Western Sydney



Spring Orientation 2020- Information & Communication TechnologyTranscriptBrian: Good morning everybody and welcome to The Bachelor of Information and Communications Technology orientation session. Joining me today is Losanna who will be assisting with some admin for this event. Soon Nicholas Sheppard will be talking to you and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions.Next slide please. NicholasWestern Sydney University acknowledges the peoples of the Darug, Tharawal, Eora and Wiradjuri nations. We also acknowledge that the teaching and learning currently delivered across our campuses is a continuance of the teaching and learning that has occurred on these lands for tens of thousands of years. We also acknowledge and pay our respects to the elders past and present.Next slide please. This meeting is being recorded and I’m letting everybody know that this may be published for use on the Western Sydney University website. As attendees the transmission of your video and audio during the zoom meeting is completely optional. If you do participate your video and audio transmission will be automatically captured by the recording. In addition, this will be accessible by other participants or to other participants in this meeting. Participation in the chat function is completely optional. By participating in the chat, you consent to this information being collected and shared by Western Sydney University for learning purposes and to build a catalogue of frequently asked questions for the benefit of other prospective students. Thank you everybody for attending and I’ll now hand over to Nicholas Sheppard. Thanks.Nicholas Sheppard: Thanks, Brian. So my name is Nick shepherd. I am the Academic Course Advisor for the ICT degree at Parramatta. Some of you, I recognize your name. So I've already seen emails from you. So we've had a few discussions already about courses. So my principal role as a ACA is to assist people in planning their courses and giving advice on what units they might be able to study or what majors they can study and how to organize all of the unit so that you'll be able to complete your courses on time. I also handle a fair amount of paperwork for things like if you want to change your home campus or you want to submit a rule waiver and all of that kind of paperwork comes through me.About Western Sydney University in general, some of these things, you may already know. Probably the most useful or interesting figure on the slide is the 10 campuses. So you're probably aware that we have multiple campuses. You may not know we have 10 campuses. The main campuses from the point of view of the ICT degree, the Parramatta, Campbelltown and Penrith campuses are where we run all of the ICT units. Most units are offered at all three of these campuses but there are a few that for example are only run at Penrith, or only at Parramatta or only at Campbelltown.Generally speaking, if you're enrolled at Parramatta, you will study all of your units at that campus unless for some reason you need to go to Penrith. To study some specialised units or sometimes people go to Campbelltown for some specialised units as well. For this upcoming semester. The home campuses are not so important, not as much as they used to be, because nearly all of the units are going to be run online, the only unit that is part of the ICT degree that isn't being running online is the computer networking unit, which I think a lot of you will be studying this semester so that unit does have a practical that requires specialized equipment and there are on campus labs for that unit but everything else will be run online. So what campus you're on doesn't matter so much this semester as it usually would. But hopefully things will go back to normal in the future, and it might matter a bit or as to whether you're at Parramatta or Penrith and so on.The rest of those figures, you can look at your leisure. I don't think we really need to go through all of them right now.As we go into semester, there's a few important dates there. The first one there has already passed, which is the date for enrolling yourself into tutorials so hopefully you've already done that and you would already know by now, I think, which tutorials you've been assigned. There is a form you can fill out if you still want to change your tutorials. If the assignment of tutorials that you got doesn’t work for you, for some reason, you can apply for a form if you need assistance with that and you can send me an email later on and I can give you the details for that. Aside from the ordering classes that we run, we also have a bunch of support workshops that run before semester and in semester for assisting you with general academic skills. The two that I have up there are the Academic Literacy Program which is run by the library. That covers a lot of general academic skills like how to use and find the library academic resources, how to do referencing, citations and those sorts of things. That you are generally expected to know, however you aren’t necessarily taught in a particular unit. If you need assistance with that sort of thing, you can go to the library and get assistance with that. The other program I have up there is the MESH, which is the mathematics and statistics support program. Ao many of you I think will be studying the statistics unit in this upcoming semester. If you have a weak mathematics background, or you didn’t study very much mathematics at high school or whatever. You can get some additional assistance with your mathematics, not just for statistics, but also if you’re studying units like discrete mathematics or so on. You can get some extra assistance there through the MESH program. Please visit that URL and there some sessions that you can put yourself into. Teaching commences on 20 July, so that would be Monday in about a week and a half time, I guess. Classes will run from then for the next 15 weeks.One important day that I haven't put up there is two weeks after spring session is the deadline for enrolling into unit. So if you still haven't enrolled into your units you have up until the end of week two ordinarily to enrol in new units. After that you'll need special permission. So if you haven't enrolled in your units already, please do so as quickly as possible to get started and away.The other important day involving enrolment is what's called the census day, that's 31st August in this semester and this is the last day that you can withdraw from your unit without penalty. So basically if you're