Foreign Perspectives

At one time the only real choice for part-time students was their local university purely on the grounds of practical travel-time but these days lots of universities are offering courses via distance learning (usually via the Internet these days) and, in some senses, the worlds your oyster.

Well, almost. The problem is that in some cases there remain significant cost advantages to doing your course at an institution within your own country, not all universities offer fully distance learning degrees and there are administration issues in doing a degree from an overseas university.

For example, say you want to do a degree in America yet all your qualifications are non-American. What that entails is going through a course by course validation which in effect translates your existing qualifications into the equivalent in the American education model. There’s generally a cost in doing that. Naturally, if you want to use the resulting qualification outside America there can also be a translation process involved too.

The 100% distance learning knocks out a surprising number of potential choices. Thus, whilst Harvard offers a considerable number of courses online these days via their extension school (which is MUCH cheaper than you’d expect), it has a residency requirement of, usually, around six months (you can do it in two summer terms in most cases). At the other end of the scale is something like the British Open University which offers 100% distance learning.

In terms of own-country cost advantage, you can find that in Europe universities give preferential charges to those living in their own country. For example, typically the Open University will charge around double the normal fee if you don’t live in the UK. That seems to be the extreme case but you can expect to pay additional charges in some form if you live outside the country in which the university is based. For example, buying the recommended texts via Harvards bookshop is more expensive if you live outside America.

Aside from those complications though you should be able to choose pretty much any university assuming that you can understand the language they use for teaching. What you should do is draw up a short list and then look into the courses that you would hope to do in more detail. Some courses work much better in an online format than others. For example, although the Open College of the Arts notionally offers distance learning courses, for some of their courses a number of the tutorials have to be face to face in areas like sculpture.

Unfortunately, Martin Bean has been appointed in what seem sure to be “interesting times” for the OU thanks to the ELQ funding fiasco that’s going to start hitting them particularly hard quite soon.

Sadly, there seems to be little that can be done whilst the current government is in power but at least that seems sure to change soon. However, it may not change soon enough to avoid significant damage being done throughout the higher education sector.

Although the timescale for the implementation of the ELQ policy seems relatively relaxed for most universities, for the OU it’s incredibly rapid. Remember that in the OU most degrees take six or seven years to complete and can take as long as 11 years, even without taking breaks between courses. Thus a change that kicks in within just two or three years can easily derail a lot of people aiming for a particular degree.

Thus, the proposals of the science faculty to eliminate all of their current range of named degrees seems sure to hit an awful lot of students who’ve already started on their degree programme. However, let’s not forget the very large number of people who browse through the OU courses and mull over the issue for a number of years before finally starting their degree. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who watched the Saturday morning OU broadcasts of many years ago (stopped only a few years ago) and thought that they’d quite like to do a degree in this or that at some point.

Even more unfortunate is that the OU are attracting a much larger number of school leavers than in years past and many of them would like to have the degree options in the OU that are available in normal universities.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all is that the elimination of the named science degrees would be accompanied by an elimination of the summer schools associated with the various named degrees. Their argument that few people do the named degrees because of the requirement to do a set number of summer schools seems to come from a particularly short memory. The named degrees were introduced at around the same time as the separation of the summer schools from the courses which they were previously an integral part of. That separation means that it’s MUCH more difficult for those with any kind of sponsorship to get funding for what then became an optional course in the eyes of sponsors.
What’s perhaps the most unfortunate thing in all this is that it could all be avoided if we were each prepared to pay £1.50 PER YEAR in extra tax.

Our own little ED209 group was quite active up until the start of the Summer but is still all but completely silent. Likewise for the ED209 forum on the OU site.

Naturally, the reason over the last couple of months has been the summer holidays. It’s surprisingly easy to drop below the number of people required to keep threads going even for a course with a large enrollment such as ED209.

Restarting things after such a break isn’t quite so easy either. People get used to not having a lot of feedback via the forum and so don’t go to it quite so often even after most people have returned from holiday. I suspect though that one other reason for the relative silence on the forum is that ED209 seems to be a course with a high drop out rate ie there just ain’t as many people around. Due to the nature of many forum conversations (ie “please help me with X”) that’s emphasised even more.

