Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Although I don’t read the blog stats religiously by any means it’s interesting to keep an eye on them now and again to see what’s popular and what’s not.

For instance, at the moment I’m doing fairly well from people searching for a little assistance with the latest ED209 assignment. Not surprising really as this is one of a mere handful of blogs that have been writing about their experiences with the Child Development course as they’ve been working their way through it this year.

Is it actually useful to try to find some pointers for the assignment this way though? So far, I suspect the answer is “not really”. For instance, Tim has been relatively quiet about it of late and my own contribution certainly doesn’t hand it out on a plate although I do say something about identity and there will be more about the TMA over the coming week. What’s more surprising is that there haven’t been any blogs writing about the course before this year. Tanya has been brave enough to upload all of her assignments for the course but it’s for an earlier year and the assignment questions were quite different so you’ll not get a whole lot of help there.

Of course, there’s also the small matter of just how reliable the information that one would find on a blog about a TMA. After all, even if I were to upload the entire TMA answer this evening you wouldn’t know what mark I was going to get for it. Having said that, I imagine that you could probably have a reasonable guess as to where the mark might fall which in turn would indicate how much work you might need to do to achieve such a mark yourself. Would that really be helpful though? Take, for example, Exploring English (U211) where in the very first assignment you’re required to upload the first half of your TMA, the second half being a critique on someone else’s uploaded TMA. With that you can easily get a feel for the overall quality of work that people are doing in your tutor group. That in itself was quite reassuring for me but then I picked up 90% on that TMA and I can understand that others might find that it was quite intimidating. So, grand if you’re at the top end of the marking range, potentially quite demoralising if you’re sitting in the large middle ground (which is why most OU forums ban discussion about marks).

If anything, the child development course and indeed psychology courses in general with the OU seem much worse than knowing how other people were doing was with the English course. Quite why that is I don’t fully understand but it seems to be related to the fact that a large number of the psychology students are treating the courses as vocational training so it’s more important to them to do well than it might be in another area that’s more of a hobby subject. Thus, whilst I’m more than happy tootling along in the 70s, others in my group are very much aiming to be in the 80s. Having said that, although I’m very content with the marks to date I have already more or less decided to up the pace at which I’m pottering along with the psychology degree thanks to some gentle prodding on the part of fellow students.

So, as always, be careful what you wish for. If you’re a consistent 60% person, would you really be over the moon to see a 90% type assignment? For that matter, there’s the not so insignificant issue that all tutors don’t mark in a 100% identical manner.

This is a somewhat peculiar piece of work that we’ve to do. Since it’s a practical you would obviously assume from that that we have to find a few children and do some practical experiment on them. These days that wouldn’t be quite such a simple thing to organise of course as youve first of all to find some children, then get the parents permission and, of course, there’d be the sex offenders register check that would need done on you as well.

So, what the Open University have done is to conduct a whole series of interviews and record them in advance. Thus we don’t need to find children, get permission and get ourselves checked out thus most of the administration hassles are removed. I suspect that these days the time taken for the pre-experiment administration would mean that some of it would need to be done pretty much as soon as we signed up for the course if it was a real practical exercise that we were going to be doing for the assignment.

What we have to do is to take these interviews and analyse them to see if they conform to Rosenberg’s theory. That’s essentially a theory of identity and basically says that younger children will tend to consider the various aspects of their identity as being defined externally whilst older children will tend to rely on themselves to define their identity. So, for example, a young child will tend to describe themselves in terms of physical characteristics and aspects that can be seen by others, whereas an older child will tend to talk about internal feelings and values.

Next up is writing up the research report which is a full-blown report in terms of format. So there’ll be a title, abstract, introduction, methods section, results, discussion and conclusion along with references and appendices. Sounds easy but I suspect that it’ll be extremely time-consuming so I’m making a proper start on it today with the writing of the methodology section which seems to be by far the easiest bit to do and, according to their suggested plan, should see me with the first 400 words written from the 2000 target.

Since I only started with the Open University so that I would be able to “speak a little more French” I was only ever really pottering along with what was ultimately to become my modern languages degree. That’s not to say that I wasn’t working hard at it but rather that I just wasn’t in a hurry to complete it by a particular date. At the time I started out that seemed to be largely the approach of a lot of people on the courses that I was doing. Certainly nobody seemed to need to pick up a degree at any particular time amongst the tutorial groups that I was in over the years.

However, over that time the mix of people doing the OU courses has changed substantially. In the “good old days” they simply would not accept anyone under 21 and the average age of the students seemed to be somewhere in the 40s albeit with quite a sizeable proportion well over 60. These days, the courses are more likely to have a fair representation of those doing the degree full-time just after their A-levels since it’s a popular choice compared to traditional universities in these days of increasing charges: even full-time the OU wouldn’t cost more than £2000 a year on the most expensive courses and in most cases it would be more like £1200. The older contingent are still there as indeed are the sizeable representation in the 40s or thereabouts but the average age is substantially down.

That shift in demographics seems at least partially to account for the shift in emphasis from merely pottering along to more of a drive to complete the degree as soon as is reasonably possible. For example, throughout the seven years of the modern languages degree I never had anyone mention that they were planning on speeding up the attainment of their degree yet quite regularly I now get people trying to persuade me to do exactly that. I’ve sort-of succumed to this pressure in that I will probably be running with the Human Biology course starting this October rather than waiting ’til the following October to start Exploring Psychology thus, for the first time, I’ll be doing two courses at once albeit only for a month.