still enrolled in your unit after 31st of August. You're then committed to studying that unit through to the end. If you for some reason have started a unit and you don't feel that you're able to complete it for any reason you can withdraw before the 30th of August, and it won’t be recorded as a withdrawal on your transcript and won’t be on file. If you are still enrolled up to 31 August, then you have to go to the end. So this is an important date for you.Teaching continues up until Monday 28th September, we will be finished on the Friday before this and we will have a one week break where the University will be closed down and then we start up again after the Labour Day public holiday and then we have a few more weeks and then we have what is called the study vacation which is not really a time off necessarily, it’s a time that you’re expected to be preparing for your examinations in the first two weeks of November. Then the session will end on the 15th of November, and then you have a few weeks until your results come out.Just before I go on to the technical details of the degree, does anyone have any questions about the timetable or campuses? If you do have any questions you can put them in the chat box if you like, and we will come around to them at the end if we don't get to them sooner.So you are enrolled in an ICT degree, the core degree consists of 16 units that try to cover a broad range of topics in information and communications technology. So they cover all of the basics of programming networking, software design & web design.That gives you a general introduction to what we think people need to know if they want to work in the information and communications technology field. If you want to, you can also choose to specialize by studying what's called a major or a sub major, you do not have to specialize, but if you want to go more deeply into a particular topic, you can choose to study a major. So the majors for the ICT degree are the ones that are on the left hand of the slide – networking, mobile computing and so on. Each of those majors is a group of eight units that go into more detail into a particular topic. So if you enrol in the networking major, for example, and I'll show an example of this later on you will study all of your core ICT degrees plus a bunch of networking units that will give you a stronger background in networking compared to just the, the core unit. So similarly, if you're enrolled in mobile computing you're into a bunch of extra units covering things like mobile software development and mobile networks and so forth. You can also study a sub major, this is a group of for units.Nearly all of the majors have a sub major version If you are interested in networking, for example, but you don't have space in your course to do all eight of those units you can do a four unit version and you'll get an ICT degree sub majoring in networking. There are also some other topics such as cloud computing and so on, that you might be interested in. There are groups of four units for these as well. It is possible to combine majors and sub majors. So depending on how much overlap there is between the majors that you want to do. It's usually possible to do one major plus one sub major or you can do two, possibly three sub majors. In some instances, it's possible to actually do two majors if you plan your course very carefully. But most people I would say do either one major or a major plus a sub major. If you do need any assistance with figuring out so you know how to complete a major then I’m the person to talk to. If you don’t study a major, this is what the standard recommended sequence looks like. These are all core units that everyone completing the ICT degree has to do in their first semester. If you're starting in spring semester, you will start studying statistics for business, database design and development and computer networking and then you have space for one elective. Then in autumn, you'll do programming fundamentals, principles of professional communications and so on. So in the ordinary course of events, you would study your degree in that order with four units per semester, which gives you six semesters that is 24 units in total that you need to complete to do the degree. 16 of these are picked out for you as per the list there.The electives can then be in principle, any unit you like that's offered by the university as long as you satisfy the prerequisites. So if you don't specialize. you can choose whichever units you think might be interesting or useful to you so you might just choose a scattering of computing units that are available. If you want to do a little bit of mobile computing here and a bit of networking there and a bit of web design somewhere else. You can put all of those into your electives.You can also, if you want to go for more broader kind of education. You can also pick units from other schools. So if you want to, you know, pick up a business unit or languages unit or something like that. You can do that as well.Now if you do elect to enroll a major you're being studied your degree, something like this. So the example I've chosen here is the networking major, which is one of the more popular ones from what I see when I talk to students. So in that case, you will still study the 16 core units usually in the same order as they were before, but you will fill up your electives with the units from the major. Now with the networking major you've already done two networking units as part of your core units, which are the computer networking unit and then the computer networks and Internets unit. So there are another six units that you need to complete in order to finish off the eight units for the major. So you slot those into the spaces that you have for elective so in semester three which will be in a year's time, you will do the LAN workshop and network security.Then the next spring after that you will do computer security systems and network management and so on. And then having done all of those units you will then get a Bachelor of ICT with a major in networking. With the networking major and most of the majors, because they share some units with the core degree usually still end up with a couple of what we call free electives at the at the end. So as well as getting a networking major you can use those other electives to either do a sub major if there's a sub major that you can finish off into units or you can choose those 40 units and go and study some other topic that you are interested in.So again, I'll just