Michael Adeyeye (Ph.D)

I waited this long to post my reflections for a couple of reasons. Please bear with me. The extension development course was quite informative. I had four students, and they all showed interest at the beginning of the course. I made them create and write blog posts, as one of the means of assessing their works. Only three of them created blogs and did some of the assignments.

We were only meeting at 4pm on Saturdays, and classes lasted for 2hrs most of the time. I had about 8 sessions with the students in order to cover the course contents. At the end of the course, only one of the students attempted the final project – developing an extension. It was the same extension (http://mastoris.wordpress.com/) he presented as his final project at his University. And that was why he registered for the course.  One of the other students worked on a related project, though it was not an extension (1, 2). He registered for the course because he wanted to learn about the technologies required to develop an extension. The other two students could not do so much (http://wbedjuanlanus.blogspot.com/, http://ijayasin.blogspot.com/).

There is room for improvement for both of us (the instructor and students). For me, I really had to make some time to meet with them online. I wish I had more time with them. The tools I had wanted to use also failed. An example is Toxbox, which never worked on all my students’ PCs. I had to use Skype for a long time before moving to the IRC. As a result, classes were mostly text-based. But I provided them with the resources that they needed, such as URLs, articles, and videos on extension development  (see http://p2pu.org/webcraft/node/6839/document).

In conclusion, I think I had too many things to teach in a short time. I would also like to see more dedicated students. And the community need to do some more work, such as getting the right students and making instructors aware of the feedback they got from the students. I am glad the students were happy at the end of the course; this is one of the comments I got – http://p2pu.org/webcraft/web-browser-extension-dev#comment-4974

I knew months ago that I had passed my Ph.D, and that was why I had included the degree (Ph.D) in my name, when replying to one or two emails in the past. Everyone would like to test-drive a new car they want to buy, and so, I tried to ‘test-include’ the new degree in my name. And yesterday, the degree was conferred at the usual place at the UCT – Jameson Hall. Below are four of the pictures of me during the ceremony.

It was awesome seeing for the second time that an external examiner would pass my thesis without asking me to make corrections. The first time I got that kind of result was when I got my M.Sc. (Eng.) result in 2008. This time around, one of the Ph.D examiners recommended the award of the Ph.D  degree with no corrections made to my thesis. Below is the only report the Doctoral Degree Board (DDB) got from the examiner.

External Examiner's Report on my Ph.D Thesis

I am not allowed to show the examiner’s details. Sorry about that. But I am happy to provide anyone interested with all the reports.