Foreign Perspectives

I signed up for this a couple of weeks ago on the basis that it looked like a doable way of updating my skills a little bit in a fairly short time.

It’s part of the Certificate of Web Applications Development which is a series of six related 10 point courses. Normally 10 point courses offer you the chance to do the course over either eight weeks or about five months corresponding roughly to the workload of a 30 point or 10 point course but this one is over a fixed 12 week period which means that it should equate to a 20 point workload. In OU terms, a 20 point workload is around 5 hours a week so if my normal scaling factor applies it should take me a couple of hours a week to get through it.

Although it’s billed as an online course a parcel arrived this afternoon containing the book Principles of Web Design, a DVD full of all kinds of Internet software (Apache, several browsers) and a cute video, and the usual OU applications DVD. Going by my quick flick through the book it’s at a fairly low level although there’s an ebook for the course which may be at a higher level but I’ll not have access to that ’til Thursday. Supposedly you can do the course with Windows, Linux or Mac computers but installing it in Ubuntu didn’t work as seamlessly as that implies. In fact, it didn’t really work at all so I may have to break out the Windows machine at some point or maybe give it a spin in VirtualBox.

I came across a website from a former TT280 student which relates his experiences but also rather interestingly the falling number of students on the various courses in the certificate. Whilst TT280 kicked off with 800 students, towards the end the number dropped to well below 100 which I guess is why this is the last run of the course with no plans to replace it. I’m not sure if I’ll complete the certificate myself at this point as some of the modules will run through rather busy periods in my timetable so I’ve linked it to my open degree that I’m using as a place holder for my miscellaneous courses.