Foreign Perspectives

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You’d think that I’m getting paid for writing this stuff, but I’m not; I just think they’re brilliant.

Although the OU has been on the go since the early 1970’s strangely enough there doesn’t appear to be any serious competitor for them in the English-speaking world (there’s a rough equivalent in Spain). On first glance it would appear that there are equivalents in America but when you look in more detail at them you find that they do post graduate stuff or skip out the first year or two of a normal course. Even those that don’t do that only offer a limited range of programmes whereas the OU offers a very complete programme, the only major omission being medicine.

How come it doesn’t have any competitors though?

It’s quite hard to say in that these days Internet delivery of the courses means that a university can be anywhere whereas obviously it was harder to launch on a correspondence basis in the 1970s. Where it did have the advantage is that it had substantial government money behind it in the early days and perhaps that’s not been available elsewhere in the world up to now.

Popularity: 17% [?]

If you’re planning on hosting with HostGator, then you may as well do it at a discount.

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Popularity: 17% [?]

It doesn’t always work as such.

Oh, it’ll tell you where you are alright and point you in a direction that’ll get you where you want to go but the problem is that in some areas of which ours is one, the roads that it sends you down are the windy ones and anyone using it to reach us from the south always adds an hour or two to their journey because of this.

The problem is that once you get dependent on a technology like that you tend not to have a fall-back ie maps in this case. So, we found that our Danish guests didn’t arrive at 7pm but were much closer to 9pm and had been following a very “interesting” route to get to us, despite them having been here before.

Popularity: 16% [?]