Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

I left this course to the one side for a couple of weeks whilst revising for the astronomy exam so it was Saturday before I found that I’d my expected two weeks worth of work to be done (which took a couple of hours) and that the ECA had arrived the day before.

In terms of marking it’s 60% for the two reports (1000 words for the client, 2000 words for the design team), 30% for the four web pages and 10% for the overall structure and presentation. Sounds like quite a lot of writing at this point although a quick glance at the ECA shows that there are quite a lot of sections to both reports which always makes for easier writing. To a large degree those sections are even stated in the ECA. With six sections listed for the client report, 1000 words doesn’t sound much, the five sections for the colleagues report doesn’t sound like enough for 2000 words.

Arriving at some stage today is the second CMA for the course which I hope to complete sometime this week along with the SK185 ECA. The last one took under an hour so hopefully this one won’t be a major undertaking either.

I’m at week 6 of the course material (a couple of weeks ahead of the official schedule) which means CSS. That chapter of the book is heavier going not because it’s difficult but rather because it’s going through every keyword of CSS which makes for quite a boring read. Still, only 10 pages to go and that’ll be completed. I’ve picked up a couple of things from it which would have been handy to know a few years back when I was writing the Inns sites though mostly it’s been revision for me, hence rapid pace through the reading (boy was the tables chapter tedious!). There’s a longer than usual course guide for this week which I’ll be reading during the week (thus far they’ve basically said “read chapter X of the course text and do these hands-on assignments”).

As far as the hands-on assignments go, thus far I’ve been able to skim through them fairly quickly but if you were using this as a course to learn HTML and CSS you’d be looking at a fairly serious time commitment which is something that I must bear in mind for later courses in the certificate as I’ll be running some of those alongside a logjam of other courses now and again.

On other fronts, reading on A251 is progressing quite quickly now as it’s on to concrete developments in the agriculture of south-west asia (where it was invented) so it looks like the 30 or so pages a week of reading won’t be the chore that it looked initially. The course doesn’t officially start ’til November 6th by which time it looks like I’ll be three weeks ahead and so be starting into the first TMA. I’ve had confirmation that the course text is available as PDF from the end of this week but it looks like it might be an image scan rather than a proper resizeable PDF so I’m not sure how that’ll work on the reader.

Probably the biggest plus point of the Kumon is that you need to sit down five nights a week with the kids to get the homework done. It was, of course, the biggest minus point too as it’s a 365 day a year deal which meant that, in practice, one or other of the little guys threw up the head now and again and so did we. However, homework is important as it shows you how the kids are doing much more directly than any report from the teacher will do. Missing the twice weekly classes wasn’t a problem really as the teacher could hand out sheets to cover any absences on our part or indeed for her own holidays.

It’s quite different at Kip McGrath. For one thing the teacher is a teacher with quite a lot of years of experience. Thus she’s not tied to the Kip McGrath system quite so rigidly as is the case with Kumon. So, in our case, she’s doing a combination of the maths and English programmes each week and we didn’t have to choose between them as we thought at first we would have to do. It’s a 52 week per year system rather than a 365 day per year one so there’s one 80 minute class per week rather than the two 40 minute ones (20 mins per subject) for Kumon. We’ve not hit a holiday period so I don’t know how that works out but John missed a class two weeks ago and so had a “make-up” class last week. Homework isn’t nearly so structured although in practice it’s working out at around five nights a week split between some maths and some English for James.

Which one is better though? In terms of cash, Kumon is £50 a month per subject, Kip McGrath is around £100 so it’s more expensive if you’re only doing one subject. However, we were finding that for John his maths was getting so far ahead of his reading that he was getting to the point that he couldn’t do the maths because he couldn’t read the questions which basically forced us to do two subjects.

In terms of quality of education, Kip McGrath seems streets ahead. The highly repetitive nature of Kumon suits early maths really well though didn’t seem so good on the English. That repetitive nature was leading to a certain amount of boredom for the kids so we’d have been moving on in a year or two. It’s noticeable that very, very few Kumon kids were coming in with year 3 or 4 boxes so it would appear that 2 to 3 years is about the most that the majority of people stay with them. Having said that, Kip McGrath feels more like a 2 or 3 year max programme too in that most of the promo material seems to be aimed at getting kids to where they should be in the class. Now in our case, James needs that help at the moment but John is already where he should be so the Kip classes should be moving him ahead so we’ll be able to compare over the next year.

