Foreign Perspectives

Aside from the very first French course that I did with them, I have always went down to the Open University before signing up for a new course and had a look through some of the course books.

I’m sure that lots of people have probably done that at one time or another and there are all kinds of approaches that you can take to looking at the books for a possible course. What I did was to have a look at a book about half-way into the course and see if I could understand the words. You might think that this approach would only apply to language courses but in fact it’s equally applicable to all subjects. Certainly I was happy enough that I could understand the words and concepts at about the half-way mark in my current course.

Why half-way though? Well, the OU books seems to be written in a slightly odd way sometimes either by accident or design. Often I’ve found that the first chapter of a book is particularly difficult to follow and one suspects that’s because they want to knock people out of the course early on or rather they want to knock out people who would probably not be up to doing that particular course. Thus the first chapter or two of a book aren’t worth looking at. By the end of the course presumably you’ll have learned quite a lot so you might not initially understand the concepts being spoken about at that point. Therefore, to my mind, the middle is the best spot to aim for.

Why didn’t I just do the “is this course for me” self-assessment test instead? Well, in the case of the languages I didn’t go on the results on said tests for the simple reason that they don’t work too well for me. I don’t do cross-words in English and wouldn’t expect to be able to do them in French yet the tests had things quite similar to cross-words in them (which I couldn’t do). Therefore, glancing at the course books before the course worked better for me than the tests that are available.

However, aside from the books, you can find an increasing number of blogs being written about various courses by students and tutors. These are extremely variable in quality of course as are blogs everywhere. However, you can find truly excellent ones such as Anne’s on various themes from the A207 history course and you can find tutorial notes, revision notes, even complete assignment answers on various courses if you care to look.

But should you look very hard online? For instance, whilst Anne’s site has a fantastic amount of information it’s so much that it has me thinking that perhaps A207 isn’t the course for me (it’s on my rather long short-list). Similarly, I’ve said that the workload on ED209 is pretty substantial on this blog, so would that put someone off doing it? Is too much information about a course beyond the course materials themselves a good thing when you’re choosing a course to do?

The problem is that there’s no easy answer to that. For instance, if I want to do the psychology degree then I have to do a course on biological psychology which has the reputation of being pretty much impossible to do. Should I go on that reputation and therefore not bother with that course? Probably yes, but then I’m just too stubborn to do that so instead I’m looking into doing a course on the biology side first which apparently makes the other course a lot more doable.

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