Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

When you do several courses at a time you sometimes get a bit of a logjam of assignments. On the whole, it’s generally not so bad as you know quite a bit ahead of time when the assignments are coming up but that doesn’t stop it feeling like quite a busy period when you’ve a series of consecutive deadlines as I do now.

Coming up first is the world archaeology assignment (A251) due on December 3rd so I’m aiming to get that one completed this week. Following close behind that is the CMA for the web applications course (TT280) although I nearly completed that before breakfast on the day it arrived so I will probably finish it off and submit it over the weekend. After that it’s the final assignment for that course which I want to start on this week. Finally, it’s the completion of the final assignment for the medicines course (SK185) which shouldn’t take long.

In theory after that it’s the assignment for the microbes course (S171) but the final date for that is in April so I’m just doing that course as and when I get a few minutes. So far, I’m about 1/4 through it which means it must be nearly time to start the assignment (for short courses you can generally do the assignment as you work through the book).

ED209 is a really big course to revise from and to pass so any help in condensing that revision is always useful as there’s an awful lot of pages in the course books. To that end, I’ve collected together all the various posts and resources relating to it right here.

Before you start there’s the matter of choosing the seen question topic. If you want a head start on this, it’s basically the same question every year and is something along the lines of “how does the theory support your chosen area”. It’s best to treat this as TMA7. In case you were wondering, yes, the question on the exam is exactly the same as the one that they give you in April/May.

Since it is such a large course, it’s best sitting back and deciding on what to revise before starting the revision. Although it’s based around the 2009 exam, that article goes over how to select what you should revise.

In 2009, those revision topics were Early cognitive development, Temperament and development, and First relationships from book 1, Gender identity, National identity, and Young consumers from book 2, Early category representation, First words, Development of children’s understanding of grammar, Executive functions, and Theory of mind from book 3.  All of these are collected in the PDF file. If that’s not enough for you, Tim has an excellent series of notes covering every chapter in book 1 to book 3; not quite so organised but with some useful gems is the information here. For book 4 you’ll need to get the notes from Erica Cox as Tim and myself thought that it would be asking for trouble to publish notes on our own topic.

Once you’ve all that done, there’s some exam preparation to be done right down to the final 24 hours when you should definitely look over your TMAs as they can come up in the exam (and did in 2009). There is a LOT of writing to be done during the exam so get yourself a decent pen.

There are two different revision weekends run for the course. These are by Erica Cox and the OU Psychological Society. I gather that Erica’s are more inspirational, the OUPS ones are more hard work. I didn’t go to either on the basis that the time would be better spent actually doing the revision rather than going to a course about doing it but if I were choosing I think I’d get Erica’s notes and go to the OUPS weekend on the basis that this would get the best of both.

Finally, for your perusal there’s the post-mortem. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the analysis of the 2009 results is that seven people didn’t answer the seen question. Worth noting too is that the large number of people leaving in the first hour or so almost certainly represent the 10% who fail the exam ie if you’re still sitting there at the end of the three hours, chances are that you’ve passed.

I was going to say “good luck” at this point but you shouldn’t need it if you use all the resources above. If you come across anything else that’s useful, let me know and I’ll mention it here.

Of the 481 students on this run of the course, all but 2 passed it with 83% getting 85% or above.

Somehow I suspect the figures for the next CMA will be rather different as it required a good deal more thinking about in comparison to the relatively easy CMA1.

As is customary with the TT CMAs, one of the questions was cancelled. There’s no official reason for that but I suspect that it’s down to the rather iffy statement in the book that smaller web designers most commonly use hierarchical structure for their sites. Whilst that may well be the “answer according to Sklar”, I’m not convinced that it’s the correct answer.

I submitted my answers for CMA2 this morning so next up is completion of SK185 before I get on to the first TMA for A251.

The site went live yesterday with the chapters of the Human Past that we’ll be reading loaded onto it.

Fortunately they’re proper PDFs so I can resize the fonts for the reader but unfortunately they’re landscape 2-up with ain’t readable in full-screen PDF even on the netbook never mind on the reader. However, it’s possible to split these and there’s even a script to do this.

Unfortunately the OU haven’t bothered to title the PDFs properly so they’re all listed as “A251 The Human Past” with no chapter title; I’ll have to change that at some point as it’s a pain finding the right chapter to read.

Aside from the book and assignment booklet there’s not a whole lot to download from the website as the majority of the various resources referred to are online. Going by the number of them I’d say that the online reading will add up to 50% to the book reading but it seems to vary a good deal between the weeks.

The first CMA of the course hardly required any thought at all but this one makes up for it.

Not in a big way mind you as I’ve around 1/3rd of the questions completed at the first run through. The remainder will require a bit more thinking about although there’s scope for a fair amount of short-cutting of that thinking.

There’s a couple of questions on weird tables where you’ve to work out which of the sets of HTML will produce the illustrated table. Frankly, some of them are enough to put you off using tables for layout for life. The code required for the nice simple tables that I would use is complicated enough (I used to fire up FrontPage Express to create the code for me) with one stray <tr> or <td> being quite enough to totally mess up the layout: the ones in some of the questions is something else altogether.

Short-cut wise, it looks like pasting the code in the questions into a file and seeing what Firefox makes of it is the way to go. Sounds a bit like cheating in a way but then this is very much a practical course so it seems the only sensible thing to do.

I’m toying with making a proper start on the ECA this week with a view to spacing out the work over the next six weeks or so. I definitely don’t want to be racing through the report so spacing that out over the remainder of the course seems sensible.