Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

I raised this question during one of the recent tutorials and was instantly shot down!

However, whilst it’s not a “girly” course in terms of difficulty (I’m finding it harder going than even level 3 French!), it is a “girly” course in the sense that it seems to attract more than the usual number of females for a course. Even though I’ve been doing language courses, a more typically female type of course, I found it very noticeable that the percentage of females was much higher than normal in the Child Development course that I’m doing at the moment. If tutorial attenders are any kind of guideline it seems to be around 80% female.

Of course, the reason for that is quite clear when you look at the range of degree and diplomas that this course counts towards even before you consider that anything with “child” in the title is still, even today, considered to be more in the female domain than in the male one. Those qualifications feeding into it are variations on the theme of what’s known as Early Years ie essentially considering the care and education of young children. Those occupations attract more than their fair share of females so thus it’s only natural that qualifications in that line would do the same.

The thing is though that it’s one of the more interesting courses around for guys. After all, whilst arguably girls are, for one reason or another, generally brought up with the expectation that they’ll be looking after the kids (yeah, I know, sexist but still largely true despite that), the guys tend, on the whole, to miss out on that kind of thing. Sure they’ll play with toy soldiers but you don’t see many little boys playing with dolls generally yet that’s one of the ways that you can get used to considering the needs of a baby. Whilst this course isn’t a childcare course as such I found that it filled in a lot of the gaps in childcare lore that guys tend to miss out on as they grow up.

Don’t underestimate the level of difficulty in it though! This course comes with one serious workload and is definitely not a course to be taken lightly.

Although many people are plugging away with various OU courses with a view, at least in principle, to eventually acquiring a degree in the fullness of time, the long drawn out nature of OU degrees tends to make the degree itself something of a fixture.

Perhaps the biggest difference from a “normal” degree is that whereas in the course of doing a normal degree your life is largely centred around the degree and your life as a student, with the OU that’s rarely the case and over the six or seven years that most people take their lives change and the degree becomes a fixture. Let’s face it: a lot can happen over seven years (and it can take as long as 11 even following normal length courses and without breaks). Children can go right through primary school for a start and grow up saying stuff like “Daddy’s doing his French now”.

That “constant” aspect means that when things go badly in one’s life people tend not to quit their degree as you might expect but rather continue with it. I’ve known several people now who’ve lost babies or close family members yet seemingly continued on regardless. To some that might seem unfeeling but those I’ve known are continuing basically because the degree itself gives them a fixed point to hold onto and get them through whatever they’re going through in their lives.

Of course, there is the small matter of that degree at the end of the road to consider. In my experience many people simply forget about it and it can come as something of a shock to receive the little email saying that you can now accept your degree. It’s only natural really: who could really plan something with certainty that was going to take six years or more to complete? In my own case, I found that it was three years on from the point where I was saying “I’d like to speak French better” that I was at the point where I realised that a modern languages degree was a possibility for me and I’m sure that many people doing OU courses are in the same boat.

However, it’s “worse” than that because the OU let you count a very wide range of courses towards a degree and, for the most part, don’t put any time limit on acquiring a degree. Thus if you have a broad range of interests you can easily find that there are several degrees worth of courses in their prospectus that you’d be interested in. Sometimes they’ll form coherent degrees but that’s far from the case all the time. For instance, in my own case I’m notionally plugging away with a psychology degree yet I also have things like World Archaeology and Medieval to Modern History on my list of courses that I’d be interested in doing which have no relationship at all with psychology.

Put together a wide range of courses with the wide range of people who sign up for them and it’s not unknown for people to be working towards multiple degrees simultaneously. The record so far is someone who had 60 odd courses behind him amounting to several degrees but I’m sure that it’s a record that will be broken many times in the years to come. Age is no barrier either and just a few weeks ago I heard of someone in their 90s who’s now reached the point where they’ve three doctorates and are still going strong!

That’s the problem with the OU: it’s quite addictive. Although I’ve just completed a modern languages degree with them I’ve already started on a psychology degree and a few days idle skimming through the prospectus over the summer produced a list equivalent to two or perhaps three degrees worth of courses for my “short” list. It’s not that I’m explicitly planning on doing all of those but it gives me a menu to choose from at least over the next couple of years.

What prompted this little missive? Well, ’tis almost time for me to be signing up for the next course. At the moment it’s looking like it’ll be Human Biology which should make a course later on in my psychology schedule much easier to do but, more importantly, it looks like a really interesting course to do. This one’s something of a rest course for me in that it’s only a 30-pointer so should take much less time than the 60 point courses I’ve been doing for the past three years.