In addition to the move towards doing degrees quicker these days I suspect that the lower age range will eventually have an effect on the range of course on offer. I don’t think that widening will be particularly noticeable though as they’ve been widening the range of courses for many years now and the only real gaps seem to be in the area of creative arts and a general medical programme (though they do offer nursing courses).

What may be noticeable sooner is the shortening of time taken to do degrees which presumably will produce something of a bulge in graduations at some point.

When you start out on the path of a particular qualification there’s usually one or two sequences of courses that you have to do if you want to pick up that qualification at some point but it’s not always clear just what overall sequence you should follow.

Certainly, if you are doing a tightly defined qualification you may well find that almost all of your courses are compulsory but in a lot of cases the sequence itself isn’t compulsory and that’s where it can be very worthwhile examining what each course entails before deciding on the appropriate sequence for you. If you have previous experience or qualifications (even in a seemingly unrelated area) then you may find that you can make life a whole lot easier for yourself if you work out an appropriate sequence because in this case the ideal sequence for you may be entirely different from that for those who are coming to the qualification with no prior experience.

For example, in my own case to get the modern languages degree I needed to do a sequence of courses in French, another sequence in Spanish and a single course in English language. Most people doing that degree tend to start with the English course since that’s perceived as the easiest one and they tend to do the French sequence next and finish with Spanish because the majority of people here will have done French at school therefore it should be easier for them than Spanish. However, that’s not necessarily the easiest sequence to do. For a start, Spanish is usually seen as easier to learn than French so logically it would be a better to start with than French. Then there’s the business of learning a language which is obviously covered in the French and Spanish sequences and which thereby makes the English course (which is supposedly one of the hardest in the university) seem fairly simple. So, in theory the ideal sequence for me would have been Spanish, French and finally English.

Since I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment, I’ve recently embarked on a psychology degree. There too there’s a sequence to follow that’s recommended which does not seem to be the ideal one for me. Although I should have started on the introductory psychology course first I actually started on the child development one. That seems to be working out to be a better sequence for me in that “learning English” was obviously covered in the English course and it’s also covered in the child development one. Right now I’m in the midst of that section which is proving to be relatively easy going for me thanks to the previous English course. In theory, the introductory course next year should also appear easier in that I’ll have already done a year of psychology. As to the subsequence years, well I’ve not gotten as far as considering a sequence for them yet.

Now, if anyone could work out the ideal (read: easiest) path to the Open University psychology degree it would be really helpful….

The latest assignment on the child psychology course is a bit of an odd one for me in that we’ve to do what is essentially a small research study and write up a scientific report on our findings.

Although in previous times this type of assignment was carried as a real practical involving children, changes in the laws have made that too difficult to do so instead we’ve been given recordings of interviews with various children to work with. Thus we don’t need to contact any children ourselves to carry out the research although I’ve been trying out some of it on my own kids.

It’s based on research that Rosenberg did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is one of those psychological experiments that look like they would make little or no sense to the participants at the time but which turn up some quite interesting results. As you’ll probably gather from my title it’s all about identity and in particular how one’s identity changes over time. Conceptually the experiment is really simple. Children (it works on adults too) are given a sheet of paper with ten lines beginning “I…” and asked to complete them in whatever way they see fit. So, for example, someone might put “I am a boy”, “I like reading”, and so on. Once they’ve completed that, they’re questioned on each statement basically to clarify just what they mean by them and the results are analysed.

Clearly one would expect the younger children to have simpler concepts of self and that’s generally the case in that they will refer, largely, to physical descriptions or activities rather than anything deeply philosophical. Likewise, older children will have a more developed sense of self and wlll usually have more sophisticated answers. However, what’s less obvious is that the younger children are, on the whole, talking about themselves by way of things that others could observe whereas the older ones tend to talk more about things that only they could know ie they have developed a sense of who they are that isn’t dependent on what others can see them do.

Naturally, as we get older that sense of self gets increasingly complex. So, whereas a child will have, for the most part, a single “self”, adults gradually acquire different layers of self over the years. Thus there’ll be the self that’s portrayed at work, the self that paints landscapes, the self that one’s family sees and so on. Clearly too one’s hopes and dreams will generally change over time too: that wishing to be a fireman or whatever mutates somewhat over the years.

As always, Ken’s tutorial on this was fascinating at all kinds of levels. Perhaps the most inspiring example that he gave was of a student who had been doing my current course a few years back. He was 92 at the time and was one of the many people that you meet at the OU who were finally getting around to doing that degree that wasn’t an option when they’d been younger. Now, you might think that this guy had left it rather late to be doing a degree but as he said he just wanted to get it completed before he died so that he could put BA on his headstone. However, as with many such people he got a little carried away with it and finished up with THREE doctorates. I don’t know about you but that certainly set me thinking along the lines of… if that old geezer can do a doctorate, what’s stopping me? In many ways, it’s not the high-flier types that provide inspiration to do something but the people like him who, let’s face it, many people would have consigned to the waste bin of life who provide the real inspiration.

So, who are you right now and who do you want to be?