Foreign Perspectives

The package for this arrived the same day as the astronomy exam which gave me a chance to have a first look in that brain dead period following exams.

I wasn’t planning on having a look at it quite so soon but a look at the calendar changed that plan pretty sharpish. The first assignment is due in the first week of December, only four weeks after the course starts with the next ones due at the start of January and February with the ECA due on March 18th. The March 18th date suits me in some ways as it means this course will be finished before S204 gets fully under way and may get it completed earlier. Downside of that is that it’s a fairly hectic schedule for the archaeology course.

Anyway, what I’m going to try and do is to make a proper start on A251 this week and, perhaps, build on that two week lead time if I can. Slightly messing that up is that I also want to get the medicine course completed over the next couple of weeks too although I should be able to do that in my new “Kip McGrath” slot.

So what’s in the box? There’s the absolutely massive (784 pages) and heavy The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, the course guide, letter from the course team and the assignment booklet (unusual in these “everything online” days) plus a CD. Going by the course guide, the book is available in PDF on the website but that doesn’t open ’til the 28th so I’ll have to lug the doorstop round ’til then. Going by my brief flick through the early parts of the course guide, it requires access to online reference texts quite a lot.

The course guide seems to weave in the content of the course text in almost as though it were an OU written text which is good in the sense that it comes across almost as though a real-life tutor were sitting with you but not so good in that you need to cart both books around all the time (roll on the arrival of the PDF!). Actually, for a change they seem to have gone out of their way to write it as though you had the tutor beside you rather than the more formal OU style.