Alrighty

So I have been banging on about this Yaldex video.....

Here it is!

Specifically aimed at M150 students for the debugging features which will save hours during M150 TMA's.

Apologies for the audio, recorded on a laptop with a mic built into the screen, did my best with what I had. The video is a little small so an alternative copy can be found HERE.

Software can be found HERE

Simon

Here we go!

So I am now back from 5 weeks backpacking my way around Europe which was great fun and extremely interesting. I was looking forward to getting stuck into another year of OU study and found the M150 preperatory units pack on my doorstep upon my return.

I have been working my way through these materials and in particular the diagnostic quiz. This is a quiz that the OU ask you to work through to find any areas in your basic mathematical knowledge that may need refreshing before the course commences. I have found the quiz fairly easy going and any questions I have found challenging have been easily understood after reading through the examples and answers provided in the answer booklet. The introductory pack is fairly chunky and I would definitely suggest students tackle it sooner rather than later as it is a good way to brush up on your maths skills.

Also whilst reading the introductory materials you are advised to buy the TI-83 calculator for the course. It retails at around £88 however the OU have negotiated deals with a company to provide it at a discount which can be paid all in one or over 10 monthly installments. As I don't have £88 on me (Just purchased the new iMac) I set about looking for a pc emulated version of the calculator. I found two pieces of software, VTI and Tilem which both do excellent jobs of replicating the calculator with full clickable skin on my PC. This will be useful as it delays the inevitable purchase of the calculator until I can afford it but I imagine that it will also allow me to easily take screen shots of the calculator to place into my TMA's over the year. There is a good website called www.ticalc.org which provides information on alll things TI related and is definitely worth a look.

Moving on, as I have already said I have just purchased the new iMac, although I do plan to install windows xp on it via bootcamp and parallels desktop, I am interested to see the sort of support that the OU may provide to Mac users. I appreciate that the inhouse software such as firstclass may be windows bound for time to come but things like course materials will hopefully be available to both Mac's and PC's.

I am still waiting for the study materials for my other courses and will update as they arrive.

I thought I would drop by as I haven't wrote an entry since my courses finished for the summer.

The good news is I received my end of course assessment back for M150 and scored 89% which I'm very pleased with. This hopefully will secure a pass for the course however I still have to await the return of the final CMA.

I have also received my registration agreements through for M263 (£355), MU120(£315) and M255(£355). After applying for financial support I managed to secure a partial grant which will cover all of MU120's costs and some of M263's. I approached my employer today regarding the remaining balance for my courses and they were more than happy to pay, which leaves me in a very fortunate position of not having to pay any fees this year.

I'm off around Europe in a few days time and will be spending 5 weeks on the continent which I am really looking forward too. It will be good to recharge the batteries before returning in August ready for a September start and another year with the OU.

I have been keeping up to date with other OU students blogs and I have been pleased to receive comments on both the ISIC card and and my blog in general so thank you to all those who have stopped by!

I hope you all have a great summer and a well deserved rest (and that the weather takes a turn for the better too!)

Bye for now.

Well what can I say?

I have submitted my ECA's for both M150 and T175 and found both of them fairly straightforward.

I was panicking over the M150 ECA as I thought I had to answer two questions both worth 100 marks. Coming from a programming background I got straight on with the first question which was programming based as I knew I could get to the bottom of it with a few hours hard work.

To my surprise when I actually read the introduction to the second question it said you do not need to answer this question if you have answered question 1! Phew and Doh both came to mind!! I went back to re-read the assignment details and noticed that whilst skim reading I had completely ignored the section about attempting only one question. So even in my last piece of work for the first year of my degree I am still learning things about myself!

I have found my first year fairly straight forward in both time management and learning, working through the course materials steadily and only really finding myself contributing large volumes of my time during assignment periods. It has been frustrating when deadlines have struck close together but I don't think I have put in the 16 hours a week that the OU recommended for two 30 point courses. I have put this down to being familiar with some of the material and more difficult ideas in the course, and I am by no means expecting this trend to continue into next year.

The most useful thing I have had from the OU is the study calendar for the course, it is good to be able to keep pace of where you are and where you should be with your studies and without it I would have certainly found managing my time a lot more difficult, so a big thumbs up goes to the OU for those and I hope they appear in future courses.

I have been deliberating whether or not to post examples of code I have submitted during my assignments with explanations of how I tackled a problem in a particular way. I am not sure how the OU would view this but I assume they won't send out the same questions to future students and it will only be of benefit to others both web users and OU students alike to get a view on how people tackle different problems in different ways.

I was thinking people may be able to respond with there examples through the comments boxes, maybe it will just be better to set up a forum? I don't know just yet although I am looking for a web based project to develop my C# and ASP.Net skills, I find learning these things so much easier when you have a problem to tackle!

O.K so the ramblings are over, I probably won't be posting on the blog as often until the start of the new academic year in September (for me anyway). Obviously if i find any useful or appropriate information I will be writing about it.

Until then have a nice summer and for those of you still studying, good luck with all your doing.

My assignments have finally been marked and returned, and as promised I am here to post the results so far prior to the ECA's being submitted in 2 weeks.

T175

TMA 01 = 83%
TMA 02 = 82%
TMA 03 = 90%
TMA04 = 94%

The main reason for the lower marks at the start of the course was down to getting familiar with assignments. Although TMA02 would have been higher however I missed a part of question 2 out which was worth 12 marks. I actually answered the question! Its the way that I construct my TMA's that was the problem. I work on a question at a time in a word document, and use that document to clean up everything and modify it before copying and pasting it into a new document for submission. Unfortunately I missed a section out, which was frustrating to say the least, however I quickly learned my lesson! (This also gave me a good example of feedback for the ECA).

