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How You will get Taught

Due to the "Lessons Learnt" from the Plague1 the module will be "Blended Delivery". This means you have a combination of Offline (or Asynchronous) pre-reading, and Face-To-Face (Synchronous), lab sessions. There will also be a purely online option, where you join us in the lab session remotely.

No Lectures

The Blended learning style means that there wont be any "Traditional" lectures. Instead we have a combination of the Offline learning, and Practical activities.

While this is good in a couple of ways: You get to study when you want, no trekking into the Uni at 9AM just to be talked at, or having to buy extortionate Starbucks coffee. It does mean that you are more responsible for your own learning.

GitHub pages and the aula.

The aula is the main reference point for the module. We will have a summary for the topics each week, along with any discussion / questions on the topics and tasks.

The feed is a good idea2, I find that discussing concepts with my peers helps me get the topic straight in my head6. Make use of the feed to ask questions other than "When will the coursework be marked", and discuss the concepts we talk about.

The bulk of the materials will be on GitHub pages.
I find it a much nicer experience to write for, and feedback from the students last year, was positive overall.

Module Materials

Offline Pre-Reading

Each week you will have some offline pre-reading work. This will usually consist of some reading materials (hosted here), videos. and depending on the topic, a demo task to help you work through the concepts.

Reading the Pre-Reading

It's going to make your life so much easier if you read the materials before the Lab takes place (or at least in the same week as the materials). It means, at the least, you can ask questions relevant to bits you dont understand.

Also, there's a lot to cover, stuff builds on other topics, and trying to cram in the last few weeks probably isn't going to work3

Lab Sessions

We will also have face to face lab sessions5. As a practical subject, this will give you the change to practice the topics we from the Offline parts of the course.

The Lab Sessions will include:

  • Brief Q&A on the topics for that week
  • Practical activity exploring the topics for that week.

Mini Lectures

The rules give us scope for a "Mini Lecture" where we can cover any questions you have. If we do anything like this I will be sure to record it and make it available.

  1. Sadly not this Plague ↩

  2. I mean that. The aula has some good ideas around communications. Its easy to bash the aula for being poorly implemented, but the ideas around having conversations about the topics is a good one. But, the pain of using the editor to get content onto the damn thing, lack of dark mode, and dire formatting options mean I will be using GH pages for the content. ↩

  3. I hate failing people, it always makes me feel guilty.4 ↩

  4. However, that doesn't mean you can expect to pass without doing some work. While I am happy to help explain things, being asked to pull your arris out of the fire by covering the whole module in the last two weeks tends to put me in a bad mood. ↩

  5. Although at the time of writing, I have no idea what the timetable looks like. ↩

  6. Other learning Styles are available ↩