T183 from Deb's point of view

T183 – Design & The Web

A Level 1, 10 pointer.

This is a cracking little 10-pointer course. You need no prior knowledge of HTML; it uses Netscape Composer as a Web Editor, which although basic does exactly what it says on the tin. There is one CMA and an ECA. The CMA is a multi choice answer paper. Sadly I did not follow the course work through and only scraped a pass in the CMA, but it should be easily done if you follow the course work.

For the ECA you get to play the part of a web designer and have to produce a small website. I didn’t do too brilliantly on this either, but I’m hoping it was only because my computer crashed a squillion times, oh and of course I never got around to backing up my work , so my ECA was designed from scratch and submitted within about 3 days. Despite this I passed with a score of 69%.
This course focuses on design, i.e. colour co-ordination etc, not site’s such as http://www.design-bysarah.co.uk/trouble/yuck/yuck.htm, so it’s not the nuts and bolts of hand coding a website and really is an ideal course for the beginner, someone who has their degree and just wishes to continue studying, just about anyone really, I thoroughly recommend it.

Deb's M150 experience

I took M150 purely to get the Certificate in IT & Computing; I had already previously taken T171, which you need, with M150 for the Cert.

The course consisted of one CMA, four TMA’s and an ECA.

The CMA was a multi choice answer paper, not too hard and I scored 79%.

TMA01 to be honest was so easy the only possible way to fail would have been not to submit it!! The questions were mostly based on very simple material that could be answered from the introductory booklet and there were a few based on simple web research. The final part of the TMA was groupwork, this is something that is either loved or hated by students, fortunately I love it and got 100% for this TMA.

TMA02 was based mostly on binary, hexadecimal, HTML, the Data Protection Act and a few other bit’s n bob’s that for now escape me. I scored 87% on this TMA, which I was pleasantly surprised with.

Downhill from there for me as JavaScript was then introduced, again something students either loved or hated and I hated it with a passion. So TMA03 was a horrible shock to the system. I managed to answer with a working program all of the questions that I submitted, but each question took a good week for the likes of me [a committed JavaScript hater] to work out. I submitted three out of five possible questions and scored 58% on this TMA … oh dear.

TMA04 had no JavaScript but covered topics such as user interfaces, cryptography and again there was a large element of groupwork. A reasonable score of 74% for this one.

For the ECA we had a choice of either JavaScript or report writing. Flushed with success at my TMA04 mark I did actually look at the JavaScript option, didn’t understand a blooming word of it and had to go and lay down in a darkened room to get over the shock!

So I chose the report. This consisted of explaining the underlying technologies behind biometric identification; this was covered quite adequately in the course material, and also explaining what was happening in this field, which was not covered in the course material. Therefore you had to do a lot of research and filter out the crud from the legitimate material available on the Internet. This is the only report I have written as an ECA where I actually went way over the word limit and had to cut huge chunks out of it. However, I scored a very respectable 94% [my best ever for an ECA] so I can guess I cut out the right chunks.

What has M150 taught me? I’ll never make a programmer :-)