Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2009

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.

Now that I’m starting to look at the course forum for SK277 it turns out that there are yet more problems in attempting to cross the ELQ minefield.

The problem is that, thanks to ELQ, several of the courses that make up the Diploma in Health Sciences may simply stop at their final presentations in 2011 and 2012 rather than being replaced by further courses. That will be a truly sad endictment on ELQ if that happens because some of those courses have been attracting comments such as “I just loved this module” (Human Biology), “one of the best OU courses I’ve taken” (Infectious Disease) and “an outstanding course!” (Signals and Perception).

At the moment, it appears to be just about possible for me to complete the entire sequence of courses before they reach their respective end dates. It does twist around my original plan somewhat but it would be a shame to miss out on courses with feedback like that. One problem for me is that it means that I have to do Biological Psychology next February and I’d not really decided about doing that then as it means I’ve to overlap that course with Human Biology which starts in October.

At one time the only real choice for part-time students was their local university purely on the grounds of practical travel-time but these days lots of universities are offering courses via distance learning (usually via the Internet these days) and, in some senses, the worlds your oyster.

Well, almost. The problem is that in some cases there remain significant cost advantages to doing your course at an institution within your own country, not all universities offer fully distance learning degrees and there are administration issues in doing a degree from an overseas university.

For example, say you want to do a degree in America yet all your qualifications are non-American. What that entails is going through a course by course validation which in effect translates your existing qualifications into the equivalent in the American education model. There’s generally a cost in doing that. Naturally, if you want to use the resulting qualification outside America there can also be a translation process involved too.

The 100% distance learning knocks out a surprising number of potential choices. Thus, whilst Harvard offers a considerable number of courses online these days via their extension school (which is MUCH cheaper than you’d expect), it has a residency requirement of, usually, around six months (you can do it in two summer terms in most cases). At the other end of the scale is something like the British Open University which offers 100% distance learning.

In terms of own-country cost advantage, you can find that in Europe universities give preferential charges to those living in their own country. For example, typically the Open University will charge around double the normal fee if you don’t live in the UK. That seems to be the extreme case but you can expect to pay additional charges in some form if you live outside the country in which the university is based. For example, buying the recommended texts via Harvards bookshop is more expensive if you live outside America.

Aside from those complications though you should be able to choose pretty much any university assuming that you can understand the language they use for teaching. What you should do is draw up a short list and then look into the courses that you would hope to do in more detail. Some courses work much better in an online format than others. For example, although the Open College of the Arts notionally offers distance learning courses, for some of their courses a number of the tutorials have to be face to face in areas like sculpture.

Unfortunately, Martin Bean has been appointed in what seem sure to be “interesting times” for the OU thanks to the ELQ funding fiasco that’s going to start hitting them particularly hard quite soon.

Sadly, there seems to be little that can be done whilst the current government is in power but at least that seems sure to change soon. However, it may not change soon enough to avoid significant damage being done throughout the higher education sector.

Although the timescale for the implementation of the ELQ policy seems relatively relaxed for most universities, for the OU it’s incredibly rapid. Remember that in the OU most degrees take six or seven years to complete and can take as long as 11 years, even without taking breaks between courses. Thus a change that kicks in within just two or three years can easily derail a lot of people aiming for a particular degree.

Thus, the proposals of the science faculty to eliminate all of their current range of named degrees seems sure to hit an awful lot of students who’ve already started on their degree programme. However, let’s not forget the very large number of people who browse through the OU courses and mull over the issue for a number of years before finally starting their degree. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who watched the Saturday morning OU broadcasts of many years ago (stopped only a few years ago) and thought that they’d quite like to do a degree in this or that at some point.

Even more unfortunate is that the OU are attracting a much larger number of school leavers than in years past and many of them would like to have the degree options in the OU that are available in normal universities.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that the elimination of the named science degrees would be accompanied by an elimination of the summer schools associated with the various named degrees. Their argument that few people do the named degrees because of the requirement to do a set number of summer schools seems to come from a particularly short memory. The named degrees were introduced at around the same time as the separation of the summer schools from the courses which they were previously an integral part of. That separation means that it’s MUCH more difficult for those with any kind of sponsorship to get funding for what then became an optional course in the eyes of sponsors.
What’s perhaps the most unfortunate thing in all this is that it could all be avoided if we were each prepared to pay £1.50 PER YEAR in extra tax.

Our own little ED209 group was quite active up until the start of the Summer but is still all but completely silent. Likewise for the ED209 forum on the OU site.

Naturally, the reason over the last couple of months has been the summer holidays. It’s surprisingly easy to drop below the number of people required to keep threads going even for a course with a large enrollment such as ED209.

Restarting things after such a break isn’t quite so easy either. People get used to not having a lot of feedback via the forum and so don’t go to it quite so often even after most people have returned from holiday. I suspect though that one other reason for the relative silence on the forum is that ED209 seems to be a course with a high drop out rate ie there just ain’t as many people around. Due to the nature of many forum conversations (ie “please help me with X”) that’s emphasised even more.

What I’ve done in past courses has been to ask the tutor just how many people are submitting TMAs at several tutorials to get a feel for the drop out rate as we went along. I didn’t do that for this course but if the number of people saying “this is a tough course” or words to that effect is anything to go by then the drop out rate must be pretty substantial.

One thing that appears to be different with this course is that the drop outs don’t seem to occur mainly at the start of the course but rather throughout the course. That’s probably down to the TMAs being consistently difficult rather than seeming to get easier as you go along as happens in other courses in my experience. It’s not that the TMAs were really getting easier, just that as one gets into a course it becomes more familiar and so they seem to get easier. With ED209 that doesn’t happen because you’re moving onto topics that are substantially different from what went before as you go along thus each TMA is based on a body of knowledge that’s often substantially different from the knowledge that you used for the previous one. Moreover, the ED209 TMAs come in three flavours (essay, methodology and practical) so you don’t even get the chance to settle into a style of TMA.

As Tim says, this is one course that’s in need of splitting into two. To have it as a level 2 60 point course is a nonsense: it’s much more like a level 3 90 point course. Level 3 because of the consistently high level of difficulty on the TMAs (and, no, I’m not saying that because my marks have been low because they haven’t been) and 90 points because it takes a whole lot more time than any 60 point courses I’ve done whether they be at level 2 or level 3.