Best CS/EE Program in Adelaide?

[adam]

On Sunday 26 August 2007 17:17, Simon Knight wrote:
> The original question was comparing the different courses - I'm not
> sure if Unisa teaches more core subjects in C.
>
> Simon

They don't, at least, there was no C in any of the classes I took (dual 
degree, computer science and business, at UniSA. I'm in my last semester, 
only business subjects left). There was one course taught in C++; and it was 
up to me in my final project, so I also did that in C++, but for the most 
part it was all Java.
However, looking at the changes in courses over the years, it looks as if they 
are going to have more C++ classes, I guess the buzzword compliance of 
spending a lot of time on Java is wearing off :)
I also had one class with COBOL (for those who don't know, COBOL still 
probably has the largest installation base of any language, since the big 
business systems have been working and updated in COBOL over the years, and 
there is a shortage in COBOL programmers with the older coders retiring... 
unfortunately, I had to play team leader for my group, so I didn't get much 
practice in the language).
There were electives for "business applications programming", which meant 
VB.NET when I did it... However, the other students I had in most of my 
classes (there were 3 of us for most of the classes on the Whyalla campus) 
took it a year later, and it was VB or C# or one other .NET language, left up 
to the student, and a lot more about essays than programming, from what they 
told me.
For the most part, I could do my work on Linux, and whip out dosbox or wine 
for a few of the non-required programs that were given as examples or tools. 
The program itself, if it had any slant, was towards Java.
I'm not particularly fond of Java (probably in part since it was used for 
teaching), but the program was reasonably agnostic.
That's the good news.
The same isn't true of the computer systems. They're heavily locked in to MS 
there; and if you even want to use, say, firefox, to read your email in the 
webmail system, you can expect glitches (if you look into it, you can receive 
mail from outside the uni, but some ISPs will stop you sending mail to 
UniSA's SMTP server, so you don't get the credentials of your student email 
address unless you use webmail). The new firefox releases may have fixed 
this, I don't know as I use konqueror (as yet, the webmail system still 
limits itself to half of the screen, which is a bug).

I have no basis of comparison with the other universities, but I don't think I 
would recommend UniSA to anyone.
They have a big push on people using their online environment, but I don't 
think they've prepared for it well. One of my (business) subjects this 
semester required me to snail-mail my assignment, because the course 
coordinator thinks that computer software isn't up to the task of putting 
good graphs in documents, and many students aren't capable of using the 
software. The first is ridiculous, the second is a good opportunity to get 
them used to using the online assignment management system.
And then there are the staff, who don't know how to use email properly... For 
example, when they had a new library home page, which all students need to 
know about, they decided to send a screenshot of the front page. In BMP. In a 
time when student email boxes were 10MB (since increased to 25) they sent a 
2MB screenshot of the library homepage to every single student. Ouch.
Of course, if you study internally in Adelaide, you may be able to avoid many 
of the problems I've had (external or outside Adelaide subjects).
The various instructors also keep saying that it's about learning the theory, 
and not regurgitating what they and the books tell you (and many subjects are 
teaching a textbook, with PPT slides from the author), but I haven't found 
that to be true; far too often you have to repeat definitions or simply get 
good marks just for explaining something the same was the textbook does.
I have also had issue with some of the subjects themselves (for example, in 2 
semesters of database work, we looked deeply into how locking, rollbacks, 
commits, etc work, but didn't even touch on database administration, which 
students would actually use... It seems that if you can learn it at TAFE, you 
probably don't get it in CompSci at UniSA), but some of those issues have 
hopefully since been fixed, and they're specific to the subject itself.

I hope this little rant doesn't put anyone off tertiary learning; there's 
still a lot to be said for the learning, networking (especially the 
networking, although many students won't know that yet), and that magic piece 
of paper at the end (even if all it says is that you can survive in a 
Dilbertesque environment), and I'm reasonably sure that other universities 
will have more enjoyable, interesting, and relevant programs :)

HTH, Adam.