"What has changed in two years?"
I have a new job working in retail. I'm not going to lie, dealing with human garbage can be extremely tiresome and does make me have violent thoughts from time to time! This job however, gave me the incentive to do something better with my life. After a very stressful day I reached crisis point where I knew if I didn't start to get the ball rolling I would forever be working terrible jobs.
In the past I had looked for programmer training but I found the prices rather hard to swallow. On this day of change, I looked on the Open University website and found that they do Computing and IT degrees. Spending the afternoon looking through my options it, seemed perfect! As an added bonus because I am only working part-time and on a very low wage I have managed to get the degree paid for; as long as I get the grades and as long as I am poorly paid. I have been very lucky with this as now the OU has stopped this and is instead offering traditional student loans, but because I started before September 2012 I am on the old scheme.
I completed my first module TU100: My Digital life, I suppose the best way to describe is a chocolate box with a few of the horrible ones you don't like. That is to be expected with any module, I think. It covered a wide array of subjects including computer history, Maths, encryption, programming, ubiquitous computing plus much more. As it was my first module some was based around academic practices, these skills have transferred to my work place. I actually learnt a lot more than what I was expecting.
A module works like this; you receive your study materials in the post and work through it, along with this you have imcas which is essentially an automated quiz, it helps drill in what you've learnt plus activities as you progress.There are six assignments and one end of module assignment. While the studying and assignments are happening every few weeks there is an online conference with the rest of my tutor group and several face-to-faces however I only attended one of the latter. As for support I joined a Facebook group and used my tutor group forum, most importantly I had a tutor who's I could brain pick when I was struggling.
I think I've done okay, easily passed on programming and Maths alone, but there is definitely a weakness in my writing so I'm going to be using this Blog as a place to practice my writing hopefully making me much sharper for the rest.
I felt this module was a hoop I had to jump through before I could start doing the awesome stuff like coding in Java that and the fact that as this is a level one course it doesn't affect my grade when it comes graduation time, maybe I would have studied a little harder?
On October 6th, I shall be starting my next module MU123 discovering Mathematics. This will only be 8 hours a week, taking up half the time of TU100 and I'm really looking forward to it!
Right, time to stop typing!
- R -
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