The end of M364, and progress through T324 and T325

M364 result

I had my exam for M364 on 8th October 2014, at Hotel Rembrandt in Weymouth. I went in feeling pretty good, because I’d studied the material against a checklist my tutor provided, and I’d done a few old exam papers that made me feel very confident!

I did do well at the exam, but I lost one or two points on each question, and it brought my score down a little bit; my OES was 80 while my OCAS was 84. Annoyingly, so few percent away from a Distinction!

The exam experience

I always used to finish exams at school very early, so I took my time carefully in this one, but still ended up using all but five to ten minutes of the time. Make sure you look carefully at the weighting of marks to each part of the exam and plan your time accordingly. Also, some exams have a recommended allowance of time for each question on the front. If you want to save some time at the end to go back and look over the paper, make sure you account for that too!

The exam was in the ball room, and there wasn’t too much in the way of noise from the rest of the hotel, even though the exam ran from the end of breakfast to well into lunchtime for the Rembrandt. There were students from several very different modules in the exam room – only one other girl from M364 was there – and we were all seated at allocated desks in three or four rows down the room.

My one regret is that while it was lovely to use my new fountain pen, which stops me from pressing too hard when writing and getting wrist cramps too early on in the exam, it was very noisy and I felt pretty bad for the girl in front of me. I hope I didn’t distract her.

Other thoughts and tips about the exam

• Put your phone on silent, turn off any alarms, and turn it off. You might be asked to leave it on the back table in the exam room. If you’re apprehensive about bringing your phone to the exam venue, bring it anyway, because it probably looks more suspicious if you don’t hand one in.
• Take a bottle of water in with you.
• You can take food in with you – I’ve seen things like mints recommended because they keep you alert.
• Buy past papers and do them during your revision period! It doesn’t have to be under exam conditions, but they are really helpful for getting to know what questions will be in the exam. I just bought some past exam papers for T324 and T325 and it’s given me ideas for revision. They’re only £1.25 per paper, they come as a PDF and you can buy them here at the OUSA Online Store. (I’d love to help you, but please don’t ask me to share them; it’s against the T&Cs.)
• The staff attending the exam are there to help you and the ones at mine were lovely. Don’t be afraid to ask them anything!

T324 and T325

I think I picked up too much of a workload this year, with two level 3 courses alongside a full time job. I’m also pressuring myself to try and get Distinctions, as you have probably gathered.

These two courses have a lot of maths in them, which I’m not great at, but most of it is just making sure to memorise equations and stuff, so it’s not so bad. I’ve been making great use of Wolfram Alpha when doing my assignments and it’s been really good.

I think I like them pretty equally, though maybe I find T325 more interesting. I think my favourite subjects so far have been:

• T325 Block 2: Intellectual property and security issues – I find IP a really interesting subject along with its arguments, and IT security is something I deal with at work.
• T325 Block 3: Mobile broadband – I also work with mobile technology at work!
• T324 Block 2: Wireless sensor networks: an investigation – mostly because there was lots of useful learning on research and technical writing, just when I thought I couldn’t learn any more!

Anyway, I’m definitely not writing this blog post to procrastinate on T325 TMA03 (wink wink) so I’ll uh, I’ll get back to that now. Thanks for reading!

Travels and M364

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I started M364! I’ve been to Japan and the US since then.

It’s been really interesting – and it tied in more with my work than I expected. It turns out I’ve done a lot more interaction design in my time with DCC than I thought. I particularly enjoyed one of the TMAs, which had a case study about a small community in a specific type of culture. We had to discuss what effect the culture would have on the high-level design of a care system, based mostly on the first four of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.

^ I think it’s okay to talk about that, since the TMA has long passed, but if you’re from the OU and you want me to redact the above information, please let me know!

I’m going to the first tutorial I can make, on Saturday, at Southampton Solent University. The others have been held in Reading, which was a little too far for me to consider getting to. Yes, I could drive, but the length of the tutorial against the length of the travel didn’t seem so worth it. At least I can have a nice direct train ride to Southampton Central on the South West Trains line, and then it’s quite a nice walk across some green space in Southampton to Solent University. A very nice university, I should add! They always seem to be very helpful and accommodating to the OU and its students.

Well, my exam is coming up a fortnight on Wednesday – it’s on the 8th October. I don’t know if I feel confident yet, but I’m sure after this weekend’s revision lesson I’ll be feeling better. I can only do my best!

