Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Aside from the very first French course that I did with them, I have always went down to the Open University before signing up for a new course and had a look through some of the course books.

I’m sure that lots of people have probably done that at one time or another and there are all kinds of approaches that you can take to looking at the books for a possible course. What I did was to have a look at a book about half-way into the course and see if I could understand the words. You might think that this approach would only apply to language courses but in fact it’s equally applicable to all subjects. Certainly I was happy enough that I could understand the words and concepts at about the half-way mark in my current course.

Why half-way though? Well, the OU books seems to be written in a slightly odd way sometimes either by accident or design. Often I’ve found that the first chapter of a book is particularly difficult to follow and one suspects that’s because they want to knock people out of the course early on or rather they want to knock out people who would probably not be up to doing that particular course. Thus the first chapter or two of a book aren’t worth looking at. By the end of the course presumably you’ll have learned quite a lot so you might not initially understand the concepts being spoken about at that point. Therefore, to my mind, the middle is the best spot to aim for.

Why didn’t I just do the “is this course for me” self-assessment test instead? Well, in the case of the languages I didn’t go on the results on said tests for the simple reason that they don’t work too well for me. I don’t do cross-words in English and wouldn’t expect to be able to do them in French yet the tests had things quite similar to cross-words in them (which I couldn’t do). Therefore, glancing at the course books before the course worked better for me than the tests that are available.

However, aside from the books, you can find an increasing number of blogs being written about various courses by students and tutors. These are extremely variable in quality of course as are blogs everywhere. However, you can find truly excellent ones such as Anne’s on various themes from the A207 history course and you can find tutorial notes, revision notes, even complete assignment answers on various courses if you care to look.

But should you look very hard online? For instance, whilst Anne’s site has a fantastic amount of information it’s so much that it has me thinking that perhaps A207 isn’t the course for me (it’s on my rather long short-list). Similarly, I’ve said that the workload on ED209 is pretty substantial on this blog, so would that put someone off doing it? Is too much information about a course beyond the course materials themselves a good thing when you’re choosing a course to do?

The problem is that there’s no easy answer to that. For instance, if I want to do the psychology degree then I have to do a course on biological psychology which has the reputation of being pretty much impossible to do. Should I go on that reputation and therefore not bother with that course? Probably yes, but then I’m just too stubborn to do that so instead I’m looking into doing a course on the biology side first which apparently makes the other course a lot more doable.

The third book is largely about childrens’ learning of which a large chunk is about learning to speak in the early years.

Net effect of that is that I should be on more familiar territory courtesy of the English course I did last year where the third book was all about learning English and most of that about children learning English. In theory that should mean that I’ll be able to work through this part of the course somewhat faster than I’ve been going up to now which is just as well since each week seems to have been taking more time to do recently.

However, now that I’m this far through the course there’s the “seen question” to start to think about. This is quite a peculiar type of thing in many ways and something that the vast majority of people haven’t come up against before. What it is, is quite literally a “seen question” ie they give you the exact question that will be on the exam paper. At first thought that might seem to make this an incredibly easy question to answer but, of course, it isn’t like that because the question is so general to be, on first sight, impossible to answer.

The actual question for this year is “Using evidence from your chosen topic area, critically evaluate the contribution that psychological theory and research have made to improving practice in this field.” which is pretty much the same as it has been ever since they started doing that type of question for this course. The chosen areas are taken from the topics of the final book and are “understanding specific learning difficulties” (dyslexia and dyspraxia), “children and the legal system”, “health psychology: children and development”, “autism and developmental psychology” and “psychology and education: understanding teaching and learning”.

What you have to do is research your chosen topic and find a couple of journal references that you can refer to in your answer. Obviously you can do a lot of work on that answer and in practical terms the question is basically a small research project. What is a problem is that you can’t refer to any notes you’ve made during the exam so you basically need to remember your answer and write it out which seems a little silly to me. One other little problem is that you’ve only about an hour to write the thing out which limits the text to no more than about 1000 words ie a little longer than this post. At the moment, I have sort-of eliminated the “legal system” and “health psychology” as I don’t really like the look of either. My front runner amongst the remaining ones is currently “specific learning difficulties” although I could be talked into the autism or education themes.

However, the biggest problem with this question is an ethical one. Clearly the tutor could provide major league assistance with this one but obviously that’s not the thing that they should be doing since, as always, it should be one’s own work. This is presumably why the OU have sent out one of their missives on the matter. It does leave open the question of study groups and that’s one that I’m not entirely clear on right now so I guess it’ll have to be brought up soonish. Assuming (unlikely I suspect) that our group were all to select the same topic and work on at least the research aspect together, how does that square with the “no collaboration on writing” guidance from the OU? In the past once or twice I’ve been in a group where we needed to rail back on, for example, seeking comments on draft assignments but this seen question seems to have a whole lot more scope for ethical dilemmas like that.

