Foreign Perspectives

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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Term insurance is one of the most economical types of insurance contracts around but because of that it’s not really sold quite so well as other higher commission paying contracts are.

Typically, it’s the type of insurance that you’d want for your mortgage rather than life insurance which you normally get sold to cover your mortgage. That’s because for your mortgage you want to have enough money around to pay it off should you die unexpectedly while it’s still current thus for a 25 year mortgage term you’d want a 25 year term insurance contract.

Since they’re not so actively sold it’s generally best to look for accurate term life insurance quotes yourself rather than try to find an agent that can be bothered to give you the best quote you need without giving you a whole lot of hassle trying to sell you a life insurance contract instead.

Popularity: 2% [?]