Harold Ogg

Ogg has again shown himself to be an excellent instructor. To give you an idea, here are two items to consider:

(1) This class filled up within the first 3 hours that the TouchTone Registration was activated. (2) Ogg came right out and told everybody on the first class day: “I will do whatever I can to make sure that you succeed in this course.”

CAN YOU BEAT THAT????

Digital Telephony deals with using the existing telephone network infrastructure to transmit data.

TEXT: Bellamy’s Digital Telephony, the bible for this subject. ISBN 0471345717 Very dense and math-heavy. Ogg stated that he may give up on it, given how dense and math-heavy it is.

SYLLABUS: Good. Simple. Sufficient detail.

PROJECT: The Vectronics 1500-K Comprehensive Soldering Course. A neat little project that lasted one and a half classes. Each of us soldered together our own small circuit board that produced a series of blinking lights. (You will have to buy a soldering gun, solder, etc.) The purpose was to give us hands-on exposure re the kinds of circuits used in Digital Telephony. I LIKED IT. And if you ever get a chance to do it, you will, too. IT WAS FUN.

QUIZZES: NONE.

PROGRAMMING: NONE.

EXAMS: One Midterm and one Final, each 50-question multiple choice (and a few small “list the answers” for the Midterm). People (those Arabs and Hindus with poor English skills) bitched and moaned to have the Midterm be Open Book, so Ogg went ahead and made it “take home”. (MISTAKE!) In violation of the school Honor code, many people got together at the library that weekend and worked on the Midterm as a team. AND, in a sign of disrespect to Ogg (which I think went over Ogg’s head – and why???), when the Midterm was handed out, fully half the class did not return to class after the mid-class break. RECOMMENDATION TO OGG: START TAKING ATTENDANCE.

Also, Ogg let everyone have a 100 / 100 on the Midterm as long as it seemed as though a good effort was made.

The Final was neither open book nor take home (duh!). As Ogg put it, he had to make up for how easy the Midterm was and how lenient he was in grading it.

As usual (I have had Ogg for other classes), numerous errors occurred on his multiple choice exams. For the study guide that he handed out the week before the Final, he had fill-in-the-blank practice questions from chapters that we had NOT covered.

BOTTOM LINE: Ogg is a great teacher, but he needs to get more disciplined re how he manages and administers the course. He is a good man, but too much of a “soft touch”.

This review is for Harold Ogg at Northeastern Illinois University. The class is CS 308-32 “Operating Systems” – Spring 2001 – 6:00 PM to 8:20 PM Fridays. I wholeheartedly recommend taking Mr. Ogg for ANY computer science class that he teaches.

TEXTBOOK

“APPLIED OPERATING SYSTEM CONCEPTS” , 1st Edition, by Silberschatz, Galvin & Gagne, Copyright 2000, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN #: 0-471-36508-4. A solid textbook that explained operating systems concepts quite well. In fact, many other instructors at NEIU also chose the same textbook. There is a website connected with the textbook: www.bell-labs.com/topic/books/aos-book. . At this website one can download PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat copies of outlines for each chapter in the text. (But beware, these outlines have a number of spelling errors!) The only downside of the text was that all of the programming examples within it were all in JAVA. However, Professor Ogg did not use any JAVA in class, and he himself instructed us to ignore the JAVA examples, with the exception of one or two drawings that described basic operating system concepts.

SYLLABUS

Somewhat bare-boned, as it only really had a listing of the chapters in the textbook that he wanted to cover, and, at the end, a re-iteration of the university policy against cheating (apparently, a number of Computer Science students at NEIU have been guilty of turning in programming assignments that they never did!!).

OFFICE HOURS

6:00 PM – 7:00 PM Tuesdays & after class on Fridays, 8:45 PM to 9:45 PM. He was always available during the class break at the middle of the class, and right after class. But really, I find it hard to believe that anyone would need to see him for office hours. This class is self-study, for all intents and purposes.

TUTORS

None for this class, and quite frankly, none needed.

