University Homepage School Homepage School Contacts School Search

FAQ for Distance Learning students

This additional information might be helpful for the distance students:

1. How will practicals work for a team of 2 distance students?:

   If students live nearby, they could meet. However, we expect that most students will be distant from each other as well as from Edinburgh.

   This is the first year for distance students, so we do not know exactly how the team practicals will work. The plan is for you to be paired with another student, perhaps a distance student or a local student, and then for you to interact via something like skype for discussions and something like dropbox or google docs for sharing code and documents. In the case of distance students, each should have a Lego kit, so in theory both can develop their practical and share code/results/etc.

   For the in-class students, we encourage students to divide up portions of the assignment so, e.g., each works on different matlab code, or one student focuses on code and other on the experiments or writeup. They also spend a lot of time together in the lab sharing ideas and we hope that the same will happen with distance students via skype.

2. What are the dates for the exams?:

   There is a 2 hour closed book exam. The dates for this are not yet set by the University, but the normal period is mid-April to early May.

3. How will I take the exam?:

   If you live near Edinburgh, then you can take the exam in the examination hall with the local students. If you live too far away, there will be a remote examination capability at your own PC, almost certainly using a combination of Perception QuestionMark to manage the exam and ProctorU to manage the proctoring/invigilation. I say 'almost certainly' because the contract is not yet signed with ProctorU. You can see an example of a typical exam paper. In QuestionMark the formatting would be different, but the style of content would be similar. Here is an example of a QuestionMark formatted exam for another course.

4. :