Foreign Perspectives

If you value your “spare time” then you should be very careful never to pick up a prospectus from the Open University.

Nobody warned me about it and I started reading one in 2001 and it’s been eating up all my spare time ever since!

The booklet looks innocent enough, but then you start leafing through it and find that it’s just filled with all kinds of courses that sound really interesting. The short courses only take a few months and even a half-credit course only takes a few hours per week. Before you know it, you’ll be filling in the application form for one of them. Just to see what they send, you understand, after all you can pull out of it, can’t you?

You’re only planning on doing the one course, but then about half-way through that one they send you a letter about those that logically follow on from that one along with a little sampler of what the next course is like. All you have to do is to sign at the bottom and return the letter and before you know it, you’re walking along to the Post Office.

It’s the same next year, but by then you’re hooked and looking beyond the current strand of courses. You’re thinking “sure, if I do a couple of courses more I’ll get a degree”. That kind of thinking is fatal: you get another prospectus. Just to have a leaf through it, of course, but it never works out like that.

You think that it’s all over when you’re about to start the final course for your degree, but you’re totally addicted at that point and it’s time to get another fix. What about that other course that you were thinking of originally? Wow, they’ve updated it and it sounds even more interesting now, doesn’t it?

That’s what happened to me. I picked up the Diploma in French three years ago and have just completed the final exam for the Diploma in Spanish. That just leaves one English course and I get a degree in Modern Languages. But I always quite fancied their science courses and will be signing up for the first of those a little after Easter next year.

I think we need to start Open University Annonymous: it’s worse than drinking!