skip over the information systems stuff. Are there any questions about majors? I see there's one in the chat here.Will those units give you what you need to know for COMTIA certificates? I don't know about COMTIA in particular, there are some units that do have certificates associated with them. I know the computer networking unit is one that's not COMTIA, but it is aligned with the Cisco certificate in networking so that if you complete. I think there's three computer networking units. If you do all three of those units, you can then go on to the Cisco certification and there are other units like that, but I don't know any of the COMTIA ones off the top of my head as far as I'm aware, we don't have any particular regime for doing the exams, but I would have to check that with the particular units, I guess.So another question about sub majors from Eric Boy.So yes, short answer that question is, yes, in principle you can enroll in as many sub majors, as you like. So if you want to, you can go into my MySR and you could enroll yourself in six different sub majors but there's no, there's probably no way you would be able to complete that many sub majors. The most I've seen is three, probably. And that requires a bit of juggling with your electives. So those particular ones, Mathematics and Statistics, certainly you could do both mathematics andstatistics, because those are four units each and you have 8 electives that you can choose to get a third some major on top of those. Two I think would be very difficult. Because doing the two sub majors would not leave you with very many leftover units. In fact, off the top my head, I think it would only give you one more elective I don't think there are a lot of sub majors, you could do in one elective but I would have to look at the specifics of the particular sub majors as to what might be possible. The question from Alexander about work experience, um, it depends on how you define work experience, I guess. There are some units. The main one, I guess, is this third unit called professional experience where you will be asked to work on a project with some other students. The project definition will usually come from some external company or form somewhere inside the university so it's not quite like the work experience that you would do saying an engineering degree, where you go off and work for a company or the kind of work experience, you might have done in high school, where again you would go to a company for a week and you effectively work for them. But you would be working on a sort of I realistic project is the idea. So the project will be defined by an external organization or by some other academic unit inside the university so that you kind of simulate working on a on a real software project. But it's not quite a placement in the or an internship kind of arrangement. There are some other opportunities occasionally to get involved in, say, some of the other units might. They might be able to do things like take you on a site visit somewhere and things like that. But that will vary from unit to unit. In terms of work experience, there's a certain amount of work experience in there, but we don’t have an internship like engineering or medicine, that kind of thing. What we have is the unit called Professional Experience where you will work on a sort of realistic project, but not really be employed in a sense.There are of course jobs around. So some students, for example, might get work at the University working in IT support or in the IT department until they might go work for companies outside the university. But it’s not compulsory for people to do that. There is our Careers HUB. It’s operated by the University which handles that kind of thing. So if you are looking for work. You can have a look at the careers hub website and they have advertisement there for people that are interested in employing students.There is a question from Karen about electives to do with different courses. If you mean you just want to study, I don’t know, a one off unit because you have an interest in something, for example in music. You can study that as an elective as long as you satisfy the prerequisites. So typically, if you're studying something outside computing you'll probably be stuck, more or less, with first few units from other courses so you can do a first year unit in music but it'd be unlikely you would be able to do, say, a 30 unit in music because you won't have done the first two years of that degree. This will vary from course to course.It is also possible to do a double degree. If you wanted to do a whole degree in ICT plus a whole degree in arts. You can enroll in the B ICT/ B Arts program. And in fact, I was talking to someone the other day who was enrolled in the B ICT/ B Arts majoring in music composition. It is certainly possible to do the double degrees. They take four years to complete. Usually, where the ICT degree by itself to complete takes three years If you do the double degree, usually what happens is you do your 16 core units of the ICT degree and then you use up all of your electives or nearly all of your electives to do units from the other degree. So I know you can do that with arts, you can do it with business, I think you can do it with Law as well. The most common one that I see though is you know be ICT and the arts. The ICT and business combination is quite common, people will combine that as a four year degree.Majoring in cybersecurity vs the cybersecurity degree?I guess it depends on how similar you define similar to be, so if you do an ICT degree in Cyber Security with a major in cyber security you're coming at the topic from the very technical end and a lot of what you would cover, Programming, Cryptography, Network Security, Firewalls are mostly very technical topics that deal with how we build the technology to prevent people from doing things we don’t want them to say. How do we stop people from breaking into our computers or writing viruses and that kind of thing.The cybersecurity and behaviour degrees covers the same topic, but it comes out at more from the sociological or the psychological insight. It covers a lot more or the less technical topics like criminology psychology, user behaviour, things like that. So it's more about the human side of what makes a computer system secure or how do people interact with computers in a secure way. So, in a sense, they are actually quite different degrees because one is a very hardcore science and engineering type degree.The cybersecurity behaviour degree