Foreign Perspectives

Thanks to the Child Development exam last week and the revision for it over the previous month, I only got around to signing up for Understanding cardiovascular diseases (SK121) a matter of days ago but this morning the website was already up for me.

That meant that I could download loads of course related stuff and in particular the full text of the course book which in turn meant that I could formally start the course this morning. So far, it’s not too bad though there’s a serious amount of medical terminology in the first chapter. I’m going to ignore most of that for the moment on the basis that they’re bound to come back to it in more detail later on in the course.

It’s the first full online course that I’ve done so no live tutorials but instead there’s an online forum where “tutorials” will be held, starting the week after next. Not sure how that’ll go though if the first one is anything to go by they’ll take me a lot less time than the suggested time listed in the course guide. I’m expecting that’ll be the case for many aspects of the course since it’s a level 1 course which means there’s lots of “this is how a course works” material. All being well, that’ll let me get considerably ahead of the course schedule as I’d like to have the final assignment completed before my February course starts which means I need to finish almost two months ahead of the formal timetable.

The nature of the course means that it’s attracted a massive number of health professionals on it. Presumably they’ll know a whole bunch of the terminology which is pretty much totally new to me; were the tutorials in person ones I’d have been left in the dust I expect!

If nothing else, this course should give me some practice at doing two courses simultaneously which will be handy to get me through 2010 which looks like being a year of overlapping courses. Having said that, SK121 is covering ground that I’ll also be doing in the Human Biology course albeit with a lot more detail in SK121 presumably. The other overlapping courses seem likely to be quite different thus less scope for semi-revision with them.

Throughout the course everyone seemed to be saying that there was “an awful lot of course” in ED209 but I found that I really didn’t notice that so much until the time came for revision.

Since it’s a research led course you need to try and memorise an enormous number of names of researchers so that you can quote them in the exam. If you were trying to revise the entire course that would equate to several dozen names at least but by that point very few people seemed to even attempt to revise the entire course as it seemed to be an impossible task.

Thus, people selected what they had to revise. In principle that was a fairly easy thing to do in that a guiding principle is that you’re only examined on a topic once. So you could eliminate almost a dozen chapters throughout the three books. However, even that turned out to be problematical as one of the assignment topics turned up on the exam paper thus removing a choice for a lot of people. In fact, this seems to have resulted in almost everyone ignoring the “disturbing behaviour” question and going with the “gender development” one if they were revising book 2.

The structure of the exam paper introduces further complications. There’s one “seen question” that you need to research before the exam and write out during it which is much more difficult than it first appears. The research isn’t so bad but few people these days know how much they could write in an hour and even fewer know how much they could write in an hour under exam conditions. Besides, you basically need to memorise that essay which isn’t that easy either.

Next you need to choose two questions. The questions on offer are a selection of two from each book of the course and you need to answer one question from each book. Thus a lot of people only revised two books and limited themselves somewhat during the exam. Since the third book was the largest and most complex, many people chose from the first two books. This would have been fine but since people were generally limiting the chapters within each book to study and eliminating those chapters already covered by an assignment they had the complication that one of the assignment topics was on the exam paper thus an awful lot of people answered the “gender development” question.

The effect of all this is that getting on for 20% of our merry band didn’t turn up for the exam and around 10% left within the first hour. One glance at the paper was enough for one person and she left after about a minute. Somehow that doesn’t seem right. Yes, people don’t turn up and people leave early in all exams but I’ve never seen it happening in anything like the numbers in ED209.

Overall, the impression is that ED209 is much harder than even the level 3 psychology courses which doesn’t seem right.

One of the advantages of the Open University is that you can do any of the level one courses without any prior knowledge. Surprisingly perhaps there are a whole heap of essentially medical courses within that level one range.

For instance if you’ve a bit of a family history of heart trouble you might consider doing Understanding cardiovascular diseases which covers everything from the treatment of those who’ve had a heart attack, how to go about avoiding one through to the medical aspects of it. To be honest it’s one course that I reckon just about everyone should do: knowing how to avoid getting a heart attack has to be knowledge worth having. If you really get the finger out, you can start that in November.

In a similar vein, there’s Diabetes care which with the drastic rise of type 2 diabetes seems something that a lot of people should know about too (the next course is in May). Alongside these are the cancer, nutrition and obesity courses and there’s also the likes of Infectious Disease if you work up to that through level two courses.

If you get really get carried away with it (which would be easy to do: they’re very interesting courses) you can even pick up a Life Sciences degree.

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.

Although I just finished the Child Development (ED209) on Wednesday and I’m currently doing Human Biology (SK277) which started in early October, it’s actually time for me to be thinking about the next course yet again.

You might think that since I’m plugging away with a Psychology degree that the next course would be quite a simple choice in that there’s a clear list of courses that comprise that degree. However, there’s a scheduling problem with that sequence in the form of Biological Psychology (SD226) which starts in February. Although the start date is OK, the wording in the description concerning recommended prior courses says that you are “strongly recommended” to do courses such as Exploring Psychology (DSE212), Child Development, Human Biology or Biology: uniformity and diversity (S204) before doing Biological Psychology. Now, if you look at the Human Biology and Biology course descriptions it’s clear that it’s an either/or recommendation and indeed that’s why I’m currently doing the Human Biology course. However, it’s not so clear if that also applies to the Exploring Psychology and Child Development courses which has me wondering if it would be better to do the Exploring Psychology course first rather than after Biological Psychology.

Now, assuming that I don’t do Biological Psychology this coming February (which seems quite likely at the moment), that leaves me with a gap in the early part of 2010. So what can I slot in? Well, I could leave it as a gap in that the Human Biology course is running through to June but I want to keep to 60 points a year which means adding another 30 point course. None of the other psychology courses fit the bill as they’re level 3 courses and definitely require Exploring Psychology.

However, as well as the psychology degree I’m also quite interested in following up a physics degree at some point and could see me doing a biology one if the Human Biology course proves as interesting as it seems to be at the moment. Of those, the next potential biology course (Infectious Disease [S320]) is at level 3 so that’s not really a runner ’til I get Human Biology completed. Which leaves the series of courses making up the physics degree. That appears to offer the most viable sequence of which the first one would be Using Mathematics (MST121).

One other “little” problem is that thanks to the funding mess that the ELQ policy has dropped upon the OU it seems quite likely that it won’t be possible to do either the biology or the physics degree for much longer because the required summer schools won’t be available. That seems to point towards the advantage of getting the required summer schools done as soon as possible for either the physics or the biology degree (it’s not possible to do both in the time required [no later than 2012]). The only issue with that is that the core courses in the psychology degree come with expiry dates so I need to keep those dates in mind.

So at the moment, it’s looking like it’ll be Using Mathematics in January though I don’t need to decide on that for another month or so.