Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

Whenever the subject of keeping to the official timetable or deviating from it on an Open University course is raised, the argument nearly always gets heated.

Up until a few years ago it wasn’t an issue as the OU sent out the course material no more than a week or two ahead of the course start date. Thus, except for those that planned on packing in a couple of weeks worth of work for a period, by and large everyone was following the official course schedule. Then it all changed. Around four years ago they started sending out the materials when they were ready so I ended up getting the materials for one of my Spanish courses almost three months ahead of time. Sense seemed to prevail after that and they now aim to get the materials out around a month early although generally speaking it seems more like six weeks early.

So now, if you start the course when the material arrives you’ll find yourself running four to six weeks ahead of the official schedule. And that’s where the differences of opinion arise. For example, in the computing course I’m doing at the moment you’re limited to being at most two weeks ahead which is too much for some, not enough for others and just right for nobody apparently if the ongoing debates in various places are anything to go by. To be fair, there’s a particular issue with the TT courses in that the material is drip-fed week by week just two weeks in advance which, for me, is a real pain. For all other courses, pretty much all the course materials turn up around a month before the course begins.

So, should you start early, wait ’til the course officially starts or build up even more of a lead-time on the official timetable? That’s really down to you. For me around a month in advance works well. It’s enough to deal with lifes ups and downs and it’s not too much that you become detached from the tutorials. OU degree programmes run on for so long that you’re bound to hit all kinds of real-life issues that’ll take several weeks out of your own schedule. Those with courses starting in October will have Christmas to contend with, the February starts will have the summer; in both cases you’re going to “lose” at least a couple of weeks. Then there are more major things like holidays, weddings, births and whatnot that can easily take a few more weeks out. On the whole, I’ve found that a four week lead can cope with just about anything but, of course, your life will be different.

On the other hand, running in lock step with the official timetable means that you’re always at the right spot in the course when the tutorials come around, at least if nothing has happened. The problem is that things do happen which is why it’s quite common to have forum messages asking in panic what to do when you’re X weeks behind and those talking of dropping out of the course. Great idea if nothing happens in real-life, not so good if anything does.

Finally, there’s the racing ahead approach. That’s fine if there’s no exam at the end but if there is then you’ll finish the course months early and, more importantly, months before the exam which can make revision more difficult as there’ll be a long gap between the end of your study and the exam itself. Tutorials become pointless as you’ll have finished the corresponding TMA two tutorials ago.

If you’re one of the crazy people doing multiple courses, a bit of lead-time is essential to avoid logjams of assignments; four weeks can handle up to four courses although having done just that in 2010 I wouldn’t recommend it

It’s the usual equation for me though seemingly never for an obvious reason.

With the archaeology the tutor has been giving really good comments on the assignments that I’ve put in. Just as well as I’ve studied neither history nor art subjects in any form for a very long time indeed.

So, in the first one I lost marks in leaving out what seems obvious in hindsight, namely the dates of the various events. I’d bandied about the terms for the periods alright, just not added the dates. Easy to fix obviously.

In the second I’d not put in enough in the way of references which seemed to drop a similar number of marks as the overall mark was much the same as for the first one. Not quite so easy to fix as I found out in the third one.

For the third one, there were dates everywhere and a page and a half of references which took ages to research. In this world archaeology course I thought that I’d take two empires as they suggested and add references from around the world. Net effect was that within the word count you couldn’t say a massive amount about those additional examples so 10% less than before! I think I fell into the trap of this course: it covers a lot of ground in a short time and leaves you with lots of examples whereas what’s really wanted at this level is an in-depth critique of a few cases with perhaps a short reference to other examples.

Which leaves the end of course assessment to do. There are two options on this one. In the first you’ve to look at the impact of cultural contact and movement which sounded good to me as there are lots of examples. For the second you’ve to choose three examples of the impact of population growth on the development of societies.

Prior to receiving the latest mark I’d decided to go for the first option as it seemed to allow the inclusion of loads of examples but I suspect that the second option is probably better as it would force me into concentrating more on fewer examples. The problem with doing that is that it depends on being able to find references to quite detailed aspects of the impact of population growth and in some really interesting societies there’s not a whole lot of detail to draw upon. So, for example, whilst presumably population growth had a major impact on the formation of early agricultural villages, there’s next to nothing to say about them.

The OU World Archaeology (A251) course is a peculiar beastie in many ways.