is more of a social sciences sort of degree, even though they do have obviously many things in common in terms of employability. I couldn't give you any figures off the top of my head. So I think if I tried to give you an answer on that. Now, I'd probably just be telling you nonsense because I don't know what the numbers are on that I'm afraid. I'm assured by people who talk a lot about these things, that there's a lot of employment out there in cyber security in general. Yeah, but I couldn't tell you how much is at the sociological end versus how much is it the technical end. I'm sorry. I'll have to look that up somewhere.So are there any other questions about majors?Double degrees. So if you do a double degree, can I choose which one I do first or do I do both at the same time. So usually if you follow the, the standard recommended core sequence they give you, you end up doing both of them at the same time. So you're effectively doing two degrees in parallel. In the recommended core sequence, what they'll do, for example, for the business degree is every semester you will do two units from the ICT degree and two units from the business degree. After four years you will have done 32 units, which is enough to satisfy the requirements for both of those degrees. There is also an arrangement, called a combined degree which works a little bit differently. It's not so common. At least there aren’t so many degrees of that sort, but there is a combined degree with data science, for example, where you would finish your ICT degree in three years as normal and then to complete the Bachelor of data science degree you do an extra year at the end. So in that case, you choose your one degree to be your first degree, finish it, and then you choose and enrol in a second degree to get the, what's called the combined degree or sometimes people call it a bolt on degree. So I hope that more or less answers your question.So if you study part time and then do full time, as far as I know there is for domestic students at least, then I don't think there's any issue with doing that so domestic students can study anything up to four units every semester without any issues so I think the pattern that you do is, you know, a wire doesn't affect your degree in any way. It's just that if you are departing from the recommended sequence of units, you may need to be careful about exactly how you are going to schedule or that you can actually finish them in the order that you want to do and if you do need assistance with that kind of thing is send me an email and we can work out your course.Any other questions about majors?Okay, so let's go through a little bit of information here about things that you're expected to know or expected to do when you start studying. So one very important website for you as a student is this one called vUWS. It's our learning management system. It's the sort of the central point of contact, our central repository for all of the teaching resources that we have. So each unit that you're enrolled in will have a site within vUWS that contains information like the unit guide that sets out the timetable and what all the assessments are and what the topics you can expect to study and so on. It has contact details for the teaching staff and it's were teaching staff make announcements of the signing exam is coming up next week or something like that, then they will post that to vUWS. You're expected to be following those announcements to know what's going on.Irrespective of the online system. We do very strongly recommend that you attend the first lecture every unit, even if all of the other lectures, you watch the recorded version or read it in the book, or whatever you want to do, make sure you go to the very first lecture because that's where they will set out the expectations for that unit. We expect you to do this tutorial every week, or these practicals every week or this assignment or whatever. You can also download the unit outline and the learning guide from vUWS. I'll show you example, in a moment of what one of those looks like. If you have any issues with a specific unit. The first point of contact will be the tutor or the lecturer of the class that you're enrolled in.So if you're struggling with things like not being able to make it to a class or you're not able to submit an assignment for some reason or your stuck with the technical know how required by the unit. The first point of contact is the lecturerI’ve seen a question in the chat here. Do you need a special devices to satisfy the course? Now, no you don’t. Being an ICT course, I guess it would surely be useful to have a computer, but it doesn't really matter what kind of computer it is. Some of the courses that do require specialized equipment or specialized software, we have special labs at the university that you'll be able to access. So you should be able to complete the course using as long as you've got sort of a standard computer of some sort. Again, I'll talk a little bit about that shortly as well.So most units that have tutorials and practically will start in week two, so they'll have a lecture in week one. But often, even if they've got tutorials, then sometimes those don't happen in week one, but do check for a particular unit because some units will have tutorials or practicals in week one, so make sure that is the case that you turn up to them.In terms of the amount of work you can expect to do so, we have a system. As most universities do, of credit points and each unit is worth a certain number of credit points and at Western Sydney University all units or nearly all units are worth 10 credit points each. And 1 credit point basically represents one hour of work per week. So when we say that a student that a subject is worth 10 credit points we mean that we expect a student to spend roughly 10 hours each week involved in that unit in some way. So some hours of those will be your class time. So you might have, say, two hours of lecture and two hours of tutorial in class that's four hours, then you'll there'll be another six hours in the week, which is the time that we expect that you might work on things like your take home homework or your assignments and so on.So if you do four units per semester, which is the standard load, then you'd be expecting to spend approximately 40 hours per week across all of your units. On average, of course, it may vary a little bit from week to week depending on what the assignments are but on average you can expect to be doing 10 hours per unit per week.So going