This course is worth 4 credit units; one credit unit is assumed to correspond to circa 26,666 (1600/60) hours of work. Your mileage may vary.

4 credit units * 26,666 h/cu = 107 h.

Lectures and workshops take place weekly, except on department-wide exam weeks (15.10.-19.10. and 10.12.-14.12.*). Friday exercise groups will be
held biweekly starting from the second lecture week on 14.9. in the first period (= odd weeks: 14.9., 28.9., 12.10.) and first lecture week 2.10. on the second period (= even weeks: 2.11., 16.11., 30.11.). The course exam is on the second period's exam week, Wed 12.12. at 16:00.

*) The last workshop is cut off by the 6.12. Finnish independence day holiday, on which there is no teaching. (While Friday 7.12. is not a holiday, it is on an odd week, and therefore has no exercise group onthis course.)

**) Note that the exam and teaching break weeks can (and should, by our recommendation) also be used for self-study to balance your total workload:

Aiming for 60 credit units per year means 1600 workhours per year, or 800 hours per semester, which divided only to lecture weeks in the autumn would mean 67-hour workweeks. When you distribute them to exam and break weeks as well, you get 57-hour workweeks.

If you in addition spend 3 weeks studying outside the autumn teaching period (on a yearly level 3+3=6 weeks would be a bit less than half of the 3-month summer break), the total goes down to 40 hours / week, which is the Finnish norm for working weeks.

Of course this is all statistics, which should always be approached with mild suspicion, but it gives you an idea of why it is a good idea to work evenly through the year rather than try to cram everything into the lecture weeks (let alone doing everything just before the exam).

Motivation for course scheduling: The structure of weekly exercises has been modified this autumn based on experiences from earlier years. As this course is now the first course taken for freshly-started MSc students at the department, we will focus more support on learning the working methods and slow down the pace the course to ease the load of learning the essential theory. Towards this goal, the course lasts through the two autumn periods, and lectures are split in two: Monday lectures cover new subject matter ("regular" lectures to students familiar with our BSc courses), while the Thursday lecture slot is primarily used for small building-block exercises that support the completion of (a reduced number of) larger weekly exercises.

The latter format is somewhat comparable to "paja" excercise system that has been successfully applied on our BSc programming courses, and aims to help our starting MSc students to build their own study groups as well. The workshop exercises are more step-wise variants of the exercise group homework, and the worskhop will have allocated time for working on the homework specifically as well.

The complexity of the subject matter will cause many students to need more time in practice than what they may be used to for a course of this size, but obviously our aim is not to sneak by two coursefuls of homework for the credit points of one.

If a student who is already familiar with the local exercise methodology wishes to also take the baseline courses from the Software Systems specialization line with colliding Thursday morning lectures (which are in Finnish), they can do this and, if needed, work on the exercises in their own private study groups (opintopiirit) instead.