Foreign Perspectives

One of the problems with the Open University is that up until a year ago they put out a prospectus giving about a paragraph on each of the courses which they run and you’re talking about hundreds of courses over dozens of different subject areas.

Net effect is that I found it very easy to find loads of courses that I’d potentially be interested in over the years but ’twas only a year ago that I finally got around to sitting down and working out a rough masterplan containing all the courses that I might be interested in doing at some point along with a pathway through the resulting maze of courses. Something of a crazy waste of time really as to do all of those on the list would take decades by which time a great deal of them would have long since been replaced by more up to date versions or perhaps completely different ones altogether. That said, it was a useful exercise in working out the medium term sequencing of the courses as there’s mix of February/October and October/June cycle courses and changing between one cycle and the other is something that you don’t want to be doing terribly often.

Anyway, I am technically on the very first of those courses right now (ED209 Child Development) and already there’s a course change in the overall route. What’s happened is that as a result of looking in more detail about the requirements of the courses coming up means that it’s useful to add a completely new course (SK277 Human Biology) into the medium term schedule in order to make it easier to do one that I’ll be getting to in several years time (SD226 Biological Psychology).

That leaves the medium term timetable looking like this:

• October 2009 SK277, Human Biology because that’ll make SD226 (Biological Psychology) a whole lot more doable and because it seems like a fascinating course in its own right;
• October 2010 DSE212, Exploring Psychology which is the psychology course that I really should have done first (along with DXR222, the associated residential);
• September 2011 A251, World Archaeology because it sounds dead interesting and I’ll need 30 points later on;
• January 2012 MST121, Using Mathematics because I need to get my maths back onstream for…
• October 2012 S207, The Physical World and SXR207, the associated residential

Eh? Where did World Archaelogy come from? That’s from my prospectus browsing. Although it’s completely unrelated to everything else I’m currently planning on doing it sounds like a really interesting course.

Where did the maths and physic courses come from? Aren’t you doing a psychology degree? Well, I have a whole host of physics courses on my masterplan simply because they sound fascinating and S207 is the first taster of those. After that I will have completed my October start sequence of courses and that’s when I’ll decide whether to complete the psychology degree or the physics degree first (long term I’ll probably do both). Thus although the course that follows it will definitely be DSE232 Applying Psychology (because it’s a September start and only runs for a few months) the one after that will be either DD307 Social Psychology or MS221 Exploring Mathematics depending on which route I choose at that point.

That brings up an issue that hasn’t arisen before in the form of enabling courses. Although I’m aiming for a physics degree that requires a fair number of maths course to enable me to do the various physics courses and they generally need to be done in a particular sequence.

There’s also the matter of a number of courses I quite fancy that I can’t see me doing a particular degree in. For instance, A207 From Enlightenment to Romanticism c.1780-1830 seems quite interesting and I’ve even read one of the recommended texts for it. Surprisingly S104 Exploring Science, although brilliant by all accounts, is one that I have provisionally dropped from my masterplan on the basis that I don’t seem to need to do it although I might revise that opinion after I’ve done the biology course. And, of course, there’s the MSc in psychology that I’d quite like to do too at some point not to mention the Creative Arts degree that sounds like fun. Still, for the moment I think I’ll just potter along through my medium term plan….