Foreign Perspectives

Up to now I’ve been using the Open University to study things not so much for pleasure but which would enable me to do other things for me or the family. Hence the Modern Languages degree grew out of a desire to move to France and the Child Psychology and Human Biology out of a desire to know some stuff that was useful for the family.

However, after considerable internal debate I’ve decided to go for TT280 which is the first of a set of six short courses spread over about two years that basically amount to a web design training course. Along the way it should update my computing knowledge in a whole host of areas from HTML through to Java and server performance. It’s probably one of the most general computing courses that they offer and seems like one of the best re-entry points into computing. In practical terms, if all goes according to plan, I may pick up some of the topics in more detail through other courses eg I don’t think it covers Java in much detail as there are three 30 point courses on Java and there are much larger courses on server technologies and whatnot.

Although it’s a university course, it seems to be run much more on the lines of a training course with quite a tight timetable in place of the normally more laid back OU timetables from other courses. I’ll be doing the first course (TT280) on its own for much of the 12 weeks but after that, if I do them, the other five courses will be running alongside courses already in my plan.