Earlier this year I completed the OU course M253. It is a mandatory course for the Computing degree I'm going for. The course title is: Team working in distributed environments. It was a short course, worth only 10 points but, like I've said, I had to do it.
It was awful. It was so bad it actually moved me to post a review of the course - something I hadn't done up until now. To make sure my review wasn't too emotive I left it for a few months. I think enough time has passed now so I have finally posted it. It was, naturally, a pretty negative affair and whilst I've tried to be constructive I wasn't really expecting it to be become 'published' - as it were.
So fair play to the OU. They did stick it on the course's website. Here it is:
The course attempts to provide an insight into distributed working. In fabricating a realistic working scenario - building a new website - this course, I feel, fails in a big way.
The primary problem, in my opinion, is the actual content of the project. Stripped down to the actual product, the website task is essentially the production of a few word processor documents. Every OU student taking the course is fairly confident in producing a word document and because of this the course becomes a scramble to churn them out. It's hard to designate and enforce a single document author, because no-one can help themselves from squirting out their own versions of the word files.
The forums contribute equally to this frantic wildness because it seems people are reluctant to digest comments made earlier in a forum, so the discussions become broad and unsophisticated. You end up drowning in a storm of poor quality documents, and a ten ton mass of forum prattle, all of which no one can control.
I wish a better project was used. Broken into smaller distinct solutions (like a real IT project) such as database design, testing & test plans, documentation, UI, support, installation, etc... where it takes an amount of research before a student could contribute. Or better yet only grant each student access to certain resources on the OU website so you would be forced to engage with each other with a focused aim. The bigger team requirement could then be experienced when all the solutions are brought together.
Or something similar to this. Just any project where people can work on separate things. The present course does not reflect a real life scenario - when have you ever had to share the task of writing a word document between multiple colleagues?
If you are taking this course I would recommend making an impact early on. Get involved in the first discussions. On my course the students who were first out the blocks seemed to have the most influence later on.
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Hi, I'm doing that course at the moment, and I think your missing the point that it has nothing (or very little) to do with the actual product, but entirely about how a group of people can get organised, communicate, make rules, interact, and produce something that has had everyones input. The product could well be a knitted scarf, if that was electronically possible. The course is teaching the process, not the product. If you think if it like that, it's much easier. Good luck with B29 Dermot.