back to the computer systems. So being an ICT degree. We do have some specialized computer systems that most people might not have at home. So I mentioned the networking unit, for example, that requires you to build computer networks and it's not the kind of equipment that most people have lying around at home. So we have on campus labs for those that have the specialized equipment in them. And these are different labs to the computers that you would see around in the library in the study halls and so on.As far as I know, they're not open at the moment due to Coronavirus restrictions, but you can access them via the internet so you can connect to them via remote desktop or Secure Shell or whatever is appropriate for the particular software you're using. You will have an account on those computers. It's not the same account as the one that you would use to connect your email or to use a computer in the library. For those library computers, your username is your student ID number, but when you're using the specialized computer labs, ICT labs, you'll have a different username, which will be your first name followed by sorry, your first initial followed by your surname possibly followed by a number.So the first person who came to the University called J. Smith might get to be called Joe Smith. But after that, they get to be J.Smith2, J.Smith3 for however many J.Smiths we’ve had over the years. You should get an email instruction you on how to do that and you can create an account on those machines.It's called SCEM computer, SCEM is the old name of our school. It used to be the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, but at the beginning of this year, we changed it to the School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences. So the SCEM should be replaced by a CDMA.When we are able to go back to campus, you'll be able to use the computers at Campbelltown, Parramatta or Penrith. Generally speaking, during the day on weekdays. They're open at Parramatta until 10pm. A little bit later at Campbelltown also. If you do need any further information about that you can go to the website there at CDMS.WesternSydney.edu.au and there is more information there about how to access those labs. There's also a software that you can download that you may find useful. So, if you want to do some programming projects at home, as a lot of ICT students will do. You can download programming tools and install them on your computer at home if you like. And finally, to use all of these things. We have an acceptable use policy that covers things like not sending nasty emails to people and so forth. You’re expected to be familiar with that policy and abide by that, I won’t go through it now as it is very boring.Any questions about access to devices or computers before we go on?Is a webcam required? Interesting question. Most of the time, I would say no. So to attend ordinary lectures, I don't think your webcam would be required, but there may be particular assessment tasks that will require you to have a webcam so this would vary a lot from unit to unit, depending on what the assessment is. I know there are some examinations, for example that at the moment because we aren't allowed to have everyone sitting in an exam at the university. One of the alternatives, we have is to have an exam that you do at home. And in that case, you would need a webcam if you want to do your exam at home. If you don't have a webcam. You do have the option of going on to campus and we can put you in a room there, but it will vary quite a lot with the nature of the particular unit is to how essential our webcam isSo that's just a screenshot of the Western Sydney University portal here, you may well have already seen this because it has information on your student timetable, your email and so on. I guess most have probably already seen that one. vUWS that I mentioned before, which you may not have seen, this is just the login screen so you can login. Using your student account, which is your ID number and password. And when you log in, you'll see a screen or a set of screens that looks something like this. This is the screen for a unit called technologies for web applications.If you go to its area in vUWS, you'll see there's a list here of information about the unit so you can get the learning guide, which describes what you're expected to do for the unit and what kinds of things you're expected to learn and to do. We have the timetable contact details for the unit coordinator and the teachers and then down the left hand side of the screen you can see things like there are links to things like recorded lectures, practical exercises, additional readings and resources and also information about the assessments and can download the assignment sheets or practical sheets, quizzes, things like that will be run through vUWS. So a lot of the information for the unit is run through this site. Every unit that you're enrolled in should have one of these sites that you will be able to go through to get information. This is an example of what the unit outline and learning guide looks like or that part of it anyway.Again, this is for technology and web application and this is setting out all of the learning activities that there are in the unit for the whole 15 weeks of the course. So for this particular course. In week one, you will do as you might expect the unit introduction and you'll learn a bit about HTML5, which is the basic technology that's used to develop the worldwide web in this particular unit. So you just go to lecture and that's it. Week two you will learn about Cascading Style Sheets and so on. Week three we do JavaScript and so on.So you can look down and see what you can expect to learn for any particular unit. You can also see when the assessments are due. On week four there'll be some practical exercises due. Week seven, there will be more of them and so on, all the way down. So it just gives you a summary of what happens in the unit and what you can expect to do throughout semester.I see there's a question in the chat there. I might come back to that one in a moment. So what can you expect to do after you ICT degree?I suppose in having enrolled in an ICT degree, you would have thought about some of these things already, but in case you haven’t. Here are some of the kinds of things that people go on to do with an ICT degree. Some people might go on to be what's called a business analyst, which is somebody who goes into an organization and figures out what we need our computers to do or if we want