PHYS1160: Introduction to Astronomy

30% Online activities. Each activity was equivalent to a mini-lecture and tutorial. A few pages of reading, followed by a short multiple-choice quiz. 20 activities in total.

15% Discussion Group participation. Each fortnight a discussion group opens. Students have to ask and answer questions related to the content that was covered.
10% Best Discussion Contribution. You choose your best two responses and submit them to be marked.

20% Essay.
25% Final exam. Multiple choices, online, open-book exam.

No assumed knowledge.

Free marks don't come easier than this course. Although the marking has become more strict in recent years, this still is the wamboosting course that it is known for.

Online Course. No timetabled hours.

1/5

No Lectures.

Everything is on moodle. Lots of questions are reused though, and course material can be easily found by a quick search

5/5

2019/T3

26% discussion group participation (something like 16% on forum participation, 10% assesses quality of your actual posts, by assessing 2 posts that you made on the forum that you submit in a section called 'Best Discussion Posts'), 32% interactive tutorials (small quizzes that check your understanding of the content), 18% essay on a topic that you choose from a list, 24% final test (online and at home, but is timed)

None (but some knowledge of basic physics is helpful)

Many people do this course as a good wam booster and it cane used as that as I think more than 50% of people ended up getting a HD. However, you do have to keep up to date and treat it as a normal course for this type of mark. The content is not very hard but because there are marks associated with fortnightly forum discussion participation you do have to a little bit of work each week. The discussion posts consist of two parts: asking questions on the content you just read in that section (but you should try to post questions that are a little more in depth than just repeat the content in the lesson) and answering the questions other people post. For the answering part however, its like doing a short answer post each time because you do have to provide references to the information you used. However, answering 2-3 posts per week in a decent detail and asking 2-3 questions should get you these participation marks. One extra thing to consider is that you get a bonus mark for posting or answering a question in the first week of the topic each time.

There is a best discussion posts assignment you have to submit, where you choose two of the posts you made in the semester and submit them as being your best posts. If you spend your time doing the posts throughout the semester with a decent enough detail you should do relatively well in this section

The 18% essay is probably the most annoying part of the course but because they provide you with a topic and potential things you could write about it isn't that bad, but will take a little bit of time to write.

The final test is 24% and consists of a multiple choice quiz that you do at home. One tip though for this is to search the question on google as I found some of the questions in the test where actually online already
Overall, this course is interesting if you like learning about science topics (but without the maths aspect of it, that can make science difficult for some people). It is a good course to increase wam but also one that you can easily take too easy and end up getting a poor mark if you don't put in consistent effort as explained above

Online course

2

No lectures

All required material is on Moodle

4.5

No textbook

2018 Sem 1

93