Foreign Perspectives

Due to a peculiar combination of circumstances, I find myself doing four courses simultaneously at the moment which doesn’t seem like an overly good idea on the face of it.

However, whilst I’m now at the “worst” of it with three assignments due over a two week period about a month from now, it doesn’t seem that bad in practice. That’s down to planning (or “panicking early” as some would say) in that I’m running more than a month ahead with all but one of the course texts and have, in principle, a couple of weeks slack to play with if need be.

What’s taking a surprising amount of time is the cardiology course which, as a level one 15 point course, should be taking the least. The final assignment for that looks like it’ll take getting on for twice the time that the comparable assignments in the two level two 30 point courses will take. That’s not so surprising with hindsight in some ways though: 15 point courses aren’t long 10 pointers but 30 point courses done over half the time which in turn means that I’m effectively doing 100 points worth of courses right now.

Still, one of the four finishes next month and another the month afterwards so I’ll be back to a normal workload for a while.

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Online tutorials are all the rage with the Open University these days.

Why isn’t all about money though obviously money does play a big part in it. For instance, my 30 point astronomy course comes with two in-person tutorials and two more online ones for our tutor group vs a more typical 4 in-person ones for the older human biology course. For the astronomy course, it looks very much like it’s all down to cost.

However, on the shorter courses online tutorials are in place of no tutorials at all. Many years ago when I did the 10 point introductory astronomy course, there weren’t any tutorials at all (though you could call your tutor in theory). These days the equivalent 10 point science courses all come with online tutorials.

In the middle ground are the 15 point courses which are basically a 30 point course load but taken over half the time. Thus they should come with two in-person tutorials but in reality they come with only online tutorials. Frankly if my experience with the cardiology course is anything to go by, there really aren’t any online tutorials. Thus far the online “tutorial” has consisted of the tutor posting a question in December and receiving a couple of replies from some students within a few days. There’s been no activity on that tutorial forum since.

The other problem is with the course-wide tutorials which are run by the astronomy course. Within a few hours of the first one starting there were far more messages than I for one could cope with. Were any relevant? Who knows? I certainly didn’t have the time to go through and read all the stuff.

So, “probably not” is the conclusion I’m coming to.

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Although I’ve just got the second human biology assignment back that’s enough to get me over the pass mark. Well, apart from the exam that is.

Since I don’t now need to submit any more assignments (there are two to go) any that I do submit can only serve to increase the overall mark which is a nice place to be in. If nothing else, it removes any assignment pressure that there has been to date.

That’s not to say that I won’t be working to improve the mark in the last couple of assignments. The marks have been good but not evenly distributed amongst the various sections of the assignments which means that there’s a lot of marks still to be had and, seemingly, the majority of them relatively easily since I’ve been doing rather well in what’s arguably the hardest question category and not so well in the one that should be easiest.

I’ll have to get going on the next assignment this week as otherwise I’ve assignments for three separate courses due in the third week of March which is a pile-up that I’d much rather avoid.

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