Foreign Perspectives

One of the great things about the Open University is that you can sign up for pretty much any course that takes your fancy yet that’s also one of the problems with it too from the student point of view.

It’s fine if you know what you want to do. No hassles with having to prove that you meet the entry requirements for a course: just register for the course and you’re accepted. That applies in exactly the same way for honours level courses as it does for those aimed at prospective students who have no prior qualifications at all.

As far as the different levels go, clearly the best plan is to start at the lowest level and work your way up. However, if, like me, you have some prior qualifications then you don’t have to go through the major hassles that can arise when you fancy doing something new but in a similar line to something you’ve done before.

Where you do hit a problem though is when you don’t really have a clear idea of where you’re headed with your qualification. The sheer number of courses can make selecting your next course quite a challenge. Not only that, but you can come seriously unstuck if the series of courses that you think you need isn’t the series that you really need. Apparently one student who’d set their heart on teaching thought that the best plan was to do all the courses listed in the education faculty and only found out some six years down the line that they’d have to start all over again.

For the really undecided there’s even the option of an “open” degree (the equivalent of the general degree of other universities) which can include pretty much any courses that are offered.

One of the biggest problems in getting out of France is the sheer quantity of post and email that continues to generate.

This wasn’t so bad when we were actually working in the hotel as we were online daily and keeping on top of everything that came in but now that we’re away from that we don’t have nearly so much time to devote to that as it seems to need. For instance, in the past week I needed to go through dozens of pieces of post and thousands of emails only to find a mere handful that were relevant and needed action taken on them.

Despite France having quite a strict no-spamming law, the quantity of junk email coming from France far exceeds that from anywhere else in the world and almost all of it seems to contravene the French law. The reason why that should be is quite simple: French ISPs require anonymous logins to their mail servers so anyone can send anything and, of course, they do.

One of the greatest hassles in our lives at the moment is that we’ve to try to sort out some administration with the French tax and social security people whilst we’re in the UK.

You’d think that it would be relatively easy to do as you can obviously use email, faxes, phone calls and even letters but in practice it just isn’t. For one thing, French fax machines seem to work on a different standard as other places as faxes from the UK aren’t accepted by the French fax machines that I’ve tried (even sending from a French fax machine!). Phone calls just don’t seem to get you anywhere and emails rarely receive any response. You might think that leaves letters as a workable approach but even that doesn’t always seem to work. In fact, the French lettre recommandé is the only approach to use but, of course, that’s not available outside France, is it?

Actually, even in France we found that the only really reliable way to do things was to visit the office concerned though flying over all the time is hardly a viable option.

Compared to the Child Development course, the Human Biology one is moving along at what almost seems like a snails pace in comparison which probably is indicative of how over the top the workload was on the Child Development course.

The first tutorial is just coming up now, just over a month into the course or rather a month into the official course timetable as I started over a month before that, albeit with a gap of several weeks for the psychology revision. Somewhat to my surprise, even with that gap, I’m running several weeks ahead of the official schedule at the moment though I’ve not so far completed all the notes.

I’ve made a start on the assignment already or at least on the easy parts of it. It’s a three part assignment with two short answer questions and a short-ish essay. The short answer questions seem relatively easy and I’d have completed them already except that I’ve to draw a couple of graphs for them and I’ve not had a chance to do that yet. The essay is basically on the workings of the digestive tract and is what prompted me to get going on writing up the notes as there’s a serious amount of detail in that chapter (and the nutrition one before it).

Funnily enough, although I initially figured that the digestive tract chapter was seriously complicated now that I’ve written up the notes it seems to have largely fallen into place in my mind. The various sphincters make sense as separators between the various sections of the gut and I could even make a passable explation of what the pancreas gets up to. All being well the other parts of this course will similarly fall into place in my mind as it goes on.

Whilst I’m getting into the swing of the human biology course, the cardiovascular diseases one is something else together.

In principle, the human biology course as a level 2, 30 point course should clearly be harder than the cardiovascular diseases courses which weighs in at level 1 and only 15 points. However, at the moment the reverse is very much the case although it’s early days for both courses.

With the human biology course, we’ve moved through a very easy going introductory chapter, onto a much more serious one on the structure of cells, through a long list of aspects of nutrition to finish with a very thorough going through (literally!) of the digestive system. I can’t say that I remember all of that as yet though all being well, after I’ve ran up my notes for it things will be somewhat clearer.

The cardiovascular course kicked off with quite a terminology loaded introductory chapter before going straight into the detail of how the cardiovascular system works. If nothing else, when I come across the same topic in the third book of the human biology course, it’ll seem really simple in comparison! Still, at least the next couple of chapters look like a much easier ride and the assignment questions look reasonably doable (there’s no exam for this).

The reason for the apparent discrepancy in the actual and apparent level of these courses is largely down to how the OU assign levels to courses. In practice, it’s the assignments and exam (if any) that are taken to establish the level of the course rather than the course content. Thus, the assignments in the cardiology course are easier than those in the human biology course. On the other hand, the apparent level of each course from the students point of view is very different: if it were me, I’d have put the cardiology course at level three and if the assignments matched the complexity of the first couple of chapters that’s where it would be.

Personally, I’d have preferred it to have been set at level three although that would have meant I’d not have done the course for a few years. As it is, I suspect that the dropout rate will be very high for the cardiology. As per usual, I’ll be too stubborn to drop out but will be mainly looking on it as pre-revision for the cardiology section of the human biology course.