Foreign Perspectives

According to the Open University it’s 16 hours a week for a 60 pointer and 8 hours for a 30 points but those hours include not only the actual course work but also things like course administration, looking at forums, etc. which is a LOT more than your typical student would count I’m sure. Not only that, but it doesn’t make any allowance for the level of the course: level 3 courses are definitely harder and more time-consuming than level 1 courses are. Neither does it make any allowance for any previous experience that you may have.

For example, in my own case I found that 30 point level 1 languages courses took about 30 minutes a day, the 60 point level 2 language courses took 45 minutes a day and the 60 point level 3 language courses took about an hour a day. You might note that even an hour a day is less than half the 16 hours that the OU reckon such a course should have taken. However, the level 2 English course which I did next was more like 30 minutes a day ie less than half what even a 30 point course should have taken. In hindsight, that was only to be expected as some of the material in the English course had already been covered in the French & Spanish course I’d done earlier ie prior experience can have a very large impact on the time it takes to do a course. However, even without that prior experience I’ve found that the time I take to do a course is under half of what the OU figure comes out at even for the much harder course I’ve just completed.

The 15 point courses are basically half a 30 point course but run over about 5 months instead of the 9 months of the 30 point courses. Thus they estimate around 6 hours a week for them ie not much less than for a 30 point course which is something to bear in mind if you were doing other courses alongside them: four 15 point courses would be roughly the time equivalent of one 90 point course, not one 60 point course! My guess is that in practice my time to do one of the 15 pointers would be about half their estimate, possibly less in that they’re mainly level 1 courses.

The 10 point ones are quite different from the rest. In most cases you can choose to do them over either two or five months. The two month version is close to a 30 point course in intensity at up to 8 hours a week (on the OU figures) whilst the five month version is like a 15 point course. One thing to watch with these ones is that the range of 10 pointers is truly massive so the time you actually take to complete one could change a lot from one course to the next depending on which you choose.

Residentials are very different from normal courses. Obviously the bulk of work is done during the residential week but you can expect anything from very little to 60 hours pre-course work to do and there’s also a post-course assessment to be done as well (sometimes two). As I’ll only be doing my fourth summer school this July I don’t have a lot of experience to go on for these but I’m told that this years one (SXR270) needs about 10 hours work before the residential week.

Finally, there are a couple of new style courses around at the moment which fall outside the normal per week estimate of the usual courses as described above. Those making up the Certificate in Web Applications (TT280 through to TT382) are all 10 point courses but run over a strict 12 week period which works out at around 20 point workload which equates to about 8 hours a week. If you’re doing World Archaeology (A251) you’ll find that it’s a 30 point course but run over 18 weeks ie around 16 hours a week. As always, these figures are highly dependent on your prior experience so about 30 minutes a week is enough for TT280 for me, a couple of hours for A251.