Part-time Study via the Web

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Hints and Advice for Studying a Webcourse

The Course Material

The material produced for the Powder Diffraction course is more in the form of a traditional textbook than in the form used for face-to-face lectures (e.g. Powerpoint, Whiteboard, Overheads, etc.). Nonetheless, webcourse notes are like lecture notes and should be treated as such. Casual reading of the material is no substitute for proper study. Casual scanning of the text will only lead to failure in the understanding of the concepts involved and, for those taking the written paper, a fail or poor pass in the final examination.

Hints on Study Methods

This will require 2×loose-leaf folders; pad of paper, colour pens, rulers, possibly compass and stencil sets, etc. Treat the webcourse HTML pages as a lecture. Take rough notes in your own words and diagrams as you read the text. The notes should be detailed enough to reconstitute the lecture in your own words.

Slowly and neatly rewrite the notes (using a ruler, stencil set and compass for diagrams). Check your rewritten notes against the HTML coursework and rough notes. Check if any significant points are missing and add them in.

Alternatively, print each of the course pages (though beware of diagrams that may end up off the edge of the page) and then annotate them with colour pens, etc., in the same way that you would with face-to-face course lecture material. Obviously, the main difference here is that the material is not in notes, but in proper sentences (hopefully) as in conventional course textbooks.

This should be a good 6 to 8 hours of work per weekly section. If you skip one week due to pressure of work, family, etc., then you will need to study twice as long the following week.

Coursework

The assignments provided in this course allow us to monitor your progress; more importantly they are also there to help you with the learning process. For this reason, we also provide model answers to both coursework, and to the final examination paper so that you can learn from your mistakes. You will probably learn more by making mistakes than by delivering correct answers to us, so don't worry (or even expect) to get 100%!

Studying Before the Exam

Using the rough a rewritten notes again (and referring to the HTML text if any ambiguities), slowly rewrite the notes again. It is important that if you do not understand anything, that you think about it and make use of the mailing list to get different perspectives and opinions to help you understand this material.

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