Feedback from the formal process was rather mixed. On the whole the students seemed to have enjoyed the module but they found the volume of material intimidating and often found the guest lectures difficult. When it came to the revision period this caused considerable anxiety with students unsure how to revise the material and again, finding it difficult to revise the guest lecturer material.
Opinion seemed to be mixed on the provision of sample exam questions during breaks in lectures and I found it hard to assess whether this had been a good idea or not. The formal peer observer who visited the module as part of the PGCHE course felt they served little purpose and his observation was that the students made little use of them during the lecture.
I also got the impression from feedback and from informal conversations with the students that they, like I, were confused by the level at which the course should be pitched, finding some of the material very straightforward and some of it less so.
On the whole I was pleased with the courseworks and in particular felt there was a noticeable improvement between the first and the second. I got the impression that the students had had little essay writing practice evidenced by a widespread poor use of citation and grammar - both of which improved dramatically for the second coursework. There was a feeling that grammar should not be important to a Computer Scientist and several clearly felt they were being unfairly marked down as a result (I gave a lot of grammar feedback, though in reality it made relatively little difference to marks). There was an opinion in some areas that the courseworks required too much work for the marks, in particular the first coursework which required a survey be undertaken (although the coursework description explicitly indicated that this survey need not be large). The second which involved a newspaper survey also seemed to bemuse several students who seemed unaware of the need to treat journalism, especially journalism about the Internet, with a degree of caution. All too often something was accepted as true since it appeared in a National Newspaper.
Generally students did well on this question one or two interpreted the first part as a comparison between Broadband Internet and iDTV rather than between the different methods of supplying Broadband.
In part c) there was a tendency in some answers to make a general comparison but not to make any recommendations specific to the business in question.
Another question that was generally well answered though a couple of answers suggested that the writer had not attended Ray Poynter's talk (on which the question was based) and were instead answering as a general question on Market Research. This was particularly obvious in part b where I got some general answers about the advantages and disadvantages of Qualitative Market Research in general and not to the specifics of attempting it online. There were also a few answers that confused quantitative and qualitative market research.
In general the students who answered this question did very badly - it was probably the one that students found hardest of all the questions on the paper. In particular they failed to distinguish between the crimes of possession and creation which is one of the key issues in this area. Several ignored the ways in which a person can unknowingly come into the possession of indecent images which was the key issue in the question. I had one bizarre answer condemning the evils of Child Pornography (with which I heartily agreed) but with no reference to Internet issues at all which was, after all, what the question was about.
In general those who had paid attention to Guy Warren's talk did OK here, but some people clearly had no idea what a Financial Aggregation Service was and answered it as a general question about Internet Banking. Again weaker answers tended not to consider the type of business under consideration (a consultancy) and often these people tended to answer the question as if they were writing a report for a High Street Bank.
This was another question for which students generally got good marks. In fact there were very few really bad answers here and most of these seemed to have been caused by lack of time.
Unsurprisingly given its mathematical nature relatively few students attempted this. Several got the formula wrong for working out the number of reachable users, suggesting they had read the notes without really understanding their content. No student seemed really on top of the arguments for and against the scalability of Napster and Gnutella but most had a good grasp of the basic issues and so performed respectably on the last part of the question.