Obnoxious Lecturers

seanie04

What's their problem?? :mad: I'm repeating first year externally and I don't have a full set of notes for this particular lecturers course, so i went to her office to ask her for a copy and she nearly had a coronary.

She told me I should have paid internal repeat fees if i didn't have a copy of the notes!! I mean it was hardly that big a problem.

And to make it worse she's all "We really want you to pass the year" in lectures.

Anyone else had anything similar happen?

butch9850

WHY can't the lecturers just give their notes on the web,or photocopied to students,and feck off out of our lives.
I see a day,when they'll be overtaken by robots,or abolished.

This passing the year,in lectures?.For a repeat student,what's the point.One hour of a day,can disrupt any plans to go full time work.Etc,,

I see the lecturers with their notes,That;s all they work on.Lecture notes should be posted on the web,for every class,.It's not so hard,to do..In this modern age,.

Tayto2000

"WHY can't the lecturers just give their notes on the web,or photocopied to students,and feck off out of our lives."

Yeah, a few lecturers do that alright. But it's been tried in a few faculties and always leads to people not bothering to show up for lectures 'cause they have the notes... then they're snowed under come exam time 'cause they have to read the notes, assimilate all the info then try to get it organised in their heads for exams = high failure rates. (Not to say that some people don't manage it, but in general)

Also, a lot of lecturers have been working off the same lecture materials for years, particularly in the science subjects, and I think that a lot of them are reluctant to put the main thing that they are employed for into the public domain... "Replaced by robots"? I guess having all their stuff available to download would amount to the same thing.

Still sounds like a very unsympathetic response though, especially for an external... repeat students definitely seem to get second class treatment around here.

OfflerCrocGod

All the computer science notes are usually on the net in nice pdf and powerpoint format, nice

Syth

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

All the computer science notes are usually on the net in nice pdf and powerpoint format, nice

Danm right. Trust those computer science proffesionals to know a thing or two about computers.

I've seen some stupid things some lectureres have done.

One put a PostScript file up with the problem sheet. PostScript! If there were more unix boxes, I'd've been able to help them out a simple ps2pdf, but alas. The poor fella couldn't understand them. If it happened to be I'd get them to PDF (somehow), then type up my homework and then convert that to PostScript and turn that in.

I was trying to help someone else with a dodgy Word file (will they ever learn? :roll:), most of the characters were messed up, and came up in a greek alphabet. Font changes, OpenOffice and trying it on another PC didn't cut it.

On the plus side, with all these not very computer literate people out there, my future job prospects as a computer science person are looking OK.

OfflerCrocGod

Ye, some of the computer science lectures in the faculty know NOTHING about computers it's scary!

Sarn

It might be asked why you don't have a full set of notes? Obviously if it was due to medical reasons then she should have been more accommodating.

However, if you have no particular excuse then I can understand her reaction. In her mind it would seem you skipped her lectures last year, failed and now expect to be handed everything to make your life easier.

It takes a serious amount of work to prepare lectures from scratch, it's understandable people being reluctant having that work lifted and used elsewhere. It's amazing how much info seeps in when your taking down notes during a lecture. Students shouldn't expect everything to be handed to them on a plate.

tribble

I'm in Arts (psy, comp. sci., info. studies) and ALL the leacture notes are on Blackboard.

Sometimes the might not be the best notes but at the very least they are pointers.

tribble

Red Alert

First off, Blackboard is an insecure crap piece of technology. It's a mishmash of php, perl and java pages, and is unable to authenticate to Novell NDS (which is why everyone;s password is different on it to their network one [also the reason why you can't look up someone's email address like before]) unlike onlineclasses. To think UCD paid a penny for that cesspit of software beggars belief, who the hell makes such stupid purchasing decisions? If I were a lecturer I wouldn't go near the thing - I would use my own website as many do.

Secondly, I wouldn;t put my notes on the net at all. I would put summaries of lectures etc, diagrams, formula sheets, problem sheets, background material that kind of thing. I still think people's own notes are the best they have - I am most up to speed in the subjects where I actually have to sit up and write down the notes during the lecture.

I would give out lots of handouts towards the end of the year to help people revise and to make sure that they've got no mistakes in their own notes - and I can't see why she wouldn't let you have the notes without paying repeat fees. Many lecturers, believe it or not, hate the goons in administration and would love to upset them! I'd be more than willing to help out a repeat student pass my subject whether or not they'd paid up and would supply them with whatever notes they needed.

tribble

Red Alert wrote:

First off, Blackboard is an insecure crap piece of technology. It's a mishmash of php, perl and java pages, and is unable to authenticate to Novell NDS (which is why everyone;s password is different on it to their network one [also the reason why you can't look up someone's email address like before]) unlike onlineclasses. To think UCD paid a penny for that cesspit of software beggars belief, who the hell makes such stupid purchasing decisions?

Well, I'm new to UCD so I don't know what you had before.


But I can tell you DIT had nothing like that in place.
Some of the leacturers had their own (different private URL's) websites (and email addys) with notes, others just links or assignments - most had nothing at all.
Now that was a mess.

Blackboards has some useability issues allright and it looks like poo but it only has to work occasionally when I download all the current stuff onto my h drive and keep a printed copy aswell.
It is at the very least a central repository - a cess pit you may say, but at least a central one.

rob1891

Before blackboard they had something called topclass, developed by wbt systems (I think) which was a spin off of from the computer science department and probably made someone a small pot of cash. It was amaturish at best, looked like an above average 4th year project, i.e. 2 months of student work put into it. It was used in physics about 4 years ago and perhaps elsewhere. My younger brother is using blackboard now and aside from looking a little cleaner the only difference seems to be that more courses are using it to put their material up.

As for postscript. In computer science you'll find a lot of papers are published in postscript and converted (badly) to pdf/jpg by citeseer. There is at least one lecturer that puts his stuff up in postscript, or used to. However he's most certainly 'old school'! What is nice about .ps? All I need to do is lpr <filename> and it printed for me. Can't get much more convinient :P

Red Alert

TopClass was only for business and some comp sci, us mere plebs used Online Classes?

It was secure, it was very very fast and never broke down apart from when computing services broke it when test-migrating it to blackboard.