to develop some software, what features should our software have in order to satisfy the needs of our users. Then there are a variety of different Software Engineering, or programmer type roles, you can be mobile application developer, games programmers, there is web programmers and so on.We already mentioned there’s security specialists who go in and look for security issues and fix up security issues and organizations and a bunch of other things, some of which are a bit less technical so you know maybe one day you'll want to move into, project management for example. I'll just answer this question in the chat before I go on to the support services. So a question from Yarn. If I choose to study ICT first. So can I only pick up two units to study? So I can see two ways of interpreting this question, so if you mean to say, can you study ICT part time and just stay two units per semester, then yes, that's possible. You just enroll part time and you can do two units. And obviously if you're doing two units per semester instead of four units are taking twice as long to finish the degree.If you are studying ICT and business as the double degree. Usually what would happen is you study to ICT units and two business units at the same time, so you're still doing four units in total. It's just that those four units will be split between ICT and business and that will take four years. On the other hand, if you study the ICT course first, then you'll spend three years of study finishing ICT and then you can enroll in a business course after that.Basically if you do that, you basically go through the whole apply to study a course again process that you would have already been to. If you studied some units inside your ICT degree that are also part of the business degree then the credit for those will carry forward. It gets a bit complicated, depending on what you actually studied in your ICT degree. So if you do an ICT degree, with your 16 core unit and then choose all of your 8 electives as business units.Then you can take those business units and transfer them into your business course afterwards. So you would effectively completed one year out of the business course before you even started it. So you would be able to finish your business course in two years, or probably even a little bit less. So I guess the short answer to that question is yes, you can do that. But exactly how it would work out depends on what electives you choose as part of your ICT degree.So aside from vUWS and those kind of sort of systems that you can work with yourself. We have a bunch of other support services, some of which I've already mentioned. So the Academic Literacy and MESH I've already mentioned. For non academic help we also have a Welfare service who can assist people with things like if you're struggling with your studies because you're ill or because of situations at home. You can discuss those kinds of issues with the welfare office and they can give you some assistance with things like navigating the system. When you need to make an application for special consideration and they can they can approve things like if you need some time off because you're sick then the welfare service can approve that, and they can give you a general advice on your mental health and well being and so forth, as you study through university.The PASS program is the Peer Assisted Study Sessions program. This is more of an academic program where students who have previously studied will run a session to assist new students of that course. So for some units, there will be regular sessions where you have to get some assistance from people who have already studied that unit.The MATES program is also a mentoring program so again it’s students that have been around for a while can help new students. You can enrol in that program by going to the website. As I mentioned before, when we're talking about jobs. There's a career site as well so you can make an account on the Careers Hub and search for jobs that are advertised through the Careers Hub.Another question, this one is about having done previous study. So a short answer to that is yes. If you have previously done a diploma at the Western Sydney University College or at UTS insearch and places like that. If you've done those units already, you'll get what's called advanced standing for that unit so depending on the situation, you may need to make an application for it. For some courses, it's kind of done automatically. If we know about the course, but to the course that we don't know about you might need to put in an application for advanced standing. If you need advice on how to do that, just send me an email and I will look up your situation and see what the best way to do it is.Sometimes people might have done part of a degree at another university. So they've done a bunch of other units that aren't necessarily directly equivalent to the ones that Western Sydney University, but we can try to do some mapping. So if you've done some statistics at another university and it has to be university level statistics are not high school statistics, then sometimes we can say, okay, we know enough about statistics alreadyAnother question from Omar about picking units and it says programming techniques is invalid. Most likely, that's because to be allowed to study programming techniques, you'd have to first pass a unit called programming fundamentals. If I go back to our diagram, you’ll see there is these lines. These are to indicate what we call pre-requisites. You will see lines that demonstrate that you have completed one unit before you start another.For example, we will see your line here, going from statistics for business to social web analytics that's supposed to indicate that before you can start Social Web Analytics, you have to have passed statistics for business first, because to be able to get started in social web analytics. You need to know some basic statistics, otherwise you won't get any of the information. Similarly for programming techniques, you need to have done a basic programming unit. Being in this case programming fundamentals before starting programming techniques and the system won't allow you to enroll in the second unit unless you have done the the first unit and that rule is basically there to avoid setting people up to fail. So if you tried to study a unit that assumes that you know all of this stuff about programming, but you don't know that stuff, then you're probably not going to do very well in that unit. So we don't generally allow people