Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

With the science courses that I’ve been doing over the last few years, the books generally turn up about a month before the course officially starts and the associated website opens a few days before the course opens. Psychology is clearly a little different and the books have arrived nearly two months before the course starts with the website opening a month before the start.

In the box are:

• Exploring Psychological Research Methods, the 400 page book that I think you dip into throughout the course;
• Mapping Psychology, two volumes totalling 600 pages; and
• Challenging Psychological Issues at 200 pages which finishes off the course;
• a DVD video which has a number of relatively short programmes on it divided into five sections (these will play in a normal DVD player);
• a DVDROM which has a couple of animated sequences (although it’s easier in Windows, you can watch the videos by browsing to the folder on Linux and Mac or, of course, via VirtualBox); and
• SPSS (this is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows and you can use the OU license key for any of them).

Total page count at around 1200 pages is way below that of the equivalent science courses which generally weigh in with around 2000 pages plus associated DVDs (the extreme case being S205 with its seven DVDs). So, in principle, less work to do though I imagine that it won’t work out like that.

On the website will be the assessments, SPSS guide, audio clips and “much more”. Quite why they couldn’t have popped the guide and audio onto the DVD I don’t know as there seems to be the space for it.

One thing that I have noticed already is that I have already covered some of the ground in other courses. Thus one of the DVDROM animations is on perception which I did in some detail in SD329 a couple of years back and some of the topics touched on in the book were covered by the social psychology course that I did with coursera last year. That pre-knowledge should make some sections easier to work through.

With the SK320 exam looming in October, I’m planning on making a start on DSE212 now so that I can take a break from it when the revision work steps up.

Not so long ago, you used to be just click on the “register now” button to sign up for any course with the Open University.

That led to some people doing crazy things like registering for level 3 courses when they’d no background in the subject and where the courses in question explicitly stated that you needed to have quite a lot of background. You might think that all such people would fail but they didn’t as a number of them had acquired the relevant background in an unofficial way.

However, now the pre-requisites are being enforced in a growing range of subjects. First to complain were the mathematicians who found that they were required to have specific modules as a pre-requisite to do later ones. Quite a number of those actually did have the knowledge required but they’d acquired it outside the OU and sometimes in a way that wasn’t documented. No complaints, yet, from the languages people where you definitely need to have a level 1 level of knowledge before doing level 2 but perhaps they’re not enforcing the pre-requisites there yet as it’s quite common in languages to acquire fluency in an undocumented way.

It’s coming up in the last of the residentials too. In the case of psychology, the original timetable of DSE212 of February to October meant that DXR222, the associated residential, fell in the middle of that. Now though that you can complete DSE212 in the October to June slot it’s possible to do that before doing DXR222 yet they enforce a registeration of DSE212 first, even though you could drop out of it after registration. Net effect for me was a worrying couple of days waiting whilst they processed the DSE212 registration before I could register for the residential when in the past I could have registered for both at the same time.

Oh well. At least my remaining modules don’t seem to have officially listed pre-requisites. Or, perhaps, I should say “not yet”.

There’s only a couple of weeks to go before James starts in his new school so we’re running around getting the last few things gathered together.

As he’s left the primary school behind, it means a whole new set of things for the uniform for a start. We bought most of that back in June but thought that it would be prudent to leave things like the trousers and shoes until closer to the start of the new school year. We met one of the parents last week who’d not done that and who is now running around exchanging everything for larger sizes.

Whilst we’ve the uniform pretty much sorted out now, there are some awkward things still to get. He’s very skinny so it’s quite difficult to get trousers that are long enough (he’s quite tall) but narrow enough at the waist at the same time. For the first time, he’ll be wearing a shirt and tie so we need to find out his neck size and also to teach him how to tie the tie.

In terms of stationery, it seems that we don’t need to get anything at this point as they’re provided with a stationery pack on the first day that provides everything that they need.

Also to be read over are the booklets that the school provided on the welcome night back in June. Well, we’ve read them, but that was a couple of months ago so I think it’s best that we read over them again in case we’ve missed anything vital.

What we’ve not worked out yet is how we’ll get the two little guys to their schools once the both of them start. It should be fine for the first week, but we’ve not sorted out a long term means of getting them in two different directions at much the same time.

One of the things that’s quite handy about the Open University is the library.

Since the OU is a distance learning university, the library, for most people, is fully online. It’s got subscriptions to hundreds of journals, mainly aimed at the various courses that they run and, usually, they’re downloadable as PDFs. What you can’t, usually, do is to download a complete issue of one of the journals unless you do it article by article but then, most of the time, you wouldn’t want to do that.

However, it also has a whole lot of books and many of these are available as PDF downloads. Although the OU online library doesn’t generally stock the OU course books it does hold those that are co-published. So, for example, you can download all the course books for the main chemistry course, S205, and for the oceanography course, S330, because those were co-published with the Royal Society of Chemistry and the equivalent earth sciences society.

In addition to those there are heaps of books that are referred to in various courses. Of those, for me, the interesting ones are those referred to by the Metals and Life (S347) course as several of them are quite closely related to the medicinal chemistry masters that I’m thinking of doing.

What’s key is, of course, to do the downloading whilst still a student. One former student is now realising that looking a bit further ahead would have saved a small fortune in books.

The Up series has moved on to look at the 56 year old participants and what’s most interesting is, as always, the enduring influence that the various parents have had on their offspring.

What’s less obvious is how significant that parental support early on had. It was fairly obvious that the upper class kids would end up doing quite well but that’s not necessarily a function of them being upper class but rather that their parents were able to provide a level of support that was more difficult to provide for the less well off parents. Moreover, in the social circles in which they moved, there was the expectation that one would work hard at school, in university and in one’s life thereafter.

The effect of parental support is much more clearly seen in the different lives of Tony and Nick. Although they both started off in very much working class homes (Tony in London, Nick in the country), their lives have turned out quite differently. Where they are now and how they got there seems to reflect the different type of ambitions that their parents supported so many years ago. Nick basically started with what might be termed working-class ambitions (ie he concentrated on getting a particular job) whereas Nick looked beyond that and is now a professor in an American university (ie he concentrated on what might be possible if he worked hard).

The parents aren’t involved in the series but it seems likely that the parents of both Tony and Nick had pressure from friends and family to have their respective children stick to working-class ambitions. Nick’s parents rose above that and so did their son.