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.

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)

Beginning TM128, and some study tips

I recently received all of the materials for my TM128 course, and the course website opened a few days ago. Fantastic! I’ve already started on Block 1…it’s split into six weeks, but I’m managing a lot of it in evenings alone. You should note that I did a lot of this stuff at college, back when I was doing my BTEC National Certificate.

Anyway, the first block of this course is based on the CompTIA Network+ course, to bring students up to speed on the fundamentals of networking, which of course is necessary if you’re going to start fiddling around with Windows Server 2008.

Here’s what I’ve done so far, laid out on our dining room table:

TM128 kit and notes

So what you’re seeing is the CompTIA book itself, the OU Good Study Guide (I cannot recommend this book enough – go get one, even if you’re not an OU student!), my snazzy Snopake pencil case, a big spiral bound notebook and some paper I’ve torn out for reference.

I’ve actually completed week one of the study, and now I’ve been looking through the TMA01 questions and linking them to what I’m learning over the next couple of weeks – to make sure I concentrate extra hard on the bits that are really going to matter at the end of the block. Those are the bits that are highlighted green on the loose sheets. I recommend going through your TMA questions as soon as they’re available to you, and map them to your reading materials and progress targets for the block you’re studying.

Part of the work in Week 1 was to look up some of the Skills for Study sections on the OU’s website. I did this, but I also read the first couple of chapters of the Good Study Guide again. Honestly, it’s the best support book I’ve ever had. When you’re a university student, you don’t get your hand held like you did in school and most colleges – you’re given the targets and the materials, and left to your own devices. If you get a good grasp of what the Good Study Guide teaches you, you’ll be well away as an independent learner. Like I said before, please consider getting one. I got mine from Amazon UK.

I’ve also downloaded all the useful booklets from this page and put them on my Sony Reader. My eReader has been great for my courses so far – I had kilos of books in last year’s courses, but the OU provided all the textbooks in PDF format on the module websites, and I was able to put them all on my Sony Reader. The PDFs are formatted for screen readers and therefore also scale and resize beautifully on my eReader.

If you don’t have a Sony Reader or something else that supports PDFs out of the box, you can download Calibre, which is pretty amazing open source software for eReaders.

What are we doing here?

Some of you might wonder why I’ve only started a blog now in my second “year” of study with The Open University, but there’s a good reason. I was going to start a blog when I began my study. I, in fact, did not start a blog, and so we’ve missed out on a year of study with me. Here’s some highlights:

• I loved going to Bournemouth University and Southampton Solent University for lectures in T175. I found them really useful. If you get a chance to go to a local tutorial with your course, please do it. It adds a human dimension to your study when you might usually feel alone. I just found out that there’s a tutorial at BU again for me in TM128 next month. Yay!
• I love Elluminate. I think Elluminate is amazing tool for the Open University to use. Plus, it works on any computer with Java Runtime. I can do it on my parents’ Windows XP computer, my Mac OS computers, and I could even do it at work if I had to. Yay Elluminate!
• I met some fellow students on Elluminate that live in Weymouth, very close to me. We intended to get together for some study in a coffee shop sometime, but it never came to fruition. I’m hoping if that opportunity arises again, I’ll be able to do it.
• I managed to participate in National Novel Writing Month, win it for the first time, and not make my M150 and T175 work suffer.
• I made some important changes in my personal life that helped me stay happier and healthier in general, which of course meant I had a better state of mind to work on my OU courses. I might share some of these changes to my personal life later, but some of them are kind of personal.

I aimed to be getting about 80-90% overall on my overall assessments. I got just below that on T175 and somewhere in it for M150, so I was pretty pleased. I know that the Level 1 courses don’t matter much in the weighting of my degree way off in the future, but I really do want to start as I mean to go on.

I hope I can provide interesting insight to my journey with the OU, but if not, I rest knowing that I’m keeping track of my journey myself…!