to do that. So follow up from your first semester, you can only do two units?It will depend on exactly what your background is, so this diagram that I have on the screen at the moment assumes that somebody is coming directly from high school or the equivalent of high school. So they haven't done any university study. And in that case, they can start these basic units statistics for business, database design and so on.If you have already done the statistics for business. For example, somebody who asked a question a little while ago, then you have a choice in that case. If you’re a part time domestic student then yes, you can just do two units if you want to. But more commonly, people will bring forward some other unit. So let's say you've already done statistics for business, then you can say, well, since I've already done statistics and business. I don't have to wait a year to do social web analytics, I can just do social web analytics straight away. Or if I've already done programming fundamentals in my TAFE diploma, then I can go straight on to programming techniques and so on.If there are no call units available. You can also choose an elective so instead of waiting to semester three to do LAN workshop. For example, you can bring LAN workshop forward and do that now because I think LAN workshop doesn't have any prerequisites. Usually if you're a full time student, we try to recommend do four units per semester so that you finish your degree as quickly as possible. If you start taking time off earlier in your degree will take longer and longer and longer to complete your degree. But ultimately, it is up to you as to exactly how you wanted to schedule your degree.Okay, so a question from Yarn, which I guess is answered by this slide here I hope. If you do need to contact us. There are lots of ways of contacting us. If you want to contact the academic course advisor. Then there are two ways to do it. You can either email me directly. My email address is N.Sheppard@westernsydney.edu.au, which is just my first initial dot surname which is the way it works for most staff, but if you can't remember that you can email CDMA@westernsydney.edu.au and then that is answered by one of our admin staff and they will redirect your email to whoever the appropriate person might be.Here are some other contact details that you might be interested in. There's a phone number there for the university.As a whole, if you call that will go to a switchboard and then you'll have to sort of let them know. I guess I haven't found that number, but I'm guessing it's one of those things where you will be press one to go to student central press two to go to somewhere else, etc. Until eventually you get through to the person who actually want to talk toFor general student matters like enrolment, if submission of paperwork, you need to contact student central so they are the central contact point for students. Who handle a lot of the paperwork to do with enrolments and course variations and so on. So you'll probably see a lot of them if you do a lot of paperwork.Whereas questions that are specific to the school of computing usually come through to me. So if you have specific computing type questions, I deal with those if they generic University type questions usually that would go to students central. Then we have the, the usual social media things as well so you can follow that the University on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram if you want to.A few more questions here. So a question from Eric currently doing diploma in ICT.If you’re enrolled in the 6039 course code there will be a recommended course plan for you that's in the handbook that’ll probably a little bit different from the one that I showed you earlier on. So basically if you've done that Diploma in ICT, you've basically done the first year of the ICT course. I think there's like one unit different or something like that. So you need to shuffle the later units around a little bit, compared to the degrees and sequence that I showed you before. But there is a standard sequence for that one that you can look up in the handbookJust look up the course code 6039 and he will have a standard sequence there that you can follow to finish the degree for people who've started that way.When will we go back to campus?I don't think anyone has a definitive idea on that, at the moment, there was a plan for the university to return back to campus in stages. I think at the moment it mainly refers to academics staff, so they will start going back relatively soon but all teaching or nearly all teaching is expected to be online for this semester. So for us, it's the computer networking labs are the only computing related activity that will happen on campus, as far as I know. So if you're studying computer networking this semester, then you will need to go to campus for a couple of hours each week to do the practical for that unit. Everything else this semester will be online. If you're doing some sort of more degrees in things like Health Care and Engineering that have specialised labs. Some of them will also be going back, but I think it’s unlikely that anyone here will be studying any of those units.As to what happens in summer and autumn, we don't know at this stage, so I guess you know we're all hoping that we'll be able to go to campus again sometime in the future, but we don't know whether that's going to be summer, autumn or whether half the units will go back or all the units will go back. We just don't know at this stage. Someone who has emailed advanced standing. So first thing to notice around this time of year if you email places like students central or advanced standing often they get quite a lot of email this time of year. So it can take them a little while to get back to you. Brian or Losanna, do you know what the best way to contact Student Central is at the moment?Brian: It just depends on when they emailed their advanced standing, it can take a while for them to reply. It can take up to a month to process applications. If you have waited longer than this time, feel free to contact Student Central.So certainly that's been my experience with applying for Advanced Standing that it is one of the more complex procedures that we have, that also leads in to my next question. If you've already done some of your course at TAFE or at another University, then apply for Advanced Standing and then work out what sort of Advanced Standing should be given it is a complicated process so first go through Student Central office and they