For a start, it’s a 30 point course which would normally mean that it would run either February to October or October to June. Instead it runs November to March which is a bit out of sync with other courses and also means that it runs at around a 60 point workload.

That “60 point” workload for a 30 point course means that it feels like it’s racing along, often at a headlong pace. Thus we covered the development of agriculture, cities and empires in three separate four week chunks and have an assignment every month.

The style of assignment changes radically too. The first one was the usual OU assignment based on the course texts, the second required a small research element outside the texts, the third requires a small amount from the texts and a lot of research and the final one looks like it will be all research. Quite a progression and one that finds me needing to do a lot more work for the third assignment due this week than I did for the previous two. The final one is supposed to run over three weeks rather than the one week for each of the previous ones.

On the whole though it feels more and more like you’re doing real archaeology, digging out information for yourself. The downside of that is that it means that this isn’t a course to be taken as lightly as many people do. It looks like an interesting course that you can just slot into even the tightest timetable but in reality it’s rather a full course with frequently massive amounts of reading to be done and increasing amounts of work to be done for assignments as the course progresses.

For all that, it is an interesting course. I just wish that they’d scheduled it over the normal 9 month timetable. That would have let me wallow in some of the topics it covers rather than just watch them race by.

The end of the intense overlap of courses seems to be coming all of a sudden as these things often appear to do.

Yesterday, I finally got around to completing the medicine, molecules and drugs (SK185) end of course assessment. One of the more interesting courses that I’ve done in a long time and one which reawakened my interest in chemistry.

I’ve two more weeks of reading of the world archaeology (A251) course to do after which there will “only” be the final TMA (due in two weeks) before getting going on the end of course assessment for it. That’s one course that I definitely wouldn’t want to even contemplate doing an exam for given the sheer volume of reading that the course entails. Having said that, it’s a course that gives a very interesting view of the development of agriculture, cities and empires throughout the world and over a massive timescale. I’d have preferred it if they’d ran the course over the usual 9 month timetable rather than the rather rushed five month one as there’s a lot in the course that I’d have liked to have had the time to properly absorb.

I also finished the reading for The empire of the microbes (S171) course on Thursday and made a reasonable start on the end of course assessment on Friday and, all being well, should get completed over the course of the next few weeks. Already I’m finding that there is a lot of cross-over with the main biology course (S204) which I’ve just started. Although in principle I could submit the January ECA I’m actually going to do the April one and just hang on to it ’til March when it can be submitted.

In principle that should “just” leave me with S204 (a major undertaking) and TT281 (hopefully a reasonably easy going course) to run through to May. If my calculations are correct the workload of those two combined should be somewhat less than that of the previous couple of months.

Quite surprisingly to me, despite dropping three weeks thanks to that swine flu thing, I seem to be pretty much on schedule once again.

Most amazing to me was that I managed to get the archaeology assignment completed and in on time. Whilst the text is hard enough to keep a handle on due to the sheer volume of reading that’s required, it turns out that the second assignment was relatively easy to do (says he not having the mark back yet). The third one looks like it will be more complicated but then assignments can look impossible to do sometimes before you sit down and make a start on them.

I’ve made another burst of progress with the medicine course (SK185) but really need to sit down and get it finished and away this week.

As far as the reading goes, A251 is on schedule though I need to start the third assignment sometime in the next week or so. I’m on the final couple of chapters of the microbes course which is really interesting and is already helping with the initial stages of the S204 reading which I should be finishing the first chapter of this week (around a month ahead of schedule). I’m planning on pulling out the chapter summaries from the S204 books to use as the basis of my own notes; given the page count involved notes are definitely required for this one.

The TT281 DVD arrived a couple of weeks ago but as the course text is online I can’t start that for another couple of weeks. The added nuisance for it is that the ebook reader only works in Windows which means that I’m going to have to reinstall Ubuntu 10.04 to get VirtualBox operational if I can’t get a PDF copy of it.

Upcoming assignments and whatnot include medicine for the end of January, archaeology for early in February and, I think, S204 towards the end of February  by which time I think the first TT281 CMA should be due and I’ll be needing to have made a start on the archaeology ECA too. The final log-jam is basically in the February to mid-March period after which it’s back to a more sensible workload with just S204 and TT281 with the possibility of S171 continuing in the background up to April (I’m hoping to do it before the end of February).