Foreign Perspectives

Archive for December, 2008

Most of the booking websites provide a mechanism for guests to comment on and score the performance of the accommodation which they’ve used recently.

In most cases the comments are approved by the booking site before they’re published so you only get to see the relatively sensible ones as they weed out those that are from another planet. For example, the commentary that we received a year ago that criticised the “ancient boxy hairdryer” in the bathroom; in fact it was a reasonably modern room heater. Or the couple that wrote quite an extensive critique of their stay that rarely touched base with reality and for which it turned out that all their problems stemmed from them not having changing the time on their watch.

However, as well as the commentary there’s generally a scoring system in place which can sometimes have quite bizzare numerical effects. For example, on one site we’ve the vast majority of scores 7 and over yet because of two 2.5s from a single group we end up with an overall 5. It’s scoring bias like that which makes a nonsense of the scoring. In a large hotel with hundreds of comments one or two low scores disappear of course but when you’ve only a few dozen comments just one disgruntled customer can really throw the overall result.

Once I’d the modern languages degree nailed down I thought I’d have a look around for what was available to do next.

My first look was at what was on offer from the Open University and it’s a pretty substantial list of courses under just about every possible faculty. The only notable thing missing is an all-out medical degree though they seem to be working up to that as they’ve a range of courses covering a lot of topics in that area.

However I thought that I’d have a look around online to see what was on offer around the world and it’s a very mixed bag. A growing number of universities put parts of their courses online as a taster and a number of others offer full-blown degrees taught largely or completely online. Fancy a degree from Harvard? Well, you can pick up a range of liberal arts degrees via their extension school. Sadly, Yales’s contribution doesn’t currently come with course credit but I suspect that they’re working up to that.

But it’s not just the big names that are in this market. If you’re looking for courses that’ll give you credit I found: Athabasca, Atlanta, Colorado, Ellis, Harvard, Illinois, London, New York, Notre Dame, Open University, Oxford, Queensland, Penn State, Walden after a good trawl through those offering courses online.

By and large the big names offer a fairly limited range of courses and qualifications; notable exceptions to this are Harvard, London and the Open University. However, the range of courses on offer and the number of universities offering such courses is increasing all the time: given a few more years it seems likely that it’ll be the norm for universities to offer at least some of their courses online.

One big plus point is that, by and large, most of these online offerings are open access which means that you don’t need qualifications to get admitted to the various courses. Having said that, some do demand SAT scores and the like.

We’re in the midst of our customary Christmas closing and generally lazing around at the moment.

Boxing Day brought us our first serious bought of snow for several years and for a while it was looking like we’d be snowed in for quite a while. As usual the French didn’t even bother to slow down on roads completely covered with ice and snow so I’m sure that the accident figures are well up.

France is a slightly peculiar place to be over Christmas in that they don’t formally “do” Christmas thus the shops were relatively empty on Christmas Eve and indeed the toy shops were eerily empty even the week before Christmas. Just as eerily empty as the toy shops in the UK were a few weeks earlier though that presumably was down to the current recession.

Although the shops do close several hours early (as does the post office) on Christmas Eve and everything is closed on Christmas Day, by Boxing Day it’s back to normal everywhere and you’d think that it was a normal shopping day. The law doesn’t allow them to have sales at the moment so you don’t get the usual post-Christmas sales that you do elsewhere and nowhere do you get the 70%+ reductions that are commonplace nowadays because the law won’t let shops sell stuff at a loss (which should create interesting closing down sales in due course).

On the sale front, we were comparing prices with the UK and found a surprising number of things sitting at around two to three times the UK prices at the current exchange rate. Obviously with all the shenanaghans recently with the interest rates  the exchange rates are not really at their “true” levels and if the price differentials are anything to go by it should be around EUR 2 to the pound rather than the current 1.10 or so which implies that there’s going to be either a major drop in the euro interest rate or massive increases in unemployment in the euro zone.

It looks like the Open University have gotten the message from the students re timely dispatch of materials for their course as my new Child Development course was posted just a couple of days after I’d applied for it.

That’s a big change from a few years ago when typically you’d receive the course materials at best a week before the course started. Now, in theory you’re not really supposed to start the course until about a week after the stuff arrives if you go by their course calendars but in reality most people I know are keen to get at least flicking through the books and whatnot as soon as they can to at least get a feel for what’s in the box if not to actually start work on it as such.

So far my record was receiving a Spanish course a few years back several months in advance which was a teensy bit too early really as I’d just finished the previous course a matter of weeks and wasn’t really geared up to start looking at the next one. It’s a little over a month in advance this time around which seems just about right were it not for the little problem that I’ll not actually get my hands on the materials for another two or three weeks as we’re in our place in France at the moment and probably won’t see the parcel ’til we get back to Belfast.

That little bit of extra lead-time is really necessary these days as the range of material that turns up is enormous compared to what they used to turn up. In place of a relatively small package of a course book and a few supplementary bits & bobs such as course calendars and the list of materials itself these days you get the course guides, supplementary guides, DVDs, DVDROMS, CDs and a whole host of other stuff. Even finding the “read me first” note can take a while and I’ve had courses with such a range of different types of material that it’s been scary to do anything more than attempting to find the contents check-list on opening the box the first time!

Once I’d finally bitten the bullet and signed up for the child development course the first difference was in the amount of pre-course website that appeared.

For six years I’d been plugging away with language courses and this was the first proper one that I’d done with the OU outside that area. With those there’s not really a whole of pre-course information that you get other than simple things like the prospectus and whatever any recommended texts there might be (usually none).

However, the psychology people are a whole different bunch of people. On the OU course record page there isn’t really a whole lot on at the moment aside from the scary entry that the course material was mailed last Friday, just two days after I signed up. Outside the OU though there’s a whole mountain of material ranging from information about study guides and intensive revision sessions through to one brave person who’s put most of her assignments online. The scariest of all is definitely that first TMA though I find that most assignments look pretty scary before you start them.

What’s clear from all that’s around is that the psychology people treat the topic very seriously, or at least those that have anything to say certainly seem to.