Foreign Perspectives

One of the essential things to do early on in starting an Open University course is to get yourself into a study group.

Although there are regular tutorials associated with the course there tend to be quite a lot of things that don’t come up during the tutorials for one reason or another but which are often vital to your success on the course. Not all of these will be obvious at the off either. For example, one of the most useful things that I picked up early on in the French course was from just how extensive another student made his notes and what he was making notes on. Seeing just how extensive the notes of another student are has a great deal more impact than hearing at a tutorial that you should make notes.

Less tangible reasons at the start are the encouragement to keep going that you can get from other study group members. As an indication of how important that is, the only people who finished the French diploma were those who were in the study group three years earlier: everyone else dropped out along the way.

Then, there’s the magnification of sources that arises from having a number of people working on the problem. On Saturday for instance our group turned up four separate sets of notes on different aspects of the course.

Finally, there’s the reason that you joined the study group for in the first place… talking about the assignments!