Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Frankly I figured that the relabelling of “unemployment offices” in the UK some years ago as “job centres” as just a PR gimmic by the government but it would appear that there’s a little more behind it than I’d thought.

As y’all know I’m technically between jobs at the moment. However, I hadn’t really thought about myself as being unemployed until Wendy pointed out that I should probably be off claiming some sort of unemployment benefit. These days, of course, it’s called jobseekers allowance to distance it both from unemployment and benefits but ’tis still the old unemployment benefit office that you go to if you want to claim it, so off we went last week.

That relabelling brought with it a lot of other changes. For instance, in the “unemployment office” you now find two separate groups of people that deal with you. First, there’s the people who handle the benefit payments who are basically the same group as have always been there and who are interested in seeing that you’ve made the appropriate social security payments to entitle you to the benefit. Separately from them are the employment people who are there to do what they can to help you back into work and who will prod you into getting up and looking for work if needbe. Formerlly the two were quite separate and in buildings separated by several miles so there wasn’t the sense that there is now of the payment being there just to help you along whilst you’re off looking for work.

One side-effect for me is that there’s what’s almost a trick question on the form: are you currently studying? I am in that I’m doing a child development course but seeing as it’s not a full-time one that means that I’m actually available for work which is what the question is really asking.

Full marks though for that relabelling and the reorganisation that happened almost behind the scenes. Although, in theory, I have a job waiting (sort-of), it has prompted me to have a look around anyway.

Clearly there are topics that are largely of interest to males and those that are largely of interest to females but which is which isn’t always as clear ahead of signing up for a course as you might expect.

For instance, languages are usually very much seen as a female thing. However, the mix of the sexes on my courses was generally around 75/25 in favour of males. Even on the English language course that I did last year (generally taken as part of an English Language & Literature degree) there were quite a number of us guys on it.

Although the current Child Development course is basically filling in a slot of a psychology degree, considering children is generally seen as womens’ work (yeah, I know, a stereotypical sexist generalisation but still largely true these days), what really struck me was that it looks like it’s something like 90/10 in favour of females. To be fair a lot of them are coming to the course from the perspective of being teachers or otherwise looking after kids professionally but if anything it’s a course that the guys could do with going on.

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.

After much debate last year I finally signed up for the psychology course which I’ve just started looking at.

So far, the biggest difference is in the organisation of the materials. Whereas the language courses were essentially organised around a fairly large workbook with, for the English, an accompanying textbook, the Child Development course comes with a fairly small course guide (essentially the workbook equivalent) for each of the textbooks. There’s the usual DVDs of course though slightly more up to date in operation which is a nuisance as they automatically select the DVD drive and it doesn’t seem possible to just run them from the hard disc.

Overall, it seems a much more professionally produced education package. Of course, you would expect that in many ways as clearly some of the psychologists involved are in the education area thus you get all the appropriate comments through the course as to how to study it. The downside of that is that it’s a course that seems to take itself very seriously.

It’s supposed to take something like 12 hours a week to do but with just starting it this morning I’m getting on for half way through the first weeks worth of work which implies that it could work out similar to the English course I was doing last year although ’tis early days yet.