Not graded. So why do it?
Many exercises
You'll do a lot of exercises.
Ray
Uhh, that worries me. I've never done any web page making. Are you going to throw me in at the deep end? I'll drown.
I hear you. I had classes like that when I was a student. They hurt!
One reason you'll be doing lots of exercises is so they can get more difficult slowly. Each one is only a little harder than the one before. By the end of the course, you'll be able to do Great Things, but you'll get there one small step at a time.
First exercise
Let's get started on your first exercise. Here's what it will look like:
You'll submit a joke, and a picture of an animal.
When you click the "Submit solution" button, a new window will open (you may need to give your browser permission). There are different things you'll fill in:
Let's go over it.
The joke
The Solution field is where you type your joke.
Most exercises just want a URL here. This exercise wants you to type a joke.
The animal picture
The next field is for uploading files. This is where you'll upload your cute animal picture.
There are limits on how many files you can upload, how big they can be, and what types they can be. You can upload JPG and PNG files, so your animal photo must be one of those file types. (It almost certainly is.)
Difficulty
There are two fields where you tell the website how difficult the exercise was for you.
Click on the difficulty range, from "Very easy" to "Very hard." You can click at any point on the line.
If you want, you can say what made the exercise easy or hard, in the "Difficulty reasons" field.
Ray
What's this for?
It helps me to check the exercises, that they're not too easy, or too hard, for that point in the course.
Also, if you explain why an exercise was too hard, maybe I can improve the explanations on this site.
Save it
The last thing at the bottom is the Submit button. Click that to save your work.
Your turn
Do this exercise now.
Joke, and cute animal
Tell me a joke, and give me a picture of a cute animal.
No racism, sexism, homophobia, or fat-guy jokes. Hate jokes are not OK.
A question again.
Not graded. So why do it?
Feedback
Ray
How do I know if I did the exercise right?
When you submit an exercise, it gets put in a queue, for a person to grade.
Adela
Wait. I figured a computer would grade everything.
Not with this course. Software isn't good enough to evaluate your work accurately.
All of your exercises are graded by Jeremy, a real, live dude. He's been working with Kieran for a long time.
READ ME!
If you need help with something, talk to Kieran. Do not ask questions in submission comments. Kieran won't see them.
Exercise status
You can check the status of your submissions in a few ways. First, you can check your notices. There's a link in the main menu.
(Sample, don't click)
Note
Remember the right-click-or-long-press-to-open-in-new-tab trick.
Second, you can click Your stuff | Submissions.
Third, you can look at the exercise itself. For example, here's your first exercise, if you haven't submitted anything.
If you submit something, it changes to:
The arrow points to a status message. When there's feedback, the status message will tell you.
Completion
Check out that message again. Here's the same screen shot:
Exercises are either complete, or not. Your grader will mark exercises as complete, when you do them well.
You can redo some exercises, if they aren't complete. The exercise will tell you how many submissions are allowed.
Kieran's courses
If you're in one of Kieran's official OU courses, use the course's Moodle page to learn more about points, grading, and things like that. Note: the website you're looking at is run by Kieran himself, on his own server, not by OU. So if you change your password on your OU account, your password on this site will not be affected.