Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

In a typical tutor group forum out of a possible 25-30 users you’re lucky if you get four or five people participating and even then that participation is generally limited to an introductory comment at the start of the course and perhaps one or two replies later on.

Thus in my current astronomy course there are 60 forum comments of which 46 are from the tutor, seven from me and one from each of six other people. In fact, nobody replied to anyone else’s comment over the eight months of the course. Although we’re down to around 15 students now that should still be enough to get some responses.

However, TT280 is at the other extreme. For that the “tutor group” encompasses the entire course (several hundred people I think) which is far too many to keep track of. For instance, the week one seminar which only opened yesterday now has getting on for 200 messages on it. Somehow I doubt that many people have read them all or have any intention of trying to.

Where there does, so far, seem to be a happy medium is in the fast track forum which has only 13 messages on it so far. It’s the one aimed at people who are running up to three weeks ahead of the course timetable. I had sort-of expected that there would be more people participating in that but it would appear that it’s something like 50-ish out of the 1000-ish people on the course (taking the seemingly typical 20% forum participation rate as a guideline) or around 5% of the student cohort.

Already there’s a sign that some people are going to miss the wood for the trees in a big way. For instance, on the accessibility thread everyone is trying to find reasons why you should bother making websites accessible to (mainly) the blind and has totally missed what is by far the most important commercial reason which is that search engines are effectively blind. Thus, if you run up a site entirely in flash (which is surprisingly commonly done), then it’s basically invisible to google et al. From the other end, the tutors are trumpeting the OU rule that assignments can’t be distributed or published in any form yet 1) Nick Athanasiou, one of the students on the Advanced Creative Writing course has had the play written for his assignment performed (and this is even mentioned by the OU) and 2) the main reason for not publishing was related to the potential for plagiarism by future students which can’t happen for TT280 as this is the final run of the course.

Normally I’d be working on TT280 at this point but thanks to the drip-feeding of material I’m as far ahead as I can really go. Well, aside from the first computer marked assignment but I can’t submit that for another week or two anyway so I’ll finish it off during the week.

Since the Open University basically sells its wares online, obviously a lot of effort goes into making sure course descriptions are as accurate and complete as possible.

Thus, not only do you get a description of what the course teaches but you get sections on the entry requirement (ie what experience/knowledge you need in advance), the qualifications that the course can be included in, any issues that could arise if you’re disabled, what course materials you get, how the teaching and assessment work and other courses that those taking this course took. As well as this there are often links to course tasters and reviews of the course by previous students. In short, a whole lot of information about the course.

The problem is that the course reviews for some courses are very misleading. It’s not that they’re intentionally so but that they are, understandably, written with the background of the reviewer in mind. Thus, for example, Exploring English (U211) comes across as a very difficult course that will take much more than the recommended 16 hours a week to complete. Yet, I actually completed the course in around 3 hours per week. How come? Well, the majority of people doing that course come from an English literature background and it’s a language course. I came from a foreign languages background and thus had come across the majority of the concepts before so making the work rather easy.

In a similar vein, Web Applications (TT280) which I’m doing at the moment has received a string of really bad reviews yet when you read blogs about it, they seem to be talking about a completely different course. Part of that is down to changes that have been made in the course over the years but a larger part is down to this being an almost entirely online course. Now you might think that those doing a web apps course would be more likely than normal students to expect to be reading things from a computer screen but many of the complaints are from people who couldn’t and gave off at having to print off mountains of paper. Similarly, you whilst you’d want such a course to be quite up to date, other complaints are that parts were being written as the course was being run which is obviously as up to date as you’re likely to get. Still more complained about the extremely high workload yet I’m three weeks ahead in less than one week and haven’t been knocking myself out doing that either. Very much a love it or loathe it course I think.

What’s really needed is a short background to the people making these comments though I guess that would be problematical with data protection these days. It’s, of course, why the most useful comments are from bloggers where you can usually get a flavour of their background.

Largely because it’s a course that I need to think about I’ve not established a proper time slot for it yet so the work on it has been slipping back over the last few weeks.

That said, I’m over half way through it so over the point where it’s worthwhile having a look at the ECA. Since the first submission date is the end of October which clashes with the astronomy exam and the first web development CMA I thought that I’d aim for the second date which is the end of January. If nothing else, that gives me the option of backpedalling a little with the course if needbe.

