Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Of the 481 students on this run of the course, all but 2 passed it with 83% getting 85% or above.

Somehow I suspect the figures for the next CMA will be rather different as it required a good deal more thinking about in comparison to the relatively easy CMA1.

As is customary with the TT CMAs, one of the questions was cancelled. There’s no official reason for that but I suspect that it’s down to the rather iffy statement in the book that smaller web designers most commonly use hierarchical structure for their sites. Whilst that may well be the “answer according to Sklar”, I’m not convinced that it’s the correct answer.

I submitted my answers for CMA2 this morning so next up is completion of SK185 before I get on to the first TMA for A251.

The site went live yesterday with the chapters of the Human Past that we’ll be reading loaded onto it.

Fortunately they’re proper PDFs so I can resize the fonts for the reader but unfortunately they’re landscape 2-up with ain’t readable in full-screen PDF even on the netbook never mind on the reader. However, it’s possible to split these and there’s even a script to do this.

Unfortunately the OU haven’t bothered to title the PDFs properly so they’re all listed as “A251 The Human Past” with no chapter title; I’ll have to change that at some point as it’s a pain finding the right chapter to read.

Aside from the book and assignment booklet there’s not a whole lot to download from the website as the majority of the various resources referred to are online. Going by the number of them I’d say that the online reading will add up to 50% to the book reading but it seems to vary a good deal between the weeks.

The first CMA of the course hardly required any thought at all but this one makes up for it.

Not in a big way mind you as I’ve around 1/3rd of the questions completed at the first run through. The remainder will require a bit more thinking about although there’s scope for a fair amount of short-cutting of that thinking.

There’s a couple of questions on weird tables where you’ve to work out which of the sets of HTML will produce the illustrated table. Frankly, some of them are enough to put you off using tables for layout for life. The code required for the nice simple tables that I would use is complicated enough (I used to fire up FrontPage Express to create the code for me) with one stray <tr> or <td> being quite enough to totally mess up the layout: the ones in some of the questions is something else altogether.

Short-cut wise, it looks like pasting the code in the questions into a file and seeing what Firefox makes of it is the way to go. Sounds a bit like cheating in a way but then this is very much a practical course so it seems the only sensible thing to do.

I’m toying with making a proper start on the ECA this week with a view to spacing out the work over the next six weeks or so. I definitely don’t want to be racing through the report so spacing that out over the remainder of the course seems sensible.

S197 is one of those Open University courses that people are rather put off by as it’s acquired a reputation of being one of the most difficult of the science short courses.

There’s reason behind that view too. It seems to have a fair amount of both mathematics and weird terminology if the extract from it in OpenLearn is anything to go by. Having said that, the short courses tend to start at a fairly basic level and get you to a level that you didn’t think you’d reach in surprisingly few pages so I’m sure that in reality this one is no different.

It would have been handy to have done this one before the astronomy course as it covers a lot of the ground from the later cosmology chapters. On the other hand, it’s still going to be handy as a pre-course for the main physics course which I’ll be getting around to in a few years time. Sadly, it’s not going to be around at that time as the last run is in May 2011 so I’ll need to squeeze it into what’ll be a fairly busy summer period.

The one downside of doing it is that I can’t count it alongside S104 which means that it’ll need to be added to the open degree rather than the physics one where it really belongs.

Since I finished reading the week 2 material so early in the week, I’m making a small start on week 3.

This moves on from consideration of the invention of agriculture in south west Asia to look at how it developed in south-east Asia. For the first time this highlights some differences in how things are spelled in the American spelling used in the course text compared to how they’re spelled in the British English of the course guide. Nothing major so far but it’s odd to see the Yangtze River appearing as the Yangtzi River.

On other fronts, I’ve started on my course summary rather early based on the chapter summaries on the website. As summaries go, they’re a bit too complete as they weigh in at 250 pages. In practice, it’s not so bad as that sounds as quite a lot of the page count is taken up by long lists of key terms and the like from each chapter. Stripping those out seems to leave around 7 pages per chapter which should mean something like 70-odd pages worth of summary for the chunks of the book that are used during this course which would be rather a lot of reading for exam but should be manageable in the smaller chunks required for the TMAs and ECA.

I see that the book is available as an ebook so all being well the OU will provide the searchable PDF version rather than what seemed to be a scanned version going by a student who’d done the course a few years ago.