look over it and do some processing on it and then it comes to me and I have to work it out has your previous study or is your previous studying equivalent to what we've doing at Western Sydney University and some cases that will be yes. In some cases, no. And it varies entirely with the kind of degree you've done before so it's a fairly lengthy complicated process, unfortunately. So with TAFE, in particular, it depends on the degree you've done so there are some TAFE courses that have what are called the proof pass pathways into the ICT degree so we mentioned before, the Diploma of ICT if you've done it apply revising it there's a standard set of advanced standing that you get for that degree if you search on the Western Sydney University website for pathways. You can find your degree in the list, that’ll be true if you’ve done the WSU College or UTS in Search or things like that. They have a standard pathway in so you’ll be able to get a credit for some of the first year units like statistics for business or if you've done a networking unit you might get credit for the networking unit and so on.But if it's not a degree to which we have a standard pathway, then we have to go through a unit by unit and figure out, firstly, is this unit of university level, which can sometimes be a problem with TAFE units because a lot of TAFE and until we things like introduction to computers or introduction to Office applications or something like that. Which we don’t often feel like is really equivalent to a university level unit. Next questions. Enrolling in the next semester but could not get through? I'm not sure what you mean by could not get through. Can you elaborate on that one? Maybe I'll come back to that one later. So the next question. Question from Omar, are the sub majors needed for the degree? No, you don't have to do any specialization at all if you want to you can just follow through the core sequence for the B/ICT specialisation and just pick any electives that you want as long as you end up doing itAs plus 16 cool units that's sufficient for your degree. You don't have to do a major or sub major those specializations to just there to give you a bit of guidance is to if you decide that you're interested in where applications development, for example, then the sub major in that area gives you a bit of guidance as to, you know, what is a useful thing to study for your puter organization lecture is full. Will there be more spaces open? I would have to check with the unit coordinator for that particular unit as to whether or not that's likely. So I can't give you an answer for that one off the top my head, or you can email the unit coordinator directly for that. If you look in the handbook for the unit. I think if I remember rightly, it's.. who's the uni coordinator for one that and who may be able to give you some help with that one.Losanna has posted the link to the Pathway s website. So if you’ve done a TAFE diploma or a university degree, that’s a good site to go to and will tell you what you credit you can get for your previous study basically.Clashing classes? At the moment, having to go to two different campus on the same day shouldn't be a problem. In theory, since nobody's going to campuses anyway. Because if everything is online, then you know what campus is it is kind of notional anyway, there is a form, though that can fill out to deal with clashes. Well it'll take me a little while to find the URL for that one. I'll come back to that. You want to enrol in elective but it won't let you. There are several different reasons why you might not be able to enrol in a particular unit. Probably the most common one, which we mentioned earlier. Is that you haven't satisfied the prerequisites. So for example, you are not usually allowed to study a second year unit, if you haven't done the first unit that leads up to itSometimes there are also difficulties with if you’ve already studied a unit that’s too similar to the one that you want to enrol in. So with statistics unit, ofr example, there are several different statistics units in the university. Once you’ve studied one of those statistics unit, it might lead to study in other statistics units that the two very similar to it.So those two things I've just said will potentially be true. Both for electives. It's hard to say what would apply in your particular situation. The other case that may sometimes come up, has to do with what unit and what campus it is is offered at. For this semester, it should be less of an issue than it is usually but ordinarily, what happens is if you're enrolled at Parramatta, the system will only let you enrol in units that are offered at Parrramatta in this semester. So if you try to enrol in a unit that is only offered at Penrith. For example, the system ordinarily won't let you do it. So that's another possibility as to why it won't let you enrol. But I believe this semester, those restrictions should be removed, at least for the computing unit so that even if even if a unit is notionally offered at Penrith and you're at Parramatta. The system should still let you enrol.under ordinary circumstances, what would happen is if you need to go study away from your home campus, you need to make what's called a rule waiver request. Then you can submit them through a system called e-forms. Those come to me and I can approve them. But making a rule waiver request. I don't think is not going to be your first course of action. In most cases, you the information Losanna posted is probably the first point of contact. If you're having trouble with that kind of thing. Brian: If you give that number a call, they can see the back end of your data. st assign it to everybody, because I'm that if you give that number of course they can see your the back end of your data. This can help by pinpointing your exact problem. Nicholas Sheppard: I don't have any more information to give out. Are there any more questions? Excellent. So if you do have any specific questions about you know what units should you enrol into finish your degree, things like that. Just email me separately or by sending an email to CDMS@westernsydney.edu.au and I can usually get back to you within one working day. If you email CDMA it tends to be a slightly longer process because it has to go through someone else before it gets to me.Brian: Awesome, thanks so much everybody for attending and thank you to Dr. Nicholas Sheppard for all that information and answering questions. ................
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