Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

The package for this arrived the same day as the astronomy exam which gave me a chance to have a first look in that brain dead period following exams.

I wasn’t planning on having a look at it quite so soon but a look at the calendar changed that plan pretty sharpish. The first assignment is due in the first week of December, only four weeks after the course starts with the next ones due at the start of January and February with the ECA due on March 18th. The March 18th date suits me in some ways as it means this course will be finished before S204 gets fully under way and may get it completed earlier. Downside of that is that it’s a fairly hectic schedule for the archaeology course.

Anyway, what I’m going to try and do is to make a proper start on A251 this week and, perhaps, build on that two week lead time if I can. Slightly messing that up is that I also want to get the medicine course completed over the next couple of weeks too although I should be able to do that in my new “Kip McGrath” slot.

So what’s in the box? There’s the absolutely massive (784 pages) and heavy The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, the course guide, letter from the course team and the assignment booklet (unusual in these “everything online” days) plus a CD. Going by the course guide, the book is available in PDF on the website but that doesn’t open ’til the 28th so I’ll have to lug the doorstop round ’til then. Going by my brief flick through the early parts of the course guide, it requires access to online reference texts quite a lot.

The course guide seems to weave in the content of the course text in almost as though it were an OU written text which is good in the sense that it comes across almost as though a real-life tutor were sitting with you but not so good in that you need to cart both books around all the time (roll on the arrival of the PDF!). Actually, for a change they seem to have gone out of their way to write it as though you had the tutor beside you rather than the more formal OU style.

The time during the exam just flew in and for the first time ever I didn’t have the luxury of having enough time to check the answers. Having said that, I usually end up “correcting” things to the wrong answer when I’ve lots of time to play with. It was also amongst the most tiring exams that I’ve done too. Since it was effectively made up of around 70 short questions (ie 8 multiple choice, and six from eight short questions with up to 10 parts each) you needed to keep the concentration full-on right through the paper.

The multiple choice questions turned out to be generally quite doable and I’ve only one almost complete guess amongst them when my brain just couldn’t get around a question on red-shifts and Hubble’s constant. Overall on that I reckoned I picked up, on my pessimistic view, around 19.5% out of a possible 28% so half-way to a pass on that bit which was a good start.

Part two on the sun & stars book was generally fine and I could have had a reasonable stab at all four questions. It’s harder to estimate the performance on those ones so I reckoned something like another 18% from that although it could have been higher. Picking the third question turned out to require some thought as I couldn’t do 100% of either of the two remaining with certainty so I followed my thinking from last week and did the one where I could get the highest score rather than just plump for the one that was in my more comfortable topic area.

Part three on cosmology looked horrible at the start. I started off on my two least worst, choosing the one that I thought I could do most parts of first. As it turned out, that was actually my worst question in that section and I think I did really well on the two almost-essay questions in the hard-core cosmology bit. I say almost-essay as whilst the answer for them took the form of an essay the questions were effectively broken up into 15 parts for the second of the two (although it was the most essay-like of the two). Net effect is that for an essay question it looked easy to estimate the marks for it. In the exam I was estimating another 18% for this bit but I think it’ll be a little higher as I checked some of the stuff afterwards.

Taken overall that gives me a pessimistic estimate of around 60% which is nicely clear of the pass mark. High end mark? Maybe into the 70s but I’ll know better when the exam paper is released later this week.

What does seem clear from this is that it’s better to consider the second and third parts of the paper as if they were around 40 short questions that just happen to be presented in four groups. For instance, in one case the part that I couldn’t do in one question amounted to only 2 out of a possible 12 per cent. In fact, with that thinking it’s probably better to aim for the questions with the most parts.

Also notable is that in a lot of cases you had, say, part b (i) introducing a term then parts ii, iii, and iv went on to talk about things related to that. For example, you might have something say “define a black hole” whilst the next part asked what a massive star would leave behind. It’s going to be a black hole, isn’t it? (no, that’s not an actual question from the paper) Because of that, it definitely pays to read the whole question before answering any part of it.

