Study notes and a brief review of ELEC5509 Mobile Networks

Exams for semester 1 this year are finally over. The first set of notes to go up is for ELEC5509 Mobile Networks taught by Abbas Jamalipour. As usual, you’ll be able to find it at my Sydney Uni section of the blog.

I would have to say that this course is one of the least enjoyable and least rewarding courses I’ve done over the years, and would strongly advise those doing Telecommunications Engineering at USYD to not take this course.

Read on for a brief review of the course.

This course was designed to give an insight into a range of mobile communication technologies, as well as some experience in research.

Even though it is a level 5 course, suitable for final year undergraduates or postgraduates, the course doesn’t go into the topics covered with enough detail to be satisfying. It turned out that much of the course is far too general – knowing that something exists and having a vague idea of what it’s used for would be enough to pass the course. I expected that to be assumed background knowledge so that we can dig into each of the topics in detail during the course. Instead, it was all that’s required.

Looking back having finished this course, it’s difficult to point identify much new knowledge I’ve gained from this course, because most of them have been touch on in the past in previous courses. Of the amount of knowledge actually gained, it really doesn’t seem to be all that useful for any intents and purposes.

I was impressed that teaching staff did personally solicit feedback from students to try and improve the course, but unfortunately in the process of giving feedback, I’ve been subjected to numerous reasons why I’m wrong about the quality of the course, and how I’m supposed to to like it. So much for actively listening to feedback. The stunning results are evident when you look at what’s actually been taught in this course. The latest and greatest in mobile technology (as at about 7 years ago). That’s why we’re still learning about AMPS as a mobile phone system, the reason why we apparently haven’t implemented E911 service, and what the lecturer believes we should expect to see in fourth generation (4G) mobiles and why it’s apparently still a fantasy. As I said, this course is overly outdated.

How about an introduction to research? Surely that can’t become outdated. After all, research is a skill. Things like writing a literature survey we still do today! Unfortunately this course’s idea of research was reflected in the assignment. Randomly allocated groups of 4 students were assigned a topic (no choice given!) and was tasked to “summarise” 5 IEEE academic papers in 3 pages of writing including abstract, intro, conclusion and references. That’s right – not a literature survey but just a 5 summaries of papers restricted to being IEEE published. So why are we not allowed to “summarise” possibly better written papers from a non-IEEE journal/conference? Maybe that’s what research is about.

For the course tutorials, what happens is that there is a tutor tasked to read out answers to a series of homework questions we were required to complete before class. Sounds marginally reasonable right? Think of it this way: You’ve just spent a number of hours interpreting poorly written questions and subsequently finding out the required information to write a response. We’re limited by the length of response so there’s no point in going into detail. Having done all that studying, you sit into the 1-2 hour long tutorial just to listen to sample answers read out to you, some of which are obviously inaccurate or incorrect based on the state of today’s technology.

All up, the combination of outdated, shallow content and poorly designed assessments make for an unenjoyable and unrewarding course. My study notes have now been uploaded and is available on my USYD page.

Meanwhile, I’m finalising my course notes for the ELEC5616 Computer and Network Security course, which is among the best courses I’ve done.