Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Sniffling, coughing and sneezing have been working their way through all of us over the past week or so thanks to to James & John bringing these home from school.

Yesterday it was James’ turn to feel a bit off but now that he’s back to school ’tis the turn of John and me to feel dreadful.

Oh well, I guess another week or two and they’ll have worked their way through the range of minor colds and whatnot that their friends have…

I’ve just been to the final tutorial for the course so there aren’t any more excuses for putting off the work for the seen question for the course.

First off, was to choose the topic from amongst the five on offer. For me the choice was relatively simple. The legal one starts by saying that it’s a bit gruesome in parts which put me off that right away. The education one seems almost exclusively for teachers so that’s out. Health psychology just doesn’t appeal. The autism one seems to require that you’ve some experience of it outside the course. Which leaves the one on specific learning difficulties which I’d have chosen anyway as it seems interesting.

That done, I’ve read the chapter on it in the course book and gone through the study guide. Which means that it’s time for the real work…

What I’ll be doing tomorrow is reading over the three journal articles that are referred to on the course website (it’s in course resources, part 4). All being well, that’ll give me an idea of what approach to take when I’m starting on the literature search which I’ll be starting later in the week.

The aim for all of this work is to produce what’s essentially a TMA of around 1000 words. I say around 1000 words but I suspect that it’ll be somewhat shorter than that as I’ll need to write it out in a little under an hour. It’s very important to keep that time limit in mind as it would be all to easy to write far more in advance than could realistically be reproduced inside that one hour time limit. Going by my tutor, the majority of resits that he has are there because they didn’t allocate their time properly so don’t under-estimate the importance of this aspect!

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.

Now that I’m starting to look at the course forum for SK277 it turns out that there are yet more problems in attempting to cross the ELQ minefield.

The problem is that, thanks to ELQ, several of the courses that make up the Diploma in Health Sciences may simply stop at their final presentations in 2011 and 2012 rather than being replaced by further courses. That will be a truly sad endictment on ELQ if that happens because some of those courses have been attracting comments such as “I just loved this module” (Human Biology), “one of the best OU courses I’ve taken” (Infectious Disease) and “an outstanding course!” (Signals and Perception).

At the moment, it appears to be just about possible for me to complete the entire sequence of courses before they reach their respective end dates. It does twist around my original plan somewhat but it would be a shame to miss out on courses with feedback like that. One problem for me is that it means that I have to do Biological Psychology next February and I’d not really decided about doing that then as it means I’ve to overlap that course with Human Biology which starts in October.

At one time the only real choice for part-time students was their local university purely on the grounds of practical travel-time but these days lots of universities are offering courses via distance learning (usually via the Internet these days) and, in some senses, the worlds your oyster.

Well, almost. The problem is that in some cases there remain significant cost advantages to doing your course at an institution within your own country, not all universities offer fully distance learning degrees and there are administration issues in doing a degree from an overseas university.

For example, say you want to do a degree in America yet all your qualifications are non-American. What that entails is going through a course by course validation which in effect translates your existing qualifications into the equivalent in the American education model. There’s generally a cost in doing that. Naturally, if you want to use the resulting qualification outside America there can also be a translation process involved too.

The 100% distance learning knocks out a surprising number of potential choices. Thus, whilst Harvard offers a considerable number of courses online these days via their extension school (which is MUCH cheaper than you’d expect), it has a residency requirement of, usually, around six months (you can do it in two summer terms in most cases). At the other end of the scale is something like the British Open University which offers 100% distance learning.

In terms of own-country cost advantage, you can find that in Europe universities give preferential charges to those living in their own country. For example, typically the Open University will charge around double the normal fee if you don’t live in the UK. That seems to be the extreme case but you can expect to pay additional charges in some form if you live outside the country in which the university is based. For example, buying the recommended texts via Harvards bookshop is more expensive if you live outside America.

Aside from those complications though you should be able to choose pretty much any university assuming that you can understand the language they use for teaching. What you should do is draw up a short list and then look into the courses that you would hope to do in more detail. Some courses work much better in an online format than others. For example, although the Open College of the Arts notionally offers distance learning courses, for some of their courses a number of the tutorials have to be face to face in areas like sculpture.