Foreign Perspectives

Not so long ago, you used to be just click on the “register now” button to sign up for any course with the Open University.

That led to some people doing crazy things like registering for level 3 courses when they’d no background in the subject and where the courses in question explicitly stated that you needed to have quite a lot of background. You might think that all such people would fail but they didn’t as a number of them had acquired the relevant background in an unofficial way.

However, now the pre-requisites are being enforced in a growing range of subjects. First to complain were the mathematicians who found that they were required to have specific modules as a pre-requisite to do later ones. Quite a number of those actually did have the knowledge required but they’d acquired it outside the OU and sometimes in a way that wasn’t documented. No complaints, yet, from the languages people where you definitely need to have a level 1 level of knowledge before doing level 2 but perhaps they’re not enforcing the pre-requisites there yet as it’s quite common in languages to acquire fluency in an undocumented way.

It’s coming up in the last of the residentials too. In the case of psychology, the original timetable of DSE212 of February to October meant that DXR222, the associated residential, fell in the middle of that. Now though that you can complete DSE212 in the October to June slot it’s possible to do that before doing DXR222 yet they enforce a registeration of DSE212 first, even though you could drop out of it after registration. Net effect for me was a worrying couple of days waiting whilst they processed the DSE212 registration before I could register for the residential when in the past I could have registered for both at the same time.

Oh well. At least my remaining modules don’t seem to have officially listed pre-requisites. Or, perhaps, I should say “not yet”.