Anyway, I’ve made a start on the ECA as some of the questions relate to chapters relatively early on in the book and should be able to complete the first question sometime this week and perhaps part of the second one. Unlike in other courses the questions don’t follow a neat progression through the course so it’s not entirely clear in advance what questions you’d be able to answer by the time you’ve reached any given chapter. That contributes to making it a little more difficult to do than typical short courses are and there’s also more of an element of needing to understand things generally with this course than I’ve seen before on a short course too. It’s not that the questions are overlly difficult but you definitely need to think more about this course than is usual for the short courses at this level which, of course, is no bad thing and should help me when I start the big chemistry course this time next year.

At the moment it’s starting to look like I would be able to hit the first submission date but since I’ve started on the ECA for the second date I’ll just be plugging away with that and I’ll hang on to it ’til December when I can submit it. Having said that, I may have a look at the earlier ECA if I finish the course really early.

It covers some ground that I did way back in the anaesthetics section of A-level chemistry many years ago but in more detail. Thus, whereas the A-level largely concentrated on telling the story of the development of modern anaesthetics, SK185 tells that story but goes on to explain how the various compounds were developed. Fascinating both in terms of the story, of how the chemicals work and how one goes about developing a new medicine. Very much a recommended course if you’re at all interested in how things like painkillers actually work.

Courses that are largely online are even more difficult to judge ahead of time than book based courses.

You might think that student reviews would be a good place to start in assessing how long a course will take to do but in reality it’s very much based on your prior knowledge and experience. Thus whilst the comments on U211 a few years back indicated that it took getting on for 20 hours a week to do, in reality it rarely took me more than three ie about 1/5th of the recommended time of 16 hours. It looks like TT280 will be even worse. The OU guideline is 8 hours, which I usually divide by two, but I finished the first three weeks worth of work in something like three or four hours (and, no, I didn’t skip things). That leaves me with just one chapter of the book to read to complete week three which is as far as I can go ’til October the 1st when the first CMA is released.

One of the exercises was to run a W3C validation on a website. For that I thought that I’d give some of my own websites a spin. Turns out that the one with the most problems is this one and all because of some of the plugins that I use; my completely DIY inns sites were fine apart from a couple of typing mistakes.

Anyway, all being well, I’ll be able to maintain this pace in future courses in the web development certificate as I’ll be running some of them alongside quite a heavy workload. The medicine course is slipping back a ways at the moment though I’m still on schedule to complete it sometime in October even with my “pottering along” pace.

The Open University TT courses are a set of six courses on various aspects of web development making up the web development certificate. Sadly, it proved a form of course that was a) too hard to keep updated sufficiently frequently and b) not sufficiently attractive to students towards the latter end of the certificate (a recent run had 800+ on the first course, 80 on the penultimate).

Anyway, as a result of that I’ve just started on what’s the final run of the suite of courses. The first one is TT280 which seems to be essentially a run through of XHTML and CSS along with a lot of related stuff such as the various web standards (boy, are they long, or what?).

Supposedly this course should take around 8 hours a week but it looks like I’ll be scooting through at more like two hours a week as I’ve already finished the first week’s worth of material (yes, all of it) this morning and that included downloading the first four weeks of material. One thing about this course that is a real pain is that the material is drip-fed week by week so that you can’t run more than four weeks ahead of the official schedule. Thus in place of my normal complete download of the course at the start, I’ll need to download a weeks worth every week from now on. The first of the Computer Marked Assignments (CMAs) won’t be available ’til next week which is something else that I don’t like as I always like a look at what’s expected early on in a course.

The course has heaps of references outside the course material if the first week is anything to go by. So, although I’ve “everything” downloaded I ended up having to read through the course guide online and download the additional documents as I was going along. That multiple document format is typical of the OU material (because it gets you more engaged in your learning) but having to be online as you read the course guide simply so that you can go off to another website for material is a bit of a nuisance. Still, it has saved a few hundred quid as I initially thought that this was the course that would force the purchase of one of the Android tablets. Oh well, I guess I might have to wait for Christmas.

One ongoing awkward part of the suite of courses is that I’m having to add them on top of my nicely planned out schedule which will be particularly difficult at some points. For instance, I’m having to start this course before the astronomy course is out of the way since the first CMA is due about a week after the astronomy exam. And, of course, there’s the medicine course as well though doing that whilst the kids are in their Kumon class seems to be working out quite well.