There are several tutorials on this course and most of them are module wide. There is a minority which are tutor group wide and I had one of those yesterday evening. Out of a potential 20 students, only six attended and that dropped to five about half way through.
Despite that, there were some useful tips about the components of TMA01 and I will modify my partly completed assignment as a result of this information.
There was an optional 'skills tutorial' this morning and to be honest it didn't sound promising. With the title 'Being an OU student' I really thought it would be dreadful but in fact it was very good. It was more of a combination of how 'Adobe Connect' works together with a bit of pastoral stuff, which is really what the tutor group tutor should be doing. This tutor did it very well, and in my opinion is a real asset to the OU. It was a shame that there were only 9 students (out of potentially 670) attending, although it was recorded so others can see it at a later date. The tutorial wasn't particularly well advertised and I got the impression that it was a last minute rushed afterthought.
Having looked back on it, 'being an OU student' is the title of an Openlearn course, which the tutor was alluding to, and in a way was semi-advertising. I thought it sounded familiar and having looked at my study records it turns out that I did it a while ago, even though I forgot all about it until I made a point of looking it up.
My tutor 'marked' TMA00 today and returned it to me. The feedback was useful, but of course no marks were gained because the weighting of this assignment is zero. It is formative only.
Tomorrow is the first day of the course officially and is the start of 'Preparation week', which I have already completed but it's nice to get a few day (or weeks) ahead. Tomorrow is also the first of the 'skills tutorials'. I'm not sure 'being an OU student is going to be that useful but I will drop in and have a look to get a feel of the thing.
The 'welcome briefing' from the SM123 course chair went well last night. There was not much in the way of entirely new information, but I did get an appreciation of the size and capacity of the course. There are around 670 students on the course in 34 tutor groups. Each group therefore comprises of around 20 students. The groups are arranged in 'clusters', and for some reason I am in the North Cluster. The other two are East and West.
The tutorial booking thingy was open for business and I booked mine this morning.
There is quite a bit of choice and in most cases, it will be a tutor from another cohort delivering the session. Some tutorials are recorded for later viewing and others are not. There are also 'skills' based tutorials on subjects such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and how to tackle the 'reflection' parts of the assignments. There are four planned for October but I suspect there will be more as the course progresses. My first 'skills' tutorial will be on Saturday 5th October and is entitled 'Being an OU student'.
In addition to this, my tutor contacted me by email to introduce themselves and asked me to reply to show that I am a live student and not a passive withdrawal or non-starter. I did this and got a reply back which is good news. I also submitted TMA00 to get it out of the way really and that will be 'marked' and returned to me to show how the electronic submission system works.
The tutor marked assignments appear to be very 'bitty' on this course and TMA01 is no exception. There are five questions on this one and I outline them below.
Question 1 is about scales. The very large, like the size of the universe, and the very small, like the size of a proton. The first part of the question involves filling in a table of various sizes of things, doing a few calculations and unit conversions. The second part is 'reflecting' on the comparison between two different scales.
Question 2 is an example of the type of 'practical' work on SM123 and involves writing a protocol for making a cup of tea and then risk assessing the activity. To be fair, it's difficult to do practical work on a distance learning science course, and this is only practice for more scientific procedures later on.
Question 3 involves the collection and presentation of remote sensor weather station data using 'live' readings from the UK and Tenerife. A spreadsheet is constructed and values entered. Students work individually on this task.
Question 4 is the presentation of historical weather station data working with other students in small groups. You get some marks for providing evidence of interacting with the others using the provided forum.
Question 5 is a skills audit of some of the skills acquired or strengthened during the first four weeks of the course. It is made slightly more complicated by the insistence of the production of 'Radar diagrams', as shown on a previous post. There is a lot of reflective learning evidence required for this question, and I suspect some students will take it more seriously than others.
The entire assignment is worth 7% of the total mark for the course.
Well, waiting for my tutor really. I have TMA00 completed and sitting on my laptop all ready to go. Being allocated a tutor really does unlock all types of things. I can book tutorials (which I will probably never attend), gain access to the tutor forums (which I will probably never visit), look them up on LinkedIn, test the electronic TMA submission facility, and generally feel part of the OU experience.
It's a bit of a lottery though. Some tutors are very good and others are dreadful.
