Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Whenever the subject of keeping to the official timetable or deviating from it on an Open University course is raised, the argument nearly always gets heated.

Up until a few years ago it wasn’t an issue as the OU sent out the course material no more than a week or two ahead of the course start date. Thus, except for those that planned on packing in a couple of weeks worth of work for a period, by and large everyone was following the official course schedule. Then it all changed. Around four years ago they started sending out the materials when they were ready so I ended up getting the materials for one of my Spanish courses almost three months ahead of time. Sense seemed to prevail after that and they now aim to get the materials out around a month early although generally speaking it seems more like six weeks early.

So now, if you start the course when the material arrives you’ll find yourself running four to six weeks ahead of the official schedule. And that’s where the differences of opinion arise. For example, in the computing course I’m doing at the moment you’re limited to being at most two weeks ahead which is too much for some, not enough for others and just right for nobody apparently if the ongoing debates in various places are anything to go by. To be fair, there’s a particular issue with the TT courses in that the material is drip-fed week by week just two weeks in advance which, for me, is a real pain. For all other courses, pretty much all the course materials turn up around a month before the course begins.

So, should you start early, wait ’til the course officially starts or build up even more of a lead-time on the official timetable? That’s really down to you. For me around a month in advance works well. It’s enough to deal with lifes ups and downs and it’s not too much that you become detached from the tutorials. OU degree programmes run on for so long that you’re bound to hit all kinds of real-life issues that’ll take several weeks out of your own schedule. Those with courses starting in October will have Christmas to contend with, the February starts will have the summer; in both cases you’re going to “lose” at least a couple of weeks. Then there are more major things like holidays, weddings, births and whatnot that can easily take a few more weeks out. On the whole, I’ve found that a four week lead can cope with just about anything but, of course, your life will be different.

On the other hand, running in lock step with the official timetable means that you’re always at the right spot in the course when the tutorials come around, at least if nothing has happened. The problem is that things do happen which is why it’s quite common to have forum messages asking in panic what to do when you’re X weeks behind and those talking of dropping out of the course. Great idea if nothing happens in real-life, not so good if anything does.

Finally, there’s the racing ahead approach. That’s fine if there’s no exam at the end but if there is then you’ll finish the course months early and, more importantly, months before the exam which can make revision more difficult as there’ll be a long gap between the end of your study and the exam itself. Tutorials become pointless as you’ll have finished the corresponding TMA two tutorials ago.

If you’re one of the crazy people doing multiple courses, a bit of lead-time is essential to avoid logjams of assignments; four weeks can handle up to four courses although having done just that in 2010 I wouldn’t recommend it

Dropout rates in the open university are a very tangible thing. You can see that there are fewer people in each tutorial as the year progresses.

Where it’s by far the highest is in the first course of a given subject. That’s not necessarily at level 1 though as some subjects only start at level 2. Thus the drop out rate for something like psychology is quite high at level 2 because there is no psychology course at level 1 (or wasn’t until last year anyway).

The drop out rate from “hard” subjects isn’t necessarily that high. Or, rather, it is but the students drop out of the subject before they get to the point of choosing it thus the people starting “hard” subjects tend to be more committed to them.

I was actually quite lucky during the modern languages sequence of courses as, by chance, the drop out rate in my tutor group was unusually low. In fact it wasn’t completely by chance as what happened was that we formed a study group consisting of almost everyone within the tutor group early on. All but one of those people went on to complete the diploma and several went on to do the modern languages degree. Getting into a study group early on is that important.

However, in courses within my life sciences programme, the drop out has been very, very noticeable. You notice it when half the group isn’t there by the third or fourth month into the course. Even after the first assignment the drop out was quite noticeable and also noticeable was that the tutor seemed to start with the view that many of those at the first tutorial wouldn’t be there at the second one. She was right.

