SAO News

Sarah on sabbatical in S2-2008:

The SAO Coordinator Sarah Maddison will be taking sabbatical leave in Semester 2, 2008. Rumour has it she'll be busy with planetary disk research, combined with beaujolais and camembert! Glen Mackie will be acting SAO Coordinator.

New version of Blackboard (V8):

Swinburne Professional Learning and Information Technology Services will upgrade Higher Education's current Blackboard version from version 6.3 to version 8.0 in early August. Some of the new features include an improved interface to the newsgroups (in browser mode).

Retirement of HET614 and HET616:

SAO currently offers a total of 16 units, with only 12 required for a Masters degree. We have been told by the Faculty that we need to reduce the total number of units we teach, which means that some of our units will need to be "retired", or at least not offered for a few years. So we'd like to give you ample warning that the units HET614 and HET616 will not be offered from 2010. If you are planning on taking these two units as part of your degree, you will need to enrol in them either in S2-2008 or in S2-2009. SAO apologises for any inconvenience this may cause our students. For a full listing of the units we offer, see the SAO units website

SAO content now fully online (farewell CDs!):

From S2-2008, all SAO course content will be delivered online via a new Content Management System with online access to the course content as well as dynamically generated PDF files. Two units, HET614 and HET616, will be delivered via downloadabel PDF files. Having a fully online system allows us to easily hyperlink to relevant material both within SAO and on the web, it makes it far easier for SAO to maintain and update course content, and allows SAO to greatly enhance its course material with new web-based technologies (like this cool example!)