Foreign Perspectives

With the science courses that I’ve been doing over the last few years, the books generally turn up about a month before the course officially starts and the associated website opens a few days before the course opens. Psychology is clearly a little different and the books have arrived nearly two months before the course starts with the website opening a month before the start.

In the box are:

• Exploring Psychological Research Methods, the 400 page book that I think you dip into throughout the course;
• Mapping Psychology, two volumes totalling 600 pages; and
• Challenging Psychological Issues at 200 pages which finishes off the course;
• a DVD video which has a number of relatively short programmes on it divided into five sections (these will play in a normal DVD player);
• a DVDROM which has a couple of animated sequences (although it’s easier in Windows, you can watch the videos by browsing to the folder on Linux and Mac or, of course, via VirtualBox); and
• SPSS (this is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows and you can use the OU license key for any of them).

Total page count at around 1200 pages is way below that of the equivalent science courses which generally weigh in with around 2000 pages plus associated DVDs (the extreme case being S205 with its seven DVDs). So, in principle, less work to do though I imagine that it won’t work out like that.

On the website will be the assessments, SPSS guide, audio clips and “much more”. Quite why they couldn’t have popped the guide and audio onto the DVD I don’t know as there seems to be the space for it.

One thing that I have noticed already is that I have already covered some of the ground in other courses. Thus one of the DVDROM animations is on perception which I did in some detail in SD329 a couple of years back and some of the topics touched on in the book were covered by the social psychology course that I did with coursera last year. That pre-knowledge should make some sections easier to work through.

With the SK320 exam looming in October, I’m planning on making a start on DSE212 now so that I can take a break from it when the revision work steps up.