CLASS ATTENDANCE

ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL FOR PASSING THIS CLASS, as the multiple-choice exams drew very heavily from both class lectures AND the assigned textbook chapters. Anything and everything that was discussed in class is fair game for the midterms & final exam. TAKE NOTES ON EVERYTHING THAT HE TALKS ABOUT AND WRITES ON THE BLACKBOARD. However, he does NOT take attendance.

CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION

Harold Ogg has lived computers since the very beginning, when your average neighborhood computer geek went out and bought a rinky-dink Altair 4000 (which was so bare bones it was little more in substance than, say, a ham radio set that a hobbyist could spackle together in an hour). He KNOWS stuff, and he eagerly shares it with the class.

Ogg’s classes are always interesting and engaging. He communicates well, he is easy to hear and understand, he answers student’s questions, and explains thoroughly, and he even throws in the occasional joke or two. He is very easy-going, bright and engaging. He has a true teacher’s personality. He exhibits concern that his students are LEARNING the concepts. No question is too dumb for him to answer. You end up feeling like he’s your uncle.

Sometimes he will use the PowerPoint exhibits (from the authors’ website, available to the students for free) on an overhead as he lectures, but most of the time he writes on the blackboard.

If there is any criticism, it is that when he lectures, he tends to present material out of his head, and then in the second-half of the class, he has to quickly cover the material in the assigned chapters.

HOMEWORK

None, besides reading the textbook chapters that he assigns, and reviewing the classroom notes. At the beginning of the semester, I began (on my own) answering the questions at the end of each chapter. However, this was unnecessary, and after Chapter 3, I stopped. In addition, there is NO programming in this class.

QUIZZES

None, really. (See EXAMS section below.)

EXAMS

Initially, the syllabus said that there were to be two midterms and one final, worth 10%, 40% and 50%, respectively. HOWEVER, almost everyone else in class completely “fubared” the first Midterm/”Quiz”, and Ogg gave everyone the option of either letting the grade on this first midterm count, under the original grading schedule, OR letting Midterm II count 50%, and the final still be counted at 50%.

I don’t quite understand how anybody could have flubbed Midterm I, as it was multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions (40 total). Again, simply reading the chapters and reviewing the class notes is all that is required to do well on an Ogg exam.

For Midterm II, Ogg stuck with 50 multiple-choice questions ONLY. But even here, the spread of grades was a high of 98 (out of 100) to the high 60s.

The Final Exam is slated to be the same in format, but with NO review of material covered on Midterm II. It is scheduled for the last Friday class of the semester (and not during exam week).

CLASS MORALE

Pretty high, from what I could see. Most people showed up for this Friday evening class on time, everybody was in good spirits, etc. I myself looked forward to starting my weekend with this class!!! However, people had a tendency to either take too long to come back from mid-class break or not at all.

IMPACT OF NEIU

Man o man, this school needs to get its act together. On the first day of class, there were about 70 or so people wanting to get into a class that was slated for no more than about 40 or so students for this section. Ogg himself said that (a) the school had placed limits on the number of students whom he could accept for the Friday evening section, and (b) he couldn’t teach everyone who had shown up in a single class section. SO, he held a lottery for those people who had not pre-registered for the class. OBVIOUSLY, there were quite a number of disappointed students that will have to wait a semester to take this class. HOWEVER, it is my opinion that Ogg could have taught a class of 1,000 people at a single setting. It’s not like he assigned homework, or had programs to review and grade, etc. In fact, he could have used Scantron sheets to grade any exams. SO, again, NEIU (and the august State of Illinois) have let its college students down. They need to either hire more people to teach Computer Science OR agree to let certain classes have more people in each section. Listen, I GUARANTEE you that they could have (no – SHOULD HAVE) given Ogg one of the auditorium classes to teach in, filled it to the brim, and Ogg would have had absolutely NO problem either teaching or administering his multiple-choice exams.

OTHER

There is NO programming in this class. Indeed, any bright, self-motivated individual who was interested in operating systems could take this course and do well.

BOTTOM LINE

Take Ogg for ANY class that he teaches. He is an alumnus of the NEIU Computer Science program, he knows his stuff, and his focus is on getting people to LEARN the material. He has no ego issues, or anything else that would diminish either the learning experience or the teacher-student relationship. I wish more teachers were as easy-going, yet focused on students LEARNING the material.