If anyone has any specific questions about M364, please let me know and I’ll be happy to let you know about my experiences. :)

OU for international students

Hey guys, I heard that the Open University has opened a new website for people wanting to study with them outside the UK and Ireland. You can find it here!

I love studying with the OU, and I started this blog so that people could see what it’s like to be an OU student, so I’m hoping prospective students from anywhere can find the right official information from here too.

Learning resources

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in such a long time! I didn’t do as well at T215 as I had hoped, but I’ve just started M364 and it looks really good so far. I’m only doing one 30-point course this year since I’ll be in Japan for three weeks in the middle of it and I’m attending a lovely wedding in the US later in the summer too!

In any case, I have picked up a lot of learning resources that I thought were pretty cool during the time I’ve been silent on WordPress. This is largely through the magic of Pocket, which I highly recommend! It’s so easy to bookmark something for later.

Some of my resources are for free study, and some of my resources complement current studies. Let’s see what’s in my Pocket list…

• A Guide to University Learning (University of Guelph, ON, Canada)
• The Student Room – Revision and Study tips forum
• LifeHacker U – Spring Semester 2014
• 24 Invaluable Skills To Learn Online This Year (BuzzFeed)
• Free books: 100 legal sites to download literature
• Study help – list compiled by meltingliam on Tumblr
• Google Tips and Tricks Every Student Should Know (LifeHacker)

I think there should be at least a little bit of useful information on each of those pages! I hope you can find even just one thing that helps your study or helps you progress your study further.

I also got this book for Christmas, which has been on my Amazon wishlist for a while. I’ll probably have to give it a separate review sometime, because I need to have a better leaf through it now I’ve started a new module. Looks really promising so far though. :)

Collaboration, and self-fulfilling prophecies

I said in my last post that I was a bit apprehensive about collaborative work, and now I’ve proven that to myself even though I really didn’t want to.

This part of the module began weekend-before-last, and I just logged in today to realise, with horror, that I hadn’t updated any part of the collaborative forum with my comments and preferences for quite a long time, while four of the members have been working their butts off getting the collaborative work started.

I’ve apologised, but I’m mad at myself, mostly, because I wanted to get a good grade in this TMA and I think I’ve jeopardised that already.

What have I been doing? Well, I’ve been writing fanfiction and developing comic characters for my original story. I hope that the latter will make me money one day, but I truly know that my degree is the most important thing to me, and I’m so so mad that I’ve let this happen.

Sigh.

I’ll work hard and see if I can make it up to my group-mates.

T215 start!

I started reading my course materials for T215 a week or so ago when they became available; I’ve had a good flick through the future blocks, and what I will be focusing on in the TMAs. There’s a couple of TMA specifications available already, so that’s cool! I’m just waiting for my tutor group forum to become open, and I received my first email from my tutor on Friday. He seems nice. (Not that I’ve ever met an OU tutor that wasn’t!)

I checked my tutorials page today and I’m glad to see I have some physical tutorials this time! By “physical”, I mean that there are tutorials in universities, and not via Elluminate (virtual classroom – kind of like Skype with a whiteboard). I do like Elluminate, but I also find that I am less distracted during classroom tutorials. I also really like Southampton Solent University, which is where all five of my tutorials are currently being held. I don’t exactly live near Southampton, but it’s easy to get to on the train, and it’s a nice walk from the train station to the university.

There’s a bit of group work later on in the module. I’m always apprehensive about working with other people. It’s not that I don’t trust other people – it’s that I’m afraid of letting them down. I work well with other people in my workplace, but I often forget to do things I’ve promised friends via text, email, chat… you name it. I suppose there’s a difference in the urgency; at work, things have to be done, and there are deadlines. The same with Open University work, I suppose. I just have to keep myself organised this year!

 

Last year

I set out intending to write a really useful review for these two modules, but I’m excited about starting T215! So here’s the lowdown off the top of my head for now, and you’re most welcome to ask me questions in the comments.

TT284 Web technologies review [level 2, 30 points]

• I was on the first presentation of the module.
• Interesting course material, quite relevant to my work.
• Android stuff a bit brief, App Inventor very fun though!
• PHP and MySQL stuff a bit brief, as some students found it too challenging.
• EMA heavily focused on HTML and CSS.

