Foreign Perspectives

Archive for September, 2009

Well, it’s almost out of the way. I’m currently sitting on 1850 words and 2000 is the target so I might run up that final 150 tomorrow. Or then again, I might just put it in as-is seeing as the mark I get on it won’t really affect the overall grade for this course that much.

Anyway, with the assignments out of the way the road is clear to start work on getting ready for the exam on October 21st. That work has two aspects for this course. First, there’s the seen question to consider. That’s the question that they’ve already given us but which we’ve to research two papers to support our argument on the day of the exam and, of course, there’s the small matter of drafting the answer in advance so that it’s “just” a matter of writing it out on the day.

Then there’s the revision for the other two questions on the paper. Frankly, that’s a nightmare for this course as there’s just so much of it. I managed to have a first run through of about half of it over the summer and it was a frightening experience. On the one hand, it was reassuring to find that there was a reasonable amount of it that I remembered but what wasn’t so good was just how long it took to go through it all (and I was “only” going through the Erica Cox notes!).

Finally, there’s the problem that I have at the moment which is that I haven’t a clue how to even make a start on answering a worryingly large proportion of the questions on the past papers. Hopefully, that will change over the next six weeks or so! At this point I’m wondering if it would have been a good idea to go to one of the revision weekends for the course… bit late now though there’s one this weekend.

One of the truly sad things about the whole mess that’s ELQ is that it seems quite likely that the Open University will end up closing its doors at some point because of it.

Why? Well, historically the OU has attracted more than its fair share of students who are studying for a second degree at the same level as their main degree, according to the governments model some 25% of the student population. Personally, I’d have put that figure much higher as it certainly appears to be more like 50% for the courses that I’ve been doing. Having said that, presumably languages would be a more likely second degree than many other subjects that they offer.

The problem is that even taking that 25% as the “real” figure those people would potentially be hit with a fee more than double what they’ll currently be paying. For example, my Human Biology course is currently £360 for those living in the UK, £915 for those in Europe and it’s the £915 that’s the “real” cost of the course. Somehow I can’t see significant numbers from that 25% paying up over £900 for a 30 point course. For my very first French course it rises to £985 for a 30 point course and, honestly, I don’t know anyone in our tutor group who’d have paid that amount.

Or what about those fantastic 10 point courses that they run? Well, at almost triple the current cost I just don’t see the student numbers adding up somehow.

Naturally, the effect will be different depending on the course. The recent rise in the number of students coming to the OU straight after A-levels will obviously have a softening effect but there are some subjects that are clearly more attractive as a second qualification in these hard economic times and one could well see entire departments closing after losing that critical mass of students that OU courses require.

Of course, it’s not just the OU that’s being hit by this crazy policy but I suspect that it’ll be the most obvious casualty in this affair. In other places we’ll just notice that the cost of night classes has jumped dramatically and then the following year that there aren’t nearly so many on offer.

It does seem particularly sad that for another £1.50 PER YEAR tax for each of us this could have been avoided.

I thought that I’d be well ahead yesterday with the TMA but it turned out that the coding phase of the assignment took a whole lot longer than expected so I’m only getting around to writing up the results section this evening.

You’d think that going through about an hour of video and assigning codes to the various responses that the participants made wouldn’t take a whole lot longer than an hour but it does. The snag is, of course, that you need to start and stop the video almost constantly throughout just to keep up with typing up the coding of it. Thus, instead of taking an hour to watch it you’re looking at something closer to twice that which is a) longer and b) a whole lot more boring. I don’t think I’m cut out for coding psychology experiments.

Anyway, now it’s on to analyse the results and write up something reasonably sensible about them. Hopefully, that won’t take nearly so long as the coding did ‘cos I need to get onto writing up the discussion pretty soon and it’s looking like quite a busy week.

I actually made a small start on this towards the end of July but August just pulls away from me every year so I’m only getting back to it now.

As always the TMAs on this course seem harder than you’d expect for a level 2 course so there’s quite a lot of work to be done between now and Friday. Typically too, the suggested timings for the various parts of this practical are way out: it took ages just to get the coding sheet sorted out yesterday and it’ll probably take getting on for a couple of hours to do the coding of the two videos today.

Having said that, once that phase is done the actual writing of the text doesn’t look like it will take overly long. Of course, I thought that with the last TMA too and sometimes it took a couple of hours just to write a few hundred words on it by the time I’d thought about what to write and looked up all the references. Lots of work for just 72% 🙁

Worryingly the course website for SK277 (my next course) opened up on Friday. That let me do the first part of work on that, namely downloading all the textbooks and whatnot that course teams upload these days. As that course starts in the first week of October and ED209 doesn’t finish ’til October 21st I’m planning on reading over the course text for it starting now thus spreading the October workload over two months.Usually, I’d have started at full speed with it now but I don’t think that’s really a runner with the overlap and I’ll be aiming to build up my preferred one month lead time after the ED209 exam is out of the way.

Anyway, must head off to get going on that coding now…

The more I read about the ELQ debate, the crazier it seems to become.

At the moment, I’m actually exempt from what might be crazy increases in university fees as I live in Northern Ireland which is one of the minor exemptions in the grand scale of things. Sounds great to not apply the charge to the whole of Northern Ireland but seeing as we represent about 1/40th of the UK population it’s not such a big deal as it first sounds. That said, I can’t see that exemption staying forever so I was curious about what other exemptions that I might be able to avail of should the need arise in subsequent years.

First up are foundation degrees however the problem with most (all?) of those is that you need your employer to sponsor you and they’re in a fairly limited range of fields at the moment too. That said, several of the courses in my current plan are within foundation degrees. Why then should someone hit by ELQ have to pay, say, double the cost for doing a course when someone else doing the very same course and with the very same prior qualifications be paying half as much? No reason really apart from the crazy nature of the ELQ funding debate.

Although it seems impossible to get a fully definitive list of the exemptions this does include certain medical subjects, youth studies and social work which creates some loopholes for me. Psychology isn’t exempt from ELQ but the majority of psych courses that I’ll be doing over the next couple of years can be allocated against a Diploma in Health Sciences which is presumably exempt and most of them can go towards a youth worker or social work qualification too. Incidently, note that the SIRV (Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects) subjects aren’t exempt from ELQ.

What the regulations don’t appear to even consider is that students don’t always have to be studying towards a specific degree. That’s much more apparent in the case of the Open University but it also applies in many universities. As far as I know one could allocate courses against an exempt qualification (or series of them if necessary) in most universities right up to the penultimate year; in the case of the OU it would be possible to do this right up to the end of the final course. What happens then if someone “changes” their mind at the last minute and picks up the qualification that they really wanted all along? There’s quite a substantial difference in funding (around £4k for non-ELQ, perhaps £16k for ELQ) so I’d have thought that a lot of people would be looking into this possibility.

Overall, it sounds very much like a Gordon Brown “savings” plan ie saves lots of money on paper but in reality it just adds to administration costs and doesn’t save anything at all.