Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

I actually made a small start on this towards the end of July but August just pulls away from me every year so I’m only getting back to it now.

As always the TMAs on this course seem harder than you’d expect for a level 2 course so there’s quite a lot of work to be done between now and Friday. Typically too, the suggested timings for the various parts of this practical are way out: it took ages just to get the coding sheet sorted out yesterday and it’ll probably take getting on for a couple of hours to do the coding of the two videos today.

Having said that, once that phase is done the actual writing of the text doesn’t look like it will take overly long. Of course, I thought that with the last TMA too and sometimes it took a couple of hours just to write a few hundred words on it by the time I’d thought about what to write and looked up all the references. Lots of work for just 72% 🙁

Worryingly the course website for SK277 (my next course) opened up on Friday. That let me do the first part of work on that, namely downloading all the textbooks and whatnot that course teams upload these days. As that course starts in the first week of October and ED209 doesn’t finish ’til October 21st I’m planning on reading over the course text for it starting now thus spreading the October workload over two months.Usually, I’d have started at full speed with it now but I don’t think that’s really a runner with the overlap and I’ll be aiming to build up my preferred one month lead time after the ED209 exam is out of the way.

Anyway, must head off to get going on that coding now…

The more I read about the ELQ debate, the crazier it seems to become.

At the moment, I’m actually exempt from what might be crazy increases in university fees as I live in Northern Ireland which is one of the minor exemptions in the grand scale of things. Sounds great to not apply the charge to the whole of Northern Ireland but seeing as we represent about 1/40th of the UK population it’s not such a big deal as it first sounds. That said, I can’t see that exemption staying forever so I was curious about what other exemptions that I might be able to avail of should the need arise in subsequent years.

First up are foundation degrees however the problem with most (all?) of those is that you need your employer to sponsor you and they’re in a fairly limited range of fields at the moment too. That said, several of the courses in my current plan are within foundation degrees. Why then should someone hit by ELQ have to pay, say, double the cost for doing a course when someone else doing the very same course and with the very same prior qualifications be paying half as much? No reason really apart from the crazy nature of the ELQ funding debate.

Although it seems impossible to get a fully definitive list of the exemptions this does include certain medical subjects, youth studies and social work which creates some loopholes for me. Psychology isn’t exempt from ELQ but the majority of psych courses that I’ll be doing over the next couple of years can be allocated against a Diploma in Health Sciences which is presumably exempt and most of them can go towards a youth worker or social work qualification too. Incidently, note that the SIRV (Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subjects) subjects aren’t exempt from ELQ.

What the regulations don’t appear to even consider is that students don’t always have to be studying towards a specific degree. That’s much more apparent in the case of the Open University but it also applies in many universities. As far as I know one could allocate courses against an exempt qualification (or series of them if necessary) in most universities right up to the penultimate year; in the case of the OU it would be possible to do this right up to the end of the final course. What happens then if someone “changes” their mind at the last minute and picks up the qualification that they really wanted all along? There’s quite a substantial difference in funding (around £4k for non-ELQ, perhaps £16k for ELQ) so I’d have thought that a lot of people would be looking into this possibility.

Overall, it sounds very much like a Gordon Brown “savings” plan ie saves lots of money on paper but in reality it just adds to administration costs and doesn’t save anything at all.

After much debate I have finally gotten around to signing up for the Human Biology course and the related residential.

The Human Biology course is something of a tangent to everything that I’ve done before. That seems likely to make it fall into the category of “challenging” for me (that’s what everyone seems to call the courses with lots of work these days). To make it that little bit less “challenging” I’ve been reading through the first of the course books for it which seems to be around 25% really hard, 25% really easy and the rest fairly doable. That’s probably about typical for a course that’s aimed at a very wide range of people: everything from nurses through to social science people with everything in between.

For me the really hard parts are the medical bits, the doable are broadly organic chemistry and the really easy are the social science sections. Since it’s aimed at a wide spectrum of people there tends to be quite a lot of hand-holding throughout the book which, hopefully, will make it fall into the category of “doable” as assignments and the exam come up.

At the moment I’m not really sure what to make of the associated residential course. There’s a massive textbook that I’ve to buy for it which implies a lot of pre-course reading that I’ll need to get going on over the coming months.

It’s too early to register for the final couple of courses in the upcoming sequence which definitely includes Exploring Psychology and its residential. I’ll be waiting to see how the Human Biology course goes before signing up for Biological Psychology which would overlap it by about five months. Ordinarily, I’d not have worried about that particular overlap but both courses, although only 30 points each, have a reputation of being “challenging” so I’m putting off the signup up decision until the last moment (early December).

In my short term plans for OU courses the next one up is Human Biology which starts at the start of October and which overlaps my Child Development course by about three weeks. To reduce the work overlap what I’ve done is to buy the first book of the biology course and I’ve been working through that over the last month or two.

However, a bunch of the people doing the Child Development course are going straight on to Biological Psychology which starts in February. As it happens my aim in doing the Human Biology course was to simplify the Biological Psychology and they complement each other quite well. Thus, I’m in the process of getting talked into yet another overlap (February to June in this case).

Interestingly, since the bio psych course doesn’t have an exam it means that it may well not overlap with the next psychology course that starts in October as, usually, I end up running quite a bit ahead of the official course timetable so in principle I might be able to complete it some time in September if not before. That in turn should let me slip in the graduation ceremony for my modern languages degree which would have been this September but I couldn’t manage to fit it in.

What’s even more interesting is that doing the bio psych overlap would knock another year off my psych graduation and still be sticking to my 60 points a year maximum for the degree.

Thanks to the “short” list of courses that I ran up last summer whilst thinking about what I do following the modern languages degree, I find that there’s quite a lot of scope for shortening the period to pick up the first two degrees from the overall sequence.

TWO degrees? Yeah, I know, it seems a little crazy to be thinking of doing two degrees at once but when I ran through the list of possibilities I ended up with the bulk of two separate degrees worth of courses having my little stars beside them. Thus over the next 10 years or so I will be working my way through both a psychology and a physics degree along with a few totally unrelated courses that seem close to forming a history degree.

Anyway, because the two degree programmes aren’t actually designed to be taken at once there’s quite a lot of scope for me to play with the scheduling of the various courses. Moving more than five years out is way too complicated as OU courses come and go but looking at the next three or four years there are still oodles of viable sequences that can be created and a surprising amount of time to be saved.

For instance, my original plan was basically to do the first major physics sequence followed by the first major psychology course sequence and finishing up with the archaeology course. That results in a completion date of December 2014. However, it’s actually possible to complete the same sequence of courses in December 2012 by changing the order slightly and removing what would have been quite long gaps between courses at several points.

Sadly, I don’t think it’ll be possible to shave so much time off in later years though there’s at least one spot where a year can be saved several years from now.