Foreign Perspectives

One of the big differences between the language courses that I’ve been doing over the last seven years and the psychology course that I’m doing at the moment is that there are a whole lot more people doing it: around six times the number apparently.

That great number of students means that there’s a corresponding increase in the number of tutorials and I find myself with three different tutorial groups to choose from. In practice, what I’d normally do is just go to the group run by my own tutor but that’s at 7pm which is rather late for me so I thought I’d try out one of the Saturday morning groups this week.

Since the Open University is, on the whole, run in a very standardised way I was quite surprised at just how differently the two tutorials were run. Both provided equally useful information but one was operated in a very laid back style whilst the other seemed very much in a typical OU tutorial style. Now the question is: would it be even more useful to go to the third tutorial this Saturday and get a third perspective?

Another consequence of the larger number of students is that there’s a whole lot more information online too. For instance, several people have loaded notes on their own tutorials, one current student is producing a very useful series of notes and there’s even someone who has loaded up the answers that they submitted to their assignments.

Finally, that larger number of students means that there are a selection of privately run revision weekend events run during the year and even a published set of notes on the course itself.

The problem with all that is that there’s so much information available that it would be very easy to get so many different views that you’d not know what direction to set off in when trying to answer a question be it in an assignment or in the exam. So chances are I’ll probably not go to that third tutorial this coming weekend and only the one revision weekend.