Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Once you’ve decided to do a new course, there are a few hurdles that you need to get over if you want to be sitting there on the day of the final exam.

First of those is the business of actually getting the application form completed and off to the university. Although in most years I get that away fairly early on in the game and, in particular, before the results of the preceeding course have arrived, this year it was very much a last minute thing. The reasons for that were specific to me but I’m sure that there are a considerable number of dropouts from courses through simply not getting the application in to begin with.

The second big hurdle is once you get the initial wad of information about the course sent to those registered for it. In the case of the Open University the books seem to be arriving earlier with every year that passes. This early arrival means that there can be several months of reconsideration time before the course formally begins. Although that early arrival is welcome in giving the opportunity of making an early start on the work it has the downside that you’re doing that work very much on your own and that lack of support combined with additional reconsideration time means that people drop out at that point too.

However, by far the biggest drop out trigger is the first assignment. One course I was on a few years ago went from 25 to 18 students as soon as the time came to do that first assignment and there were similarly large dropout rates on other courses. That’s a shame really as most of the time the first assignment doesn’t count towards the final mark so you may as well have a go at it. I really hadn’t got much of a clue as to how to proceed with the first assignment of my course last year yet I picked up a mark of 90% on it: how well you think you’re doing doesn’t necessarily correspond to how well you’re actually doing. Although there can be dropouts around the other assignments that first one is by far the most significant in most courses: most people that survive it are still there for the final exam.

So with the submission date coming up this Friday I’ll be expecting to see a few less faces at the tutorial next time.

One of the big differences between the language courses that I’ve been doing over the last seven years and the psychology course that I’m doing at the moment is that there are a whole lot more people doing it: around six times the number apparently.

That great number of students means that there’s a corresponding increase in the number of tutorials and I find myself with three different tutorial groups to choose from. In practice, what I’d normally do is just go to the group run by my own tutor but that’s at 7pm which is rather late for me so I thought I’d try out one of the Saturday morning groups this week.

Since the Open University is, on the whole, run in a very standardised way I was quite surprised at just how differently the two tutorials were run. Both provided equally useful information but one was operated in a very laid back style whilst the other seemed very much in a typical OU tutorial style. Now the question is: would it be even more useful to go to the third tutorial this Saturday and get a third perspective?

Another consequence of the larger number of students is that there’s a whole lot more information online too. For instance, several people have loaded notes on their own tutorials, one current student is producing a very useful series of notes and there’s even someone who has loaded up the answers that they submitted to their assignments.

Finally, that larger number of students means that there are a selection of privately run revision weekend events run during the year and even a published set of notes on the course itself.

The problem with all that is that there’s so much information available that it would be very easy to get so many different views that you’d not know what direction to set off in when trying to answer a question be it in an assignment or in the exam. So chances are I’ll probably not go to that third tutorial this coming weekend and only the one revision weekend.

One of the high points of the language courses was always the tutorials which were always useful.

It’s quite different with other types of course as I’m now having confirmed by the recent psychology tutorial. For one thing the tutorials are only two hours rather than the four hours of the language classes which obviously means that less work is done during them.

However, whilst the first tutorial of each of the language courses always had a certain amount of “real work” involved during them, the first of both the English and the psychology courses is really just an overview of the course presentation itself and it’s the second tutorial that will be going over the first assignment.

Thus, I’ll not really know what a real psychology tutorial will be like for another three weeks or so.

I’ve been plugging away with the language courses from the OU for, it seems like, forever now so I’m finding it a bit of a jolt to get into the way that their psychology course works.

Since it is psychology the education psychologists have obviously had their hand in with the course design. Thus you get a small guidebook to the course which leads you through the various components that make up the course and is as a side-line also the course workbook.

Whilst I know that the business of having everything in separate books is to draw you into the course as a participant, at the moment it’s a bit of a nuisance having to go from that course guide, to the course text, back to the guide and then off to the methods book before getting to the audiovisual component (which isn’t as well integrated as it was on the languages courses). Personally, I’d prefer one book to carry around but, like I say, it’s designed to get you drawn into the course.

At the moment I’m a little bit ahead of my own schedule (one month ahead of the official one) but I’d say that’s likely to change during the week of the move. I’m also running at around the same speed through the course as I did with the English one last year which, at the moment, means about 10 pages of reading at a stretch before my brain overloads.