What I’ve done in past courses has been to ask the tutor just how many people are submitting TMAs at several tutorials to get a feel for the drop out rate as we went along. I didn’t do that for this course but if the number of people saying “this is a tough course” or words to that effect is anything to go by then the drop out rate must be pretty substantial.

One thing that appears to be different with this course is that the drop outs don’t seem to occur mainly at the start of the course but rather throughout the course. That’s probably down to the TMAs being consistently difficult rather than seeming to get easier as you go along as happens in other courses in my experience. It’s not that the TMAs were really getting easier, just that as one gets into a course it becomes more familiar and so they seem to get easier. With ED209 that doesn’t happen because you’re moving onto topics that are substantially different from what went before as you go along thus each TMA is based on a body of knowledge that’s often substantially different from the knowledge that you used for the previous one. Moreover, the ED209 TMAs come in three flavours (essay, methodology and practical) so you don’t even get the chance to settle into a style of TMA.

As Tim says, this is one course that’s in need of splitting into two. To have it as a level 2 60 point course is a nonsense: it’s much more like a level 3 90 point course. Level 3 because of the consistently high level of difficulty on the TMAs (and, no, I’m not saying that because my marks have been low because they haven’t been) and 90 points because it takes a whole lot more time than any 60 point courses I’ve done whether they be at level 2 or level 3.

Well, it’s almost out of the way. I’m currently sitting on 1850 words and 2000 is the target so I might run up that final 150 tomorrow. Or then again, I might just put it in as-is seeing as the mark I get on it won’t really affect the overall grade for this course that much.

Anyway, with the assignments out of the way the road is clear to start work on getting ready for the exam on October 21st. That work has two aspects for this course. First, there’s the seen question to consider. That’s the question that they’ve already given us but which we’ve to research two papers to support our argument on the day of the exam and, of course, there’s the small matter of drafting the answer in advance so that it’s “just” a matter of writing it out on the day.

Then there’s the revision for the other two questions on the paper. Frankly, that’s a nightmare for this course as there’s just so much of it. I managed to have a first run through of about half of it over the summer and it was a frightening experience. On the one hand, it was reassuring to find that there was a reasonable amount of it that I remembered but what wasn’t so good was just how long it took to go through it all (and I was “only” going through the Erica Cox notes!).

Finally, there’s the problem that I have at the moment which is that I haven’t a clue how to even make a start on answering a worryingly large proportion of the questions on the past papers. Hopefully, that will change over the next six weeks or so! At this point I’m wondering if it would have been a good idea to go to one of the revision weekends for the course… bit late now though there’s one this weekend.

One of the truly sad things about the whole mess that’s ELQ is that it seems quite likely that the Open University will end up closing its doors at some point because of it.

Why? Well, historically the OU has attracted more than its fair share of students who are studying for a second degree at the same level as their main degree, according to the governments model some 25% of the student population. Personally, I’d have put that figure much higher as it certainly appears to be more like 50% for the courses that I’ve been doing. Having said that, presumably languages would be a more likely second degree than many other subjects that they offer.

The problem is that even taking that 25% as the “real” figure those people would potentially be hit with a fee more than double what they’ll currently be paying. For example, my Human Biology course is currently £360 for those living in the UK, £915 for those in Europe and it’s the £915 that’s the “real” cost of the course. Somehow I can’t see significant numbers from that 25% paying up over £900 for a 30 point course. For my very first French course it rises to £985 for a 30 point course and, honestly, I don’t know anyone in our tutor group who’d have paid that amount.

Or what about those fantastic 10 point courses that they run? Well, at almost triple the current cost I just don’t see the student numbers adding up somehow.

Naturally, the effect will be different depending on the course. The recent rise in the number of students coming to the OU straight after A-levels will obviously have a softening effect but there are some subjects that are clearly more attractive as a second qualification in these hard economic times and one could well see entire departments closing after losing that critical mass of students that OU courses require.

Of course, it’s not just the OU that’s being hit by this crazy policy but I suspect that it’ll be the most obvious casualty in this affair. In other places we’ll just notice that the cost of night classes has jumped dramatically and then the following year that there aren’t nearly so many on offer.

It does seem particularly sad that for another £1.50 PER YEAR tax for each of us this could have been avoided.