Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Open education is becoming an increasingly popular thing for various universities around the world to produce these days.

The quality of what’s on offer varies enormously of course. Normal redbrick universities will put on anything from small samplers through to pretty much entire courses in the case of Yale. Ironically, the sample from the more open universities is at the other end of the scale with, for example, the Open University offering very small segments of a wide range of courses in contrast to Yales complete versions of a small number of courses.

Why the difference?

For Yale, the course samples on offer are something of an advertisement for the university and creates quite a bit of good PR too as segments of some of the courses currently on offer have been used by a range of educational establishments to liven up their own course presentations. The situation with the Open University is quite different. They’re not so much advertising the university as the courses themselves thus whilst in the Yale selection you’ll find the complete introductory pschology course (which is absolutely fascinating), from the Open University you’ll find just four units from their equivalent course.

The “problem” with all of these offerings is that they’re quite addictive and it’s tempting to seriously consider signing up for the full thing. Now, that “full thing” is $35,000 a year in Yale (that’s for 8 to 10 courses similar to those that you’ll see online ie around $4,000 a course) or around $4.500 for the full credit course in the Open University (assuming that you’re paying the full price, $2,000 if you live in the UK and get the subsidity). Interestingly, it’s actually cheaper to do the course in America which is contrary to what most people would expect.

From my little shortlist of courses of a week or so back I ordered one each of the recommended text, most of which arrived this morning.

That’s already dropped off one of the potential courses, Art and its histories, and indeed courses in that particular line as I just don’t see me being able to stick at them long enough to finish a course in that area. The philosophy book looks quite interesting though it’s rather too information rich and will take a while to work through.

Which leaves the history book. That one looks surprisingly readable and I’ll be working my way through it over the coming weeks.

All being well, by Christmas I’ll have BA Hons Modern Languages after my name.

I’m hoping to do some more courses after that but will be taking it relatively easy in the coming year. For one thing, I want to leave a gap for my hoped for graduation in Versailles next September.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll be doing nothing in the way of courses in the coming year. Skimming through potential courses that I might consider are Exploring Science, Art and its Histories, Astronomy and its companion Planetary Sciences, Exploring history from medieval to modern, Philosophy and the human situation and, finally, Child Development. Something of a mixed bag but all interesting courses.

The Child Development course is on my to-do list but seems relatively hard going so that knocks it out for the coming year. The Astronomy course has a residential falling in September so that’s also out for now. To see what I might be letting myself in for I’ve ordered the recommended texts for the art, history and philosophy courses before making a decision about them but at the moment the front runners seem to be Exploring Science and Planetary Sciences with the latter being the most likely option I suspect.

“Discuss” is probably one of the worst words that can be used in an exam or assignment question.

Why? Well, because, on the whole, you’ve no idea whether or not your answer is anywhere near complete no matter how much you work on it. A seemingly excellently written answer can end up in fairly low marks whilst at the same time an answer that you might feel is very poor comes back with really high marks.

The problem is, of course, that unless you are very good at the subject you won’t really know for sure if you have included all relevant aspects in the discussion for a start. It is possible to get really high marks on a “discuss” question but, by and large, I think that for a whole lot of people the mark coming back seems almost random. For example, if there are five points on the marking sheet then miss just one and there’s potentially 20% out the window even if you address the other four points perfectly.

And, yes, this post has been prompted by a “discuss” question that I’ve just submitted. I’ve loads of references in it so, in principle, the mark should be reasonable but, really, I’ve no idea whether it’ll be 50% or 80%. Still, one big plus point is that it doesn’t actually matter as I’ve already passed the assignment section of the course.

For a variety of reasons I ended up learning Spanish rather than German years ago with the effect that it’s only now that I’m getting around to starting on the German.

As expected, it’s easier to pick up than either French or Spanish were in that since English is also a Germanic language then various aspects of it are a good deal similar to English than the corresponding constructs in French and Spanish. The overall effect of that plus me already having two foreign languages behind me is that I’m progressing through the course at quite a pace and can even say some relatively sensible things in German whereas it was quite a while before I got to the same point in the other languages.

One “problem” that I’m having is that the Rosetta Stone course that I’m following seems “too easy” in that you pick up the language without really trying that hard. Whether that’ll remain the case as I get further into it remains to be seen though!