Due to Covid-19, the university is in the process of transitioning away from all face-to-face course instruction as of Monday March 16th, with this then likely to continue through the summer term.
For SEng 486, we were largely through the bulk of the lecture notes.
Hence, as of Tues. March 17th to the end of term there will be no SENG 468 lectures.
Instead, you will need to go through the final 64 lecture slides (slide 66 through to slide 130 of the Workload and QoS Predictability lecture notes) on your own. These slides do cover important material relative to QoS predictability and workload modeling issues within real-world systems – hence, they are worth going through.
Course Project:
For the course project, Faculty of Engineering computer labs are currently still open but with increased social isolation. Hence, as most groups are at the 1,000-user workload and the bulk of the project marks come from your written documentation, you have two choices with respect to finalizing your groups project submission:
- You can, as a group, choose to write up what you have as of now, or
- You may choose to make use of the lab to continue to advance your project and then write up your documentation based on this.
Updated:
As of March 21st all Faculty of Engineering undergraduate labs have been closed due to concerns over Covid-19’s potential ability to persist on surfaces (keyboards, mice, etc.). For the course project your choices would now be:
- As a group, choose to write up what you have as of now, or
- Make use of the what computing facilities you may have access to to continue to advance your project and then write up your documentation based on that
- Note: Various of the commercial cloud providers (Amazon, Google, etc) have educational access programs that provide free credits on their systems if you are looking for additional computing resources.
The final due date for the project materials will not change, but the documents will need to be submitted as pdfs via email. We will not run the final workload (given option 1 above).
We will make a final workload available so that you can choose to run against it and provide those results within your submitted documentation. Again, it is important in your documentation to detail the engineering rationales for your decisions and include discussions of what you tried but it did not work – provided that you have solid reasoning as to why it did not work.
For the end of term presentations, I am still in the process of working through how these may (or may not) go ahead. If they do go ahead it would be via video conferencing. This is still being worked through and the details are not finalized. I will post updates on the course web site and via the class list emails as these become available.
Course Final:
There will still be a final in the course – the exact date and time of which is still in the process of being determined. I am still working through exactly how this will be best structured, completed, and submitted as it will not be face-to-face exam format.
Likely it will be some form of exam which you will download from the course web site then have a set time to complete before uploading a scanned copy of your answers, i.e., with the scanning part supported for example through one of the many smartphone document scanning apps. The details of this though will be worked out over the next couple of weeks and announced via the course web site and via the class list emails once they are finalized.
I am also exploring the best method(s) of supporting non-face-to-face office hours, i.e., via an appropriate teleconferencing solution – but this is not yet in place. Once how this will be done is put in place then I will email the class and put a notice on the course web site.
Course Grading:
As the course project and final will still go ahead, in modified forms, the overall course grading scheme will remain unchanged.