Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ 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.

For various reasons the majority of online booking systems in Europe are run by UK based companies which means that we regularly get phone calls from them during the peak holiday season.

Almost without fail, they start off in French which is fair enough as they’re phoning a French hotel. However, we know they’re from the UK since we see the phone number before we answer the phone so we always start off in English.

What’s really surprising is how long the brits keep going in, usually, bad French before it dawns on them that we’ve been talking English to them from the start. Even when the penny does drop, their first question afterwards is “do you speak English”!

Isn’t it peculiar how our brains work like that?

Isn’t it strange the way that when someone you’ve not seen in several years appears on the scene, it’s as though the years between didn’t exist?

I’ve just had quite an enjoyable night chatting with an old work colleage (DG) who’s staying with us this evening. What’s perhaps even stranger is that some of the old fixtures in the workplace are still very much fixtures although sometimes it seems like if I went back there I’d be the only one left of the “old guard”!

One thing that constantly confuses is that whenever we have a trip to Spain the diesel that we’ve bought there seems to last considerably longer than when the diesel that we ordinarily buy in France.

A LOT longer too. For example, we filled the car up Friday a week ago in Spain, have been running around quite a bit during the week and only needed to get some more last Friday. Ordinarily we’d have been expecting to top up at least once during the week.

Weird, huh?

It’s been ages since I looked at the detailed stats for this blog so it was something of a surprise that one place reckoned that 75% of the readership is in America.

I say one place because one place reckoned that as low as 25% were from there and that 16% were from India.

Of course, that’s the problem with web site statistics: none of them are really accurate. Bear in mind too that all of those that I looked at have a little stats marker on the site so they should all be in agreement!

To be fair, they’re not all measuring over exactly the same timescale but a few days out isn’t going to make a difference from 75% American readership to 25%. Some statistical errors are evident though so for example the American readership that Alexa guesses at 25% is higher than the British readership that they guess at 20% simply because their toolbar is more popular in the US (all the sensible stats places reckon that both countries are about equal).

However, it does seem clear that we’re getting more American readers than we used to and therefore I’m thinking that it’s time that Foreign Perspectives emmigrated to America itself so over the next week or two I’ll be moving the hosting for it.