Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

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.