Schedule
One chronological view of the Semester 1, 2027 teaching period: lectures, weekly lab sessions, project milestones, and the break.
Twelve teaching weeks, each pairing one lecture with one weekly lab session --- a formal lab, a drop-in clinic, or a lightweight guided session. The mid-semester break falls after Week 6, and each project is due at the end of its four-week block.
| Week | Week beginning | Lecture | Lab | Milestone |
|---|
| 1 | 22 February | What a Language Model Learns | Project 1 Launch and Data Validation (Guided session) | Validate the story split and define the training target. |
| 2 | 1 March | Inside a Decoder-Only Transformer | Lab 1 — Spend a 32M Parameter Budget (Formal lab) | Freeze a feasible baseline architecture. |
| 3 | 8 March | Scale, Data, and Optimisation Under Fixed Compute | Project 1 Pilot Clinic (Drop-in clinic) | Freeze the principal run plan. |
| 4 | 15 March | Evaluate, Decode, and Package a Base Model | Project 1 Evaluation and Packaging (Guided session) | Project 1 due 21 March 2027 at 11:59 pm AET |
| 5 | 22 March | From a Base Model to a Target Behaviour | Project 2 Target and Baseline Planning (Guided session) | Define the target voice and unchanged-model baseline. |
| 6 | 29 March | Supervised Fine-Tuning and Data That Teaches Behaviour | Lab 2 — Build and Inspect a Post-Training Batch (Formal lab) | Produce a masking check and viable pilot. |
| — | 5 April | Mid-semester break, Monday 5–Sunday 11 April 2027 --- no teaching | Preserve logs and checkpoints outside the runtime |
| 7 | 12 April | Learning from Preferences Without Hiding the Cost | Project 2 Behaviour Clinic (Drop-in clinic) | Freeze the evaluation comparison. |
| 8 | 19 April | Did the Behaviour Change, and What Regressed? | Project 2 Blind Evaluation and Packaging (Guided session) | Project 2 due 25 April 2027 at 11:59 pm AET |
| 9 | 26 April | Reasoning as Generated and Verifiable Behaviour | Project 3 Task Contract and Baseline (Guided session) | Choose a track, define one capability, and establish the baseline. |
| 10 | 3 May | Train a Specialist That Can Be Tested | Lab 3 — Train and Verify a Specialist (Formal lab) | Produce one loadable pilot and a valid task metric. |
| 11 | 10 May | Generalisation, Supervision, and One Honest Ablation | Project 3 Generalisation Clinic (Drop-in clinic) | Freeze the candidate checkpoint and bounded claim. |
| 12 | 17 May | Audit the Training System | Project 3 Fresh-Load Audit and Submission (Guided session) | Project 3 due 23 May 2027 at 11:59 pm AET |