Summary of Course Taken

I am an undergraduate in the School of Engineering Sciences studying Aeronautics & Astronautics. I am in my final year working on a project related to jet propulsion. I use a mac for most of my design work and tend to have to write reports and use Mathematical equations. Much of my research involves use of interactive web pages that I find very helpful.

Description of Strategies Used

When I am working on-line I have found that I need to use dictionaries for complex words, for both the meaning and the spelling. I was given a Merriam Webster CD dictionary when I had a Disabled Students Allowance assessment. It is so slow and will not allow me to scroll down when I use the glide pad on my laptop. It also not as easy to use as the free one available with every Apple Mac computer which loads in half the time and is always available.

Many courses not using Blackboard fully - including Maths and Computing. Engineers have to use both sets of learning materials, but many of the resources are on separate websites – Blackboard has not been particularly robust in the past and lecturers abandon it if it does not work. The main use of Blackboard is to put up lecture notes and assignments for printing up. It is sometimes used for interactive quizzes which are helpful for over-learning. It is also helpful to have previous years courses available for going over later.

Lecturers personal websites may not be available through Blackboard but they can be very good and Sussed has the course list which drops you into Blackboard. There are times when a lecturer puts notes or tables in Blackboard which are much harder to save compared to when they appears as a separate window.

Some people do not realise that Powerpoint for Mac does not read equations in Powerpoint presentations, but they do work in Keynote, so some of us have to juggle between the two. I also struggle when files are available as PDFs especially if they contain diagrams - The text to speech program I use does not always read them and scanning ruins the diagram layout if you want to make it readable in Word.

I have an interesting one for you - a management lecture started this week. We were 5 minutes in and he said: "Use wikipedia as much as you like, but don’t reference it ever".