Foreign Perspectives

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.