This was the first technical course I've ever taken and it proved to be interesting but demanding.  My rationale for taking this course was that I needed to have some idea about how computers actually work as opposed to what they do.  When I'd  finished I got more satisfaction from completing it than from any other course I've ever taken (including those on my first degree in History).

The course wasn't taught on-line although there were a number of student conferences available for help and support.  These conferences proved to be lively and highly supportive and rapidly became a highlight of the course.  Just about everybody found the course tough going.

The course covered a vast amount of ground (which has proved invaluable to my overall understanding of computing as I've moved onto other areas) beginning with the components that make up a personal computer and how they work together, the program development process and an introduction to the programming language C.  The course then moved on to cover the binary/hex numbering systems, the physical characteristics of a microprocessor (the Intel x86 family) and on how a processor actually works.  Finally, the course looked at the huge area of data transfers, both within the computer and across networks (from memory transfers to packet switching!) and then brought everything together with a case study that had been introduced and used throughout the course.

This course was a good example of 'no pain, no gain'.  The amount of work involved was huge, the assignments were difficult and the exam was a stinker.

But it was an excellent course for anybody like me starting with little or no technical knowledge of computer systems and the hardware associated with them.  Highly recommended if you've got the time, motivation and patience.

This is a compulsory course in the OU's degree in IT and Computing.  Although it touches on general computer and networking issues, the course is primarily  concerned with current 'state of the art' issues in computing that are to do with Human Computer Interaction, object-oriented programming and the planning, development and implementation of software systems.

Although many of the course materials are available in printed form, all of the content is also available on-line.  Extensive use is made of conferencing, involving group work within a small tutor group, as well as national and regional conferences for more general use.  The M206 website is the fulcrum of the course, containing up-to-the minute information as well as the course study calendar and various downloads - for assignments, supplementary materials and certain chapters of the course texts that are only available over the web.

I found the course extremely interesting and there's no doubt that having done T223 I was much more confident about tackling this course.  The object-oriented language SmallTalk, which underpins the course, is much easier to understand and write than the C I learned on T223.

The course places great empahasis on the importance of the careful planning and implementation of computer systems, applying them to real-life situations such as patient care in hospitals, a video library or an air traffic control system.  Although the systems used in these contexts were very simple they were authentic enough to illustrate for me how computer systems are linked to the real world and gave the course relevance - not something that the 'amphibian world' of frogs, hoverfrogs and toads that is used in the early part of the course to illustrate how object-oriented programming works would have led me to expect!

The course also introduces the key elements in modelling computer systems, using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) to show how an initial requirement for a computer system is identified, agreed, developed, coded, prototyped, tested and finally implemented.

This short course was the pilot presentation for the first unit in the OU's new Web Applications Certificate and ran for a truly memorable 12 weeks from May to July.  I knew when I took on the course that I was jumping in at the deep end as my only web design experience was the little I gained on T171 (which in retrospect was very basic, despite being very enjoyable).  This feeling was compunded when I realised that there were many experienced web designers on the course, some of them professionals.

The course was taught mainly on-line and is much more technical than T183 (which I actually did afterwards) - it goes into some detail about coding HTML by hand and about the technical and design issues involved putting a site on the Web.  It's based on two books, one by Web guru Joel Sklar ('Designing Web Sites') and the other by Elizabeth Reding and Sasha Vodnik ('HTML Illustrated Introductory').  Both of these books are excellent introductions to their subjects.

HTML isn't really what the course is all about but a reasonable understanding of how it works is necessary to grasp the essentials that the course covers.  These include, for instance, the importance of clean and easily accessable web pages and the importance of the standards produced for the Web by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) - all of which would be hard to appreciate without understanding the basics of HTML.

The course was very intensive, with enough material to easily fill a normal full 30 week course and it continued at a rollicking pace once it going.  Because it was a pilot presentation there were many gremlins with its administration but there was a great deal of support, official and unofficial, within the course conferences, which were easily the liveliest that I've come across at the OU.  I personally learnt a great deal from my fellow course members, who helped me out on a number of occasions with several technical issues.  Every aspect of web design is covered in the course - planning, navigation, layout, colour, graphics, typography, tables, frames, protocols, the role of Java scripts, forms, the cgi, file structures, publishing and maintaining a site, and much more.  All at the same time as learning HTML!

The course culminates in an end of course assessment that requires students to produce a multi-page web site (hand coded) that, for good measure, mixes a basic commercial design ( including forms and action buttons) with an educational one.

The course was truly memorable and made a lasting impression on all of us who took it.  A number of students have produced pages as permanent momentos of the experience - in particular, Frances Foot has produced a wall of fame and Bill Larnach an excellent course diary.

This is the second in the suite of courses included in the Web Applications Certificate, and again this was a pilot presentation. The course is about client-side interactivity for web applications and is structured around the Javascript scripting language.

Basically, client-side scripting is a means of adding some dynamism to static web pages, using small programmes that execute on a user's web browser - techniques such as image roll-overs and pop-up windows that offer users immediate feedback as they use a web page. A critical use of such techniques is in the client-side validation of user input forms - this offers users instant notification of any errors without the need to use the network (by sending the form to a server for validation)

This was the first time I've applied any kind of programming language in a real-world environment (the other coding I've done - except for HTML which isn't really a programming language anyway - has been done within a very academic context) so it was quite a challenge to get things to work in a meaningful, practical way. Javascript is an object-oriented language and I'm familiar with the basic concepts; but programming an actual working application was difficult, especially as the course textbook wasn't particularly helpful.

The ECA involved developing a working website that not only integrated Javascript scripting techniques, but also involved identifying and explaining (with examples) five specific techniques chosen from a menu of options. Designing the site, using valid HTML and CSS, was quite demanding in itself but adding in the JScript functions proved very time consuming - in the end I ran out of time but did manage to get the site working properly.

I think the course made a lot of assumptions abput programming ability - I managed to get through because I've studied object-oriented languages in other courses, but many people weren't able to cope with the programming, which I think the course team should carefully consider when they advertise the course. Still, I enjoyed the course and learned a lot from it - there are several working examples now included in this site.

This is the third in the suite of courses included in the Web Applications Certificate. The course is about the server-side of web applications and covers topics including server reliability, security issues, application architectures and site design. It also covers Active Server Page (ASP) scripting using the VBScript language, and the ASP objects used to manage user sessions in complex web applications, such as on-line shopping applications.

This was a challenging course in every way, but especially in terms of workload and programming. Again, the programming content was understated in the course description, and although the coding component accounted for only 35% of the total course marks, it took a lot of people a lot more than 35% of their time to complete this part of the course.

Having said that, by the end of the course I'd really got to grips with using an object based language in a real-life situation - the ECA included an incomplete on-line shopping application that students had to make work. I couldn't finish it to my satisfaction because I ran out of time, but I now understand much more about the practicalities of using an OO language in a network environment. The OU also made available to us a server (the TTASP Server) to host our application, which I found very useful, and a web 'wireframes' program that helped with the planning and design of an ASP based site.

This was a really enjoyable course, but my only complaint is the amount of time necessary to complete the ECA - some students with ASP/VBScript experience spent weeks completing the on-line shopping application and I spent a full 100 hours or so on this part myself. This left less time to do a good job on the other two parts of the ECA - a report on security/availability issues when choosing a hosting service and a wireframe of the on-line application.