The first time I came across ELQ (Equivalent and Lower Qualifications) was a year or two back when it was mentioned in one of the rare rallying cry type emails that come out from the Open University. What’s it all about? Well, basically the government are intending to drastically reduce funding to universities for those students who are studying for a qualification that is equal to or lower than one that they’ve already got. For example, if you already have a BA or BSc degree then if you sign up for another BA or BSc degree, even if it’s in a totally different subject, then you come under the ELQ rule.

In practical terms, the number of ELQ students is fairly low in most mainstream universities but it’s quite a different matter for the OU where many people start on a different degree for leisure purposes (the proportion of retired students is pretty high on some courses), to change career or to acquire a degree in a more relevant subject to their existing job. Thus, something that would largely have affected the night classes run by mainstream universities is going to affect the main business of the OU. Ironically it would appear that an excellent institution created by the Labour party way back in 1969 may well be killed off by the Labour party of 2009.

So how significant is this reduction in funding? Well, that’s the problem: nobody really knows for sure. Yes, there’s a figure for the reduction but the snag is that the reduction in funding is being met by an increase in course fees and nobody knows what impact that will have on the uptake of courses by students.

Plucking some figures out of the air might give some idea of the impact though. At the moment the OU charges around £10 per point degree courses thus overall a 360 point honours degree costs about £3,600 or around £600 a year on average spread over the typical six years of their courses. Depending on the subject that you do residential schools may increase that to more like £4,600 so say £800/year on average.

However, were the university to double those fees which some would say seems likely, what would happen? Would people find it so easy to justify £1,600 a year over six years? The snag is that it’s not quite so simple as that because there are a lot of quite major universities around the world offering distance learning in similar ranges of courses. Whilst an overall cost for a degree of under £5,000 is quite a bargain generally, that’s not the case were the overall cost to be twice that.

Already discussions are ongoing in the university as to what to do. For example, the science faculty seems likely to drop all but one of its named degrees and is looking for ways to drastically cut the cost of running the residential schools. Whereas right now you can do degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, life sciences and natural sciences in the future there might only be the option to do just “science” albeit with at least some of the currently existing degree programmes continuing to exist as strands within that. Although as they say most of those named degrees were only introduced in 2003 taking them out just six years later seems rather a rapid move on the part of the OU. I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one of their students who ruminated over doing a degree with them for a number of years before actually getting around to it.

Now whilst they argue that they need to drop the residential courses because they don’t make any money on them, they’re in this situation largely because they separated out the residential courses from the courses to which they were originally linked. For example, S103 included a residential whereas S104, its replacement, has SXR103 as a separate residential course. Thanks to the way that most companies sponsoring students on courses work the non-compulsory nature of SXR103 means that fewer people will get funding to go on it.

That’s just the science faculty too. Other faculties attract more hobby students and could see substantial number of courses needing to be dropped if the prices go up too much. For example, how would the various history courses fare at double their current cost? Yes, many of them sound fascinating (and are on my own short list) but realistically I’d have thought that they’re more likely to be done by the retired hobby student population (who tend to get much better marks than the rest of us) and so could be more price sensitive than other more employment oriented courses.

Supposedly none of this affects us students registered for the courses with addresses in Northern Ireland. Not yet, anyway. I imagine that it’s none too ethical but presumably the OU could just supply all students with an NI forwarding address and thus continue to claim the full funding. I wonder if anyone’s floated that suggestion yet?

As usual I ended up putting my previous assignment in at the last minute. That’s not because I didn’t start on it reasonably early this time around but because I always find that there’s some last minute thing that I can do to improve it in some way and I’m always scared of putting it in too early in case I come up with some much better way of answering it at the last minute.

However, despite the pretty much last minute submission all of the previous ones were marked by the next day (top marks to Ken, my tutor!). Staggeringly fast marking but not rushed as you might expect as the comments were both plentiful and helpful too. But, this time as we’re getting ready to head off to France of course the mark isn’t in yet.

This one was a different type of assignment so I’ve really no way of judging where the final mark will fall. Up to now we’ve had two essay assignments (one more to go) for which the mark was more or less as expected and assignment looking at methodology which ended up with a higher mark as it was so much more structured. This particular one is what they bill as a practical for which we had to write what’s essentially a scientific report looking at how two children of different ages think about their identity. Since it is a report style answer there’s a whole lot of structure already fixed which, in principle, might lead to a higher mark than you’d normally get on an essay style question. However, there’s also a couple of semi-essay segments within it and it’s a new style answer format for me so overall it’s anyone’s guess as to where the mark might fall.

Actually, that varying of the answer formats is one of the things that goes to make this course much harder to do than other ones that I’ve done. Usually the assignments require a similar sort of answer so you get used to producing something along those lines. That’s not to say that they’re easier overall but rather that you get to know what’s expected of you which doesn’t really happen in this particular course.

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….