Month: July 2006

The “Gantt chart” question in week 3 has caused students some problems.

The textbook only briefly mentions Gantt charts. It doesn’t step by step tell the students how to do it. There is no structure. My assumption was that simple project management and using Project isn’t that difficult a task for Masters level students. I was wrong.

Not surprisingly this lack of structure is the apparent root cause of the difficulties the AIC students are having. There hasn’t been the same level of difficulty in evidence with the mature FLEX students.

Sachin has indicated that many of these students are literally straight off the plan. They aren’t prepared. They don’t have the necessary literacy skills to dive in and do this.

This highlights the issue of how and where do they receive instruction/experience with these skills? What course in the program does it?

COIS20025 could potentially do this. It could fit nicely with the week 3 requirements and week 2 system planning topics and how searching for this information is required.

Two additional problems

• Support for SSL – a student tried to register a URL with https: and the system said couldn’t retireve the URL. Need to add support for SSL or improve the error message.
• A student registered the RSS feed URL and was accepted. Need to ensure they give the HTML version

Thought it would be a grand idea to get the students, in week 3, to prepare a Gantt chart planning out their study for the term. They get to apply some content knowledge and think actively about planning their study.

Of course, the problem is that many of these students are new to technology.

Satish is reporting that a number of the students have never used computers and don’t have an email address.

They are struggling with getting going with the tools and also the structure/format of Gantt charts.

Will have to re-think this one for next time.

It’s now the end of week 2 of CQU’s Term 2 for 2006. This is the first attempt at a log entry for the first test of the BAM project in the CQU course COIS20025, Systems Development Overview

Key events this week

• Initial BAM Management interface up and going
• Concerns from staff about the workload for students and a response
• Potential problems with workload for staff
• A Technorati search for “COIS20025” reveals 7 posts, including this one.
• A similar search for “systems analyst” reveals 33,908 posts including many related to this course.
  Highlights that this use of blogs is a public medium.
• 159 of 283 students have registered their blogs
• A number of students seem to be confused about the requirements e.g.
  • Many haven’t registered their blog home page, but instead the URL of their first post
  • A number believe they have to tell me, or other staff, the URL of their answer to their weekly answers.