The internet presents us with yet another problem. There are several bloggers talking about the course and that’s created what is, in effect, a sort-of loose study group with, for example, notes very kindly provided by Tim. I gather that a growing number of ED209 students are relying on his notes which will present the first problem for them as presumably he’ll only be doing notes on his chosen topic in the final book. However, what if he were to provide references that he’d researched for that question too? For that matter, others have already put on the full text of their TMAs online and they or others could, in principle, put the full text of their seen question online too. One might think that the university policy on plagiarism would have something to say about that and it does but in general terms their rules are aimed at stopping people selling TMAs (a policy that seems less than effective going by the frequent sales of them on ebay) and don’t really address the issue of people simply publishing them on blogs and whatnot.

I’ve managed to drop another week courtesy of the last assignment but should pick it up again as there’s a week allocated in the schedule for catching up with things so, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be back with my 4 week lead time in about a months time or perhaps a bit less as it didn’t take me nearly so long as I’d expected to get through the material on Sunday as quite a lot of it was covered in the English course last year.

One of the things that you notice when you’ve done a few courses with the Open University is that over the years successive courses tend to get better and the rough edges disappear.

So, it’s a bit of a surprise to find that the workload for the Child Development course is far from even week to week. Within the current book some chapters have taken nearly twice as long to do as others which is a really major change week on week. Now, you’d expect that there could be, say, 10% or so of a difference between weeks or that there could well be a somewhat more substantial difference over the course of a month or two. But doubling from one week to the next and then back to the normal level the following week seems very unusual.

Even more puzzling perhaps is that one would have thought that the educational psychologists would have had some input to the course design. Or perhaps, that lumpiness is a required feature for effective learning? I guess I’ll have to wait ’til I do an educational psychology course to find out!

Somehow or other I managed to pick up 78% on the latest assignment which is pretty good going as initially I hadn’t a clue as to how to properly approach the semi-essay part of it.

It was quite a strange kind of assignment as it was largely based on the methodology book rather than the main course text. That dictated quite a different structure than the typical essay response ending up in the question being split between five short definitions and a longer piece on experimental ethics.

As always at degree level, the “definitions” required are quite complete ones with a full definition of each term in the question and examples to show that you actually understand it which, of course, wouldn’t be shown were you just to write out a straight dictionary style definition.

The ethics part was based around an experiment first carried out in the 1960s and replicated for the BBC/Open University series Child of Our Time a few years ago. Basically it involved kids looking at a video of an adult attacking a doll with three different endings to the video: the adult getting told off for his actions, getting rewarded for them and finally nothing happening to him. There are loads of ethical problems in reproducing an experiment like this, most obviously being that you already know that the kids will become more violent after watching the video (yes, folks, watching violent programming does affect them) you know ahead of time that you will be harming in this way.

Psychological experiments on children seem to be quite a minefield in terms of ethics. For instance, it would be really handy to be able to experiment on the effect of removing, say, the father from the family unit but clearly that’s not a runner ethically or morally and many other potential experiments are just as problematical. In these cases you can use what are called “natural experiments” where the conditions you’d liked to have had in your experiment have happened naturally. For example, if the father leaves naturally. However, even there you’ve problems as one assumes that how the family functioned prior to the divorce would be different than if the divorce hadn’t happened ie the “experiment” isn’t running entirely as one would ideally need it to run.

Still, a pleasing mark. Let’s hope that I can keep it up for the next assignment which I gotta get going on soon…

One of the common comments that I hear about all of the level 2 psychology courses is that there’s way too much content for the level and number of points of the courses.

They’re not wrong either if my experience so far is anything to go by. The level 2 60 point Child Development course feels much more like a 90 point course at times and some of the work required from assignments seems to fall into the definition of requirements for level 3 rather than those for level 2.

Usually the Open University are pretty good at setting the level and amount of content in their courses so how come they appear to have this one so wrong?

One big difference that this sequence of course has is that it’s very much targeted at creating professional psychologists rather than having a more general aim of producing degree level education as other courses usually do. Thus, even though level is the lowest level of psychology course that they offer, the content and requirements of us seems to be almost a postgraduate level eg the “big” assignment that’s coming up soon seems to require original research.

The snag is that if they did make it a 90 point course they’d put a lot of people off what’s a very popular course and if they make it level 3 then they’d have to go and produce a new level 2 introductory course to fill in a gap (it takes a very crazy person to start a new subject at level 3!).