What’s generally worth noting for prospective students is that some courses front load the course texts with difficult material, seemingly in an effort to weed out those students who will drop out as early as possible. Not all do that mind you but if you’re finding the first unit or two of a course very difficult, have a leaf through what’s coming up as often it’s much easier. Being way too stubborn to drop out saw me right through the modern languages degree and frankly that is something that I would never have believe I’d have ten years back.

The TT courses have developed something of a reputation of slipping up with the assessments resulting in numerous questions needing to be “zero-weighted” ie not counting towards the final mark.

It looks like the first CMA of TT281 is continuing in this tradition. In TT280, the preceding course, the marks for the three CMA worked out to have around 80% of students achieving the top grade and 15% getting the next highest grade ie a total of 95% or so getting grades 1 or 2. For the first CMA of TT281 the figures are rather different with only 18% getting that top grade and 61% getting the top two grades and 89% in the top three grades. Overall, it looks like most people have dropped something like 20% to 30% in their marks which is pretty bad.

The reason basically is down to a combination of rather less clear questions and what appears to be quite a high number of iffy “correct” answers. In my own case I count six where the “correct” answer is rather iffy and three where it’s definitely wrong which equates to over 20% of the answers.

Naturally a lot of people are currently fuming about this. The response from the course team is that the explanatory paper will be released sometime next week. Somehow I think that’ll spark even more argument if a whole raft of the questions aren’t zero-rated.

I went for a job interview yesterday which was unusual in that, whilst I felt that I did meet the requirements for the job on the whole, I didn’t fulfil all their essential requirements. So, I shouldn’t have been asked for the interview.

The snag is that, as with many other employers at the moment, these guys basically wrote a wish list rather than a list of requirements that anybody they could expect to recruit would actually possess. Not quite in the same league as one notorious job advert a few years back which had as an essential requirement a minimum of 5 years experience in using a particular version of software that had only been released the year before, but certainly getting there. That wish-list approach is one reason why it’s best to apply for a job that you like the sound of but which you feel you can only do a small fraction of: employers have been known to get a zero response from some job adverts these days as a consequence of that wish-list mentality.

For example, they asked for experience of a product that was written by a company who have since gone bankrupt and which seems to be mainly used in a different continent. I’m guessing that the number of people who could cover that will be quite limited and indeed the acknowledged local expert is returning to Canada later this year.

Other things had an air of inconsistency about them. Things like an essential requirement of experience in a product that is long past its heyday whilst also having a complete knowledge of the latest of technologies.

One question was particularly interesting in that they reckoned that the team would largely be made up of people in their 20s who would be “very sharp and know all the latest software” so how would I deal with that. Actually, chances are that I’d be even more up to date than they are since, as y’all know, I’m in the midst of a university IT course. It’s been a long time since I met anyone who could talk me under the table in terms of computer technology and even then it was a telecoms guy and they don’t count.

Oh well, I guess I better keep at the job applications.

After a bit of a to-do between students and faculty as to why they were forcing us to use CafeScribe (a truly dire piece of software by all accounts), things settled down as we got into the second week of the course (or week 3 according to the students) for the simple reason that everyone seems to have printed the whole book either on paper or to a PDF and thereby abandoned CafeScribe.

It’s an odd kind of course. There’s a bit of programming in it (JavaScript) but that aspect is downplayed a lot as the Web Applications Certificate is at more a management level than a programming one. Thus the first daily (yes, daily) seminar on JavaScript started at a very low level and by the end of the week it was producing a single alert message. That said, I have the feeling that some people have already been put off by the programming aspect.

The daily seminars are a bit much really when added to the rest of the course work. All told there’s the usual course guide which is fine. It mainly points you towards parts of the main course text but also to parts of the JavaScript guide and to a couple of websites too. Add that to the daily seminars and the daily activities and the rather active forums and you’ve a lot of course packed into 10 points.

Coming up quite soon is the first computer marked assignment. I’ve about 1/3rd of that done already and should get the rest completed sometime this week all being well although seeing as I’m a bit behind schedule with the biology assignment perhaps not.