Turnout was extremely low with only three from seven there. As one who’d not been pointed out this was a very lonely course without the proper number of tutorials and I think that contributed to the high dropout rate throughout the year.

Since the OU claim to have over 200,000 students enrolled in courses at any one time and with a sizeable number of those being quite computer literate, you’d think that there would be more than 15 active blogs written by their students. So where are they?

Although I don’t constantly trawl for them, the 14 that are currently listed in the blog roll are all the active ones that I’ve found and includes those pinched from the blog rolls of those on the list plus some more who are no longer active. Those that aren’t actively writing include some who have completed their courses and don’t seem to be continuing with the blog at the moment.

There’s also at least one OU tutor who went and deleted what was far and away the best ever advert that A207 has had in the form of a blog that she ran whilst tutoring the course. Not only did she stop writing it when she finished her tutoring roll but she deleted it altogether. Why do people do stuff like that? I’d bookmarked it for the day when I get around to doing the course and now it’s gone 🙁

And then there’s the bloggers who run out of steam for one reason or another. That happens to bloggers everywhere so I guess it’s no different when it’s OU bloggers that are no different though with the added issues of time pressure from the degree itself.

But none of that really explains why there are so few OU bloggers around. With 200k students to draw upon I’d have expected at least 100 and perhaps even more given that many of the courses offered are all about writing.

All being well, I will have completed my run-through of the revision notes by this afternoon so that leaves Saturday and Sunday for some last-minute stuff.

My plan at the moment is that I’ll put the books to one side and go through the short question sections of one or two past papers on Saturday with a final read-through of the revision notes over the course of Sunday. That’s if I find I can answer the first past paper from memory, of course; otherwise Saturday will be drafted in as a revision session too. One of the more important things to do is to look at the formulae and constants that are given with the exam paper and check that I know what each of them are for.

Also to be done is assembling all the bits and pieces for the day itself. As it’s a science exam that list is a little bit longer than usual with the addition of a calculator and my drawing set in case I feel the urge to run up a diagram at some point. Also in there are the gel refills for the pens though there’s not so much writing for this one as for the psychology so I’ll likely just use the ordinary refill. I’ve still to print the exam allocation page and track down the passport for id. And, of course, the Lucozade and wine gums. Despite the vast amount of revision I’ve done for this in comparison that for previous exams I suspect there’ll be a number of “wine gum moments” (ie when I’m staring at the exam paper and haven’t a clue where to start).

‘Tis odd to think that this time last year I was working on the Child Development revision. I see from the drastic increase in hits on the site that lots of people are doing that right now.

I finally managed to get Wendy going on OU study after chipping away for a number of years so all being well she’ll be starting on Arts Past and Present (AA100) in February.

We called in to the regional office this afternoon to have a leaf through the books before signing up. They’ve “improved” the library on their move to the new offices so it now has all the course materials nicely laid out quite a spacious room and with a desk for visitors. The surroundings are certainly a massive improvement on the extremely cramped conditions in the old place. However, whilst there was barely enough room to stand in the old library they somehow managed to keep several copies of every course so you could borrow them for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, they’ve also “improved” the library by dumping all those extra copies so now it’s purely a reference library. Whilst that’s not a problem for most people, it does mean that it’s no longer possible to borrow the books a month or two before your course starts and thereby make a head start on it. And, no, they can’t give you a copy of the PDFs of the course texts even if you’ve paid for the course.

Also on the shelves are a copy of the AA308 Cities and Technology course which sadly has just finished its last run with no planned replacement (as is the situation with all too many great courses these days). Even sadder is that those books are destined for the bin rather than finding a good home in my house.

Wendy’s got some previous course credits which we will have to see about transferring in at some stage although as they’re from Australia it will probably take a “while” to do.

Slightly complicated in her registration is that the OU keep records of any contact you’ve made seemingly forever so we couldn’t complete the online registration this evening and have to wait ’til they check up on the records manually and send us something to sign.