Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

One of the essential things to do early on in starting an Open University course is to get yourself into a study group.

Although there are regular tutorials associated with the course there tend to be quite a lot of things that don’t come up during the tutorials for one reason or another but which are often vital to your success on the course. Not all of these will be obvious at the off either. For example, one of the most useful things that I picked up early on in the French course was from just how extensive another student made his notes and what he was making notes on. Seeing just how extensive the notes of another student are has a great deal more impact than hearing at a tutorial that you should make notes.

Less tangible reasons at the start are the encouragement to keep going that you can get from other study group members. As an indication of how important that is, the only people who finished the French diploma were those who were in the study group three years earlier: everyone else dropped out along the way.

Then, there’s the magnification of sources that arises from having a number of people working on the problem. On Saturday for instance our group turned up four separate sets of notes on different aspects of the course.

Finally, there’s the reason that you joined the study group for in the first place… talking about the assignments!

One of the biggest surprises that I had when I started the psychology course this year was the sheer number of separate tutorial groups that it has in the area. Previously with the language courses it was one group to cover the whole of Ireland whereas there are six or seven separate ones for this psychology course and it’s not even the most popular course (Exploring Psychology in case you were wondering).

That larger number of students is also reflected in the blogging world with myself prattling on here, Lynn doing something vaguely similar and Tim being very dedicated. And that’s just from the crop of students studying the course right now with Tanya and presumably others being around in previous years.

Where does all this interest come from though. Well, for me this is notionally the first course in a psychology degree being followed out of interest at the moment although I tend to use my qualifications eventually. The others in my tutor group pretty much all seem to be working with children in some connection so the current course is of more immediate benefit to them. That doesn’t explain why Exploring Psychology (which is considered the first OU psychology course) is running with around 8000 students but I guess that understanding how peoples’ minds work is an interesting topic for an awful lot of people.

I’m something of an addict to browsing university prospectuses though sometimes it’s quite a while between getting the thing and getting around to signing up for a course. Last time it was all the way from picking up a prospectus around 1985 to starting a course in 2002!

At the moment I’m plugging away with a child development course which means that my next logical one is notionally the exploring psychology course which I’d have started last October were it not for the overlap with the final course for the modern languages degree. However, there’s an even worse overlap this year so I’m going to create a gap for myself by not starting the psychology course ’til October 2010 (with probably a little course popped into the first half of that year).

However, for a change, I’ve been looking much further ahead than I usually do and browsing the postgraduate prospectus which has a rather interesting little MSc in psychology that in turn leads on to a PhD.

Crazy, eh? Still, ’twas crazy talk like that which got me from “speaking a little French” to finishing off an honours degree in modern languages.

I was doing quite nicely pottering along with the child development course this last couple of months and keeping my one month lead-time on the official course calendar until now.

However, the next section of the course on the personal and social development of children has started off with a substantial jump in the quantity and complexity of the work involved. As noted earlier that, for me, has fallen at the same time as a dearth in the posts in the course forum which does seem to point to a likelihood of a substantial drop-out rate over the previous week.

Why the big jump though? Well, the first segment in the new section is on parenting and as all us parents know that’s not a simple topic. Secondly, the segment looks in considerable detail at the implementation of what’s called the “strange test” which is basically used as a means of identifying how and in what way a child is attached to, usually, their mother. It turns out that this is quite an important classification as it can determine how the child handles relationships in later life and therefore there have been ways developed of identifying that child attachment classification in adults. Net effect of this is that the methodology segment which is usually quite short seems to take up almost as much time as the rest of the segment which in turn means it’s gonna take me another couple of days to get through it.

On the plus side, it looks like the next segment is back to the normal workload though there is the “small” matter of the next assignment to think about too…

During the couple of weeks prior to the cut-off date for the first assignment for the psychology course the course forum was understandably very busy with all those last minute questions as to how to interpret the question, whether to include this reference or that, and so on.

We’re now in the week just after that date and there’s not been a single message on the forum in that week. Granted, there wouldn’t be the volume of posts after an assignment, but none at all seems a little odd as there’s always at trickle of questions or comments.

Whether that’s an indication that the first assignment was viewed as being quite difficult and therefore there’s been a higher than normal drop-out rate, we’ll have to wait a week or two to find out.