There are lots of ways to get help in this course—here are four big tips:
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Read the website: make sure you read the stuff on this course website. In particular, you should know about the course policies and the stuff on the resources page.
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Attend your weekly class session: you should look at the lab material ahead of time and come prepared. If you know what aspects of the course you’re struggling with then you can let your teacher know—they’re really keen to help you out.
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Start your projects/assignments early: you probably hear this a lot, but you’ll save yourself a lot of pain if you start the assignments early. Make an initial commit (just add your name!) to make sure that your
git pushis working correctly, and work on it at least till you get stuck—that way you’ll know what stuff you need to ask questions about. Because we use GitLab for assignment submissions we can tell when you made your first push—so if you only started the night before the due date then there’s no hiding that fact. -
Ask questions on Microsoft Teams: you’re probably not the only one with the same question, so if you ask it there then others can benefit as well. Learning how to ask good questions is a useful skill in this course and beyond, and this course gives you a chance to practice that skill :)
Helpful contact info
Here are a few more places you can go and people you can talk to.
ANU Extension
CECS Student Services
(+612) 6125 4450
CECS Student Experience team
ANU Students’ Association
(+612) 6125 2444
Feedback
You can send course feedback via cecs.anu.edu.au/course-feedback
Feeling lost
If you’re feeling lost, that’s ok. The most important thing to remember is that the lecturers and tutors really want to help you out, so make sure you let us know if you have any questions.
It’s a proven fact (with science!) that there’s often a gap between a student’s “felt” proficiency (how much you feel you know) and actual proficiency (how much you actually know) during the course:
So if you feel like you’re struggling, you may well be at the “bottom” part of that yellow curve, just before the moment when it all comes together. Hang in there!
General information & support services
If you’ve been studying at the ANU for a while you probably already know about these websites, but here’s a list of various tools/repositories of information to help you in your studies at the ANU.