T227 Change, strategy and projects at work review [level 2, 30 points]

• More advanced and interesting than T122 (kind of a natural progression).
• Got involved more at work; had discussions with my manager for the TMAs.
• Actually came up with good ideas for projects at work.
• Not many people in my tutor group were interested in tutorials unfortunately.

I got a Grade 2 Pass for both, which is like a 2:1 degree score if I remember correctly. I’m not unhappy with that, but I’m shooting for Grade 1 Passes in the rest of my modules!

My position right now…

I’ve just reserved a place for course #4 this year; T227 Change, strategy and projects at work. This should be a nice follow-on from T122, and I’ve already been documenting and holding on to bits of work so that I might be able to use them during my assignments. As it’s my fourth course this year, and I have used all my financial support allocation, I am going to have to shell out the £400 for it. However, given that I’ve already signed up to five courses and paid a total of about £80 all in, I’m really not going to complain.

In the meantime, I also signed up for TT284 Web technologies, as it looks like an exciting new course and it’s very relevant to my work at the moment. I get time at work to study this! It looks really interesting, and I’m hoping that I can produce something to benefit my employers as my final assignment. We also get to learn Android app development, which is awesome.

I’m just polishing off my last two Level 1 courses, TM128 and T122. I can’t say I’ve found Level 1 very challenging, which is nice in some ways, but I also joined The Open University for a challenge. I know I have industry experience and I’ve done a LOT of formal education on the subject, but I just expected a little more. I am enjoying it, of course, and the staff are fantastic, but I don’t feel I’m being pushed. Maybe I should just set myself some shorter deadlines and extra learning?

Library website, referencing, and plagiarism.

Hey everyone! Just a quick post to share with you that the Open University library section of its website has had a bit of an overhaul by the looks of it.

This is the new equivalent of the section I most used to visit on the old site: Referencing and plagiarism. While references are very important in most assignments on most Open University courses, you must make sure that you reference them correctly. Otherwise, you can be in all kinds of trouble!

There’s another page on the OU website about how they respond to plagiarism. This is common to all universities; everyone in the academic world takes plagiarism very seriously.

I know referencing can be tedious and time-consuming. One of my favourite tools for referencing is Zotero, which is a Firefox plugin, and can also connect with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. They’re developing applications and plugins for other platforms – I’ve just downloaded the standalone application for Mac OS X, so I’ll let you know how I get on with it!

Edit: Here’s me using the desktop version on Mac OS X! I’m using the Safari plugin to send page references from Safari into Zotero desktop version, and I’ve also added The Manager’s Good Study Guide using the ISBN wizard.

Zotero standalone version (Mac OS X)

Inspirational teachers

Yesterday I met a lecturer again that I had during my year doing my BTEC at Yeovil College. I wanted to share some of my experiences and how I think he’s helped me further than just the college courses he taught.

M – for I am not going to name him here! – was the first of the lecturers I met, aside from my tutor. We were a tiny class of students and I had joined a week late. I got the immediate impression that the others had decided he was a strict tutor and that he was going to push them hard.

Some of us, like me, had come straight from school. Some of us had come from years out of education, and some had come from failed attempts at college before. We hadn’t been pushed like this in a while, if ever.

Of course, it was never pushing. It was firm encouragement because he knew the potential of all of us, and he wanted to help us achieve that potential. He taught us that deadlines weren’t a joke like they are at so many schools. He didn’t get angry, just disappointed, if someone didn’t meet one of the deadlines. And to be honest, disappointing your lecturer makes you feel worse than if they get angry at you.

I am generally a committed student and something of a perfectionist. He was pleased with my first submitted assignment. I made it my goal to keep on meeting his expectations and hopefully pushing past them. I don’t know if I should have been aiming for M’s expectations rather than mine, but it certainly gave me a wonderful idea of what I can achieve.

M also went out of his way to help with the extra unit I had to take as directed by my employer. He always had time for us, always gave me carefully delivered constructive feedback, and was always, always, encouraging.

It dawned on me when I left college that I had learned much more; I felt much better prepared for my upcoming NVQ and full-time job out in the real world than I ever had before, and I think I owe it mostly to M.

It’s lovely that he asked after me when he came to see our new apprentices yesterday, and he’s always interested to know how I’m doing and what I’m doing with what I’ve learned. I left Yeovil College in 2008 and he still remembers me!