M150

TMA 01 = 98%
TMA 02 = 98%
TMA 03 = 95%
TMA04 = 89%

The marks for this course have been fairly consistent, I lost some easy marks in TMA04 by not using certain keywords in a question which my tutor marked against. In level one courses like these tutors mark to a fairly rigid guideline, they are often given examples of where marks should be allocated. I'm sure this will be true for level 2 and 3 courses going forward as they expect you to demonstrate the knowledge you have learned. One example is that when I was explaining why voice recognition systems may have difficulties interpreting the word minute for example as it can be pronounced differently when referring to time or referring to size, the keyword that my tutor was looking for was the fact that it was a "Homograph". Even though I explained the problem I failed to include this keyword in my answer, which resulted in me throwing away an easy mark!

Anyway I have thoroughly enjoyed both of these courses and would recommend them to anyone.

After I have submitted my ECA's and hopefully passed the courses I am eligible to claim my Certificate in Computing and Information. The good thing about the OU is you gain different level of qualifications as you work towards your Degree. For example once I have studied more Level two courses I will be eligible for a Diploma, then with further study a degree. So you are constantly having something to show for your efforts!!

Another sigh of relief as this one bites the dust.

I have to admit I found this assignment fairly challenging, well question 3 anyway. It was a question geared at your ability to write a report in non-technical language, albeit in the most ambiguously constructed question I have ever faced at the OU. To be honest I am just glad to have completed it and know that I only have an ECA left for this course and a further ECA for T175 and then this year is done. I can look forward to 5 weeks travelling Europe with my girlfriend to recharge the batteries.

On a slightly different note I went to the last tutorial for T175 last wednesday. Only 3 students turned up, if i'm honest this is only the second tutorial I have attended for T175 but I'm glad I did, it was very reassuring and cleared up any questions I had as we talked through what was expected of us.

Whilst attending the tutorial a member of the guidance/support staff was there to discuss how we as students were finding the OU and what we were planning going forward. When I told her that I was registered for 90 points next year she laughed, as did my tutor, who then jested that my social life was gone. I hope their laugh's were unjustified but I guess this will be the place to look in twelve months time to find out!!

Once I have the results for this assignment I will post up my scores for the year for both T175 and M150, and when the End of Course Assessments are returned I will update those scores as well.

Good afternoon

As I am coming around to the end of my first year with the OU I have decided to write about where I am heading and what I intend to study.
For the first year of my degree I studied two 30 credit level 1 courses. These were T175 Networked Living: Exploring Information and Communication and M150 Data, Computing and Information.

I have found both of these courses thoroughly engaging and enjoyable and they have provided a really good broad base for my future studies in computing. I have found M150 more challenging and rewarding than T175 however this is mainly because I am from a programming background and it is the route I want to persure. T175 is a newer course and the materials are probably presented in a nicer way.

My Degree (B29 BSc(Hons) Computing) should in accordance with OU recommendations, be studied over 6 years at 60 credits per year. I have followed this path for the first year however I am going to step my study up to 90 credits next year with the aim of completing my degree two years early.

The 90 credits I am going to study over the next 12 months are the level 1 course MU120 Open Mathematics, the level 2 courses M263 Building Blocks of Software and M255 Object Orientated Programming with Java.

I found my first year very manageable and hopefully 90 credits should not but overly stretching myself. At the moment though I am looking forward to having the summer off when I will be travelling around Europe for 5 weeks. I look forward to properly blogging these courses as I study them and offering any ideas and suggestions as I go.

Simon

****UPDATED 22/04/2008****
Link to tutorial video HERE

I was thinking about which course I should post information on first, T175 or M150? I have gone with the latter for two reasons, coming from a development background this course presented the most programical challenges and secondly I found a great piece of software to help me through my TMA's.

M150 is a great foundation to my degree, I will complete it in two months and I have found it fairly easy to get to grips with the wide range of content you are presented with. So far I have studied the fundamentals of computing, from bits and bytes, to data storage, manipulation, html and JavaScript programming. JavaScript has definitely been the most interesting and rewarding topic covered in this course but on the other hand it has also been the hardest to get to grips with! TMA03 is almost completely programming based, building on the foundations of JavaScript that you are taught in units 7 - 10. The first part of my TMA involved 'debugging' a section of JavaScript code which was provided to me. Debugging is the process by which you analyse or look at a piece of code which contains errors and identify and correct them. This can be an arduous task and considering this question had the smallest score allocation it still took me a long time to solve.

The reason being I am used to having a tool which I can execute code line by line and find errors in specific lines quickly and easily. With JavaScript debugging in IE or Netscape the only feedback given to you is that there is an error!! This means you can't tell whether an amendment you've made has actually worked or not as there could still be different errors causing the problem.

Luckily after hunting the Internet I found a great piece of software called Yaldex 1st JavaScript Editor Pro which had a built in debugger, allowing me to quickly step through code and solve problems. It was a life saver to say the least! It became invaluable in helping me write my code for the remaining questions in my assignment and I am sure I would not have scored 98% without it!

I used the 21day free trial however I was so impressed with the software I decided to buy it for good as I am sure it will become invaluable. It only costs around $49.00 (around £25 GBP) and was worth every penny.

I have added it to my links collection and would recommend anyone studying M150 or JavaScript makes use of it via the free trial or purchasing.

So that's my top tip for the day! I will have more don't worry!

Simon