Will there be a problem with the school if you move the kids too far ahead? That’s something that was mentioned by the Kumon teacher when we enrolled. Some schools do have issues with kids who are well ahead of the rest of the class. The school they’re in at the moment were quite keen that we were helping both the little guys along and seem to have the same basic view as me ie that it’s much better to err on the side of being too far ahead. Having said that, I imagine that if at some point we find ourselves with the guys several years ahead of their class in maths or English that it could create some problems. However, I’m sure that it’s better to have problems like that than to have them well behind their class.

Although we’re constantly reminded that the Open University has all kinds of checks in place to detect plagiarism, there’s a constant stream of hits on this site around TMA/ECA submission time looking for “SK185 answers”, “molecules medicines and drugs answers” and all kinds of variations on those. Since SK185 is a short course there’s getting on for a thousand students studying it at any one time (double the number for one of the main science courses) and this makes for a whole lot of people searching for inspiration given that the ECA submission date is October 28th.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I’ve not reached the end of chapter 6 so I can do another one of the ECA questions which I may run up this evening as it seems fairly short. The final question is on chapter 8 which I should be able to get through by next week and then there’s just the final couple of chapters of the book to read with no overhanging ECA questions from them.

That would leave me able to submit the ECA by the first closing date but since the 28th seemed way too close to the date of the astronomy exam, I decided a couple of months ago to do the second ECA which means that a) I can’t submit it ’til December and b) all those searching for the answers for the October 28th ECA are wasting their time here as I’ve not even glanced at it.

Overall, I’m quite impressed by this course. It offers a very good re-introduction to chemistry for me and insights to the processes involved in the development of medicines that I suspect I’ll not see again ’til I get around to doing Drug design and synthesis (S346).

I’m nearly through the first week of the course now which hasn’t taken quite so long as the 16 hours it suggests. It looks like about two to three hours will be enough to complete although the course hasn’t really quite started in the first unit of the course so that could change.

The first week is basically introducing the course although it doesn’t go overboard as there aren’t massive numbers of different booklets as some courses have these days. Some hand-holding is there too as this is billed as a potential first OU course but it’s not too onerous eg it tells you to read the book organisation section in the course book.

The first bits that you do are mainly introducing archaeology as a subject so there’s a few exercises on that interspersed with readings from the course text (hereinafter known as the doorstop) and listening to the first track from the CD. So it moves on from the “digging things up” aspect to introduce a few terms covering things like experimental archaeology and distinguishing it from history (anything relying on written records). It gives the impression that there’s a bit of fighting going on between the archaeologists and the historians over ownership of some parts of the past. Actual archaeology doesn’t start ’til the last reading of the week where it begins to introduce the development of agriculture or at least it seems to as I’ve not read that bit yet.

Going by the course guide, the course motors on at a fair rate. Work on the first TMA begins after three weeks of reading so I don’t think much is expected from the first one as there will only be about 2 1/2 weeks of reading for it. Thus far the reading is quite heavy going at the moment as it’s a totally new subject for me so there’s lots of new terminology.

I see from the website that I’ve just acquired a tutor. Rumour has it that the tutors are supposed to call in the week before the course officially starts although I don’t think there are any in-person tutorials with this course.

The package for this arrived the same day as the astronomy exam which gave me a chance to have a first look in that brain dead period following exams.

I wasn’t planning on having a look at it quite so soon but a look at the calendar changed that plan pretty sharpish. The first assignment is due in the first week of December, only four weeks after the course starts with the next ones due at the start of January and February with the ECA due on March 18th. The March 18th date suits me in some ways as it means this course will be finished before S204 gets fully under way and may get it completed earlier. Downside of that is that it’s a fairly hectic schedule for the archaeology course.

Anyway, what I’m going to try and do is to make a proper start on A251 this week and, perhaps, build on that two week lead time if I can. Slightly messing that up is that I also want to get the medicine course completed over the next couple of weeks too although I should be able to do that in my new “Kip McGrath” slot.

So what’s in the box? There’s the absolutely massive (784 pages) and heavy The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, the course guide, letter from the course team and the assignment booklet (unusual in these “everything online” days) plus a CD. Going by the course guide, the book is available in PDF on the website but that doesn’t open ’til the 28th so I’ll have to lug the doorstop round ’til then. Going by my brief flick through the early parts of the course guide, it requires access to online reference texts quite a lot.

The course guide seems to weave in the content of the course text in almost as though it were an OU written text which is good in the sense that it comes across almost as though a real-life tutor were sitting with you but not so good in that you need to cart both books around all the time (roll on the arrival of the PDF!). Actually, for a change they seem to have gone out of their way to write it as though you had the tutor beside you rather than the more formal OU style.