Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2010

Since the Open University basically sells its wares online, obviously a lot of effort goes into making sure course descriptions are as accurate and complete as possible.

Thus, not only do you get a description of what the course teaches but you get sections on the entry requirement (ie what experience/knowledge you need in advance), the qualifications that the course can be included in, any issues that could arise if you’re disabled, what course materials you get, how the teaching and assessment work and other courses that those taking this course took. As well as this there are often links to course tasters and reviews of the course by previous students. In short, a whole lot of information about the course.

The problem is that the course reviews for some courses are very misleading. It’s not that they’re intentionally so but that they are, understandably, written with the background of the reviewer in mind. Thus, for example, Exploring English (U211) comes across as a very difficult course that will take much more than the recommended 16 hours a week to complete. Yet, I actually completed the course in around 3 hours per week. How come? Well, the majority of people doing that course come from an English literature background and it’s a language course. I came from a foreign languages background and thus had come across the majority of the concepts before so making the work rather easy.

In a similar vein, Web Applications (TT280) which I’m doing at the moment has received a string of really bad reviews yet when you read blogs about it, they seem to be talking about a completely different course. Part of that is down to changes that have been made in the course over the years but a larger part is down to this being an almost entirely online course. Now you might think that those doing a web apps course would be more likely than normal students to expect to be reading things from a computer screen but many of the complaints are from people who couldn’t and gave off at having to print off mountains of paper. Similarly, you whilst you’d want such a course to be quite up to date, other complaints are that parts were being written as the course was being run which is obviously as up to date as you’re likely to get. Still more complained about the extremely high workload yet I’m three weeks ahead in less than one week and haven’t been knocking myself out doing that either. Very much a love it or loathe it course I think.

What’s really needed is a short background to the people making these comments though I guess that would be problematical with data protection these days. It’s, of course, why the most useful comments are from bloggers where you can usually get a flavour of their background.

The Connswater greenway is a project which will, over the course of the next two or three years, link up pretty much all of the existing smattering of parks and walkways from the Titanic quarter through to the Castlereagh hills.

Although it’s an area that I’ve been in and around for most of my life their booklet highlights a whole bunch of things that I never knew existed. In fact, it comes across as a much more interesting area than you would expect, picking out as it does interests ranging from George Best’s home and Van Morrison’s home and haunts through to a 400 year old bridge in what it a fairly compact area.

That bridge is the most surprising for me as I went to school right beside it yet never knew of its existence until Wednesday morning! To be fair, it doesn’t look that impressive these days but then ancient footbridges rarely do and this one crosses the river at a point where the flow tends to collect a whole heap of junk ranging from fallen branches through to the Tesco trolley which seem to get everywhere these days.

Whilst the majority of the open spaces exist already, many of them have seen better days and the walkways have generally fallen into disuse over the years. Thus one of the major tasks of the project is to spruce up what’s already there which is no small task given the span of the greenway. This will include re-routing some of the stretches of river to both create a more typical meandering look and to sort out the flooding problem that arises along some sections of the rivers. In addition to all the prettying up the playgrounds scattered along the route will have their numbers increased somewhat and upgrades to those that are already there.

One of the most staggering figures that was quoted in the presentation on Wednesday was that over 50% of the population in the area is “economically inactive” ie there’s a very high level of unemployment. Whilst this project won’t directly change that, it should help to pretty up the area substantially which may in turn attract more businesses to move to what was once an area with close to 100% employment thanks to the shipyard, aircraft factory and all the supporting businesses which they drew in.

Largely because it’s a course that I need to think about I’ve not established a proper time slot for it yet so the work on it has been slipping back over the last few weeks.

That said, I’m over half way through it so over the point where it’s worthwhile having a look at the ECA. Since the first submission date is the end of October which clashes with the astronomy exam and the first web development CMA I thought that I’d aim for the second date which is the end of January. If nothing else, that gives me the option of backpedalling a little with the course if needbe.

Anyway, I’ve made a start on the ECA as some of the questions relate to chapters relatively early on in the book and should be able to complete the first question sometime this week and perhaps part of the second one. Unlike in other courses the questions don’t follow a neat progression through the course so it’s not entirely clear in advance what questions you’d be able to answer by the time you’ve reached any given chapter. That contributes to making it a little more difficult to do than typical short courses are and there’s also more of an element of needing to understand things generally with this course than I’ve seen before on a short course too. It’s not that the questions are overlly difficult but you definitely need to think more about this course than is usual for the short courses at this level which, of course, is no bad thing and should help me when I start the big chemistry course this time next year.

At the moment it’s starting to look like I would be able to hit the first submission date but since I’ve started on the ECA for the second date I’ll just be plugging away with that and I’ll hang on to it ’til December when I can submit it. Having said that, I may have a look at the earlier ECA if I finish the course really early.

It covers some ground that I did way back in the anaesthetics section of A-level chemistry many years ago but in more detail. Thus, whereas the A-level largely concentrated on telling the story of the development of modern anaesthetics, SK185 tells that story but goes on to explain how the various compounds were developed. Fascinating both in terms of the story, of how the chemicals work and how one goes about developing a new medicine. Very much a recommended course if you’re at all interested in how things like painkillers actually work.

Thanks to our Kumon centre taking on rather too many new students than they seem to be able to cope with and hence arbitrarily halving the number of worksheets per session (without reducing the fees, of course), we’ve been looking around at other options.

The Kumon issue arose because there’s no set limit to the number of students that a given centre can take on. Thus, with a sudden increase in numbers following the free trial at the end of August, the numbers in the class seemed to pretty much double. Due to the way the in-class marking is handled that in turn meant that the time taken to get through the work in class went up from around 40 minutes for our guys to over an hour which might not sound like much of an increase but had the overall effect that there just wasn’t enough time to get through all the students. Rather than recruit more supervisors, the centre just halved the number of worksheets so that 60 minute time-slot now takes about 30 minutes.

So we’ve started looking for something similar that places explicit limits on the maximum number of students that they can take on. That’s thrown up Kip McGrath which operates rather differently in that rather than trying to run the kids through a standardised programme, they tailor their programmes to the children and there’s a maximum of six per class. Anyway, we’re getting the kids assessed for their programme later this week.

Ironically, we would have stuck with Kumon as it showed steady progress for the kids but it’s just too expensive for what they’re providing at the moment.

Courses that are largely online are even more difficult to judge ahead of time than book based courses.

You might think that student reviews would be a good place to start in assessing how long a course will take to do but in reality it’s very much based on your prior knowledge and experience. Thus whilst the comments on U211 a few years back indicated that it took getting on for 20 hours a week to do, in reality it rarely took me more than three ie about 1/5th of the recommended time of 16 hours. It looks like TT280 will be even worse. The OU guideline is 8 hours, which I usually divide by two, but I finished the first three weeks worth of work in something like three or four hours (and, no, I didn’t skip things). That leaves me with just one chapter of the book to read to complete week three which is as far as I can go ’til October the 1st when the first CMA is released.

One of the exercises was to run a W3C validation on a website. For that I thought that I’d give some of my own websites a spin. Turns out that the one with the most problems is this one and all because of some of the plugins that I use; my completely DIY inns sites were fine apart from a couple of typing mistakes.

Anyway, all being well, I’ll be able to maintain this pace in future courses in the web development certificate as I’ll be running some of them alongside quite a heavy workload. The medicine course is slipping back a ways at the moment though I’m still on schedule to complete it sometime in October even with my “pottering along” pace.