Foreign Perspectives

One of the problems that I have in choosing which courses to go for is that a number of those that I’d quite like to do fall into the category of “difficult” for one reason or another.

In some cases that’s not so bad I can, for instance, work up to the astrophysics course by starting with a very doable maths course and working up to astrophysics itself via a series of stepping stone courses. So, in principle, the astrophysics is quite an achievable goal for me. However, some of the other courses don’t have those easy stepping stones and, for example, the human biology course that I’ve pencilled in for next year looks like it will be rather difficult in a number of areas. The snag is that in that particular case human biology is itself the stepping stone that I felt I needed for biological psychology which I’ll be doing in a few years time.

One plus point is that, at the moment, the most difficult courses seem to be 30 pointers rather than the 60 point courses that I’ve been doing the last few years. So, in principle, if I do hit a really rough patch with one then I should be able to devote more time to it.

Still, if I was able to manage level 3 French, I’m sure that I’ll be able to get through a couple of level 2 biology courses.

One of the problems with doing a degree with the OU is that it’s a very long drawn out affair taking anything from six years upwards in most cases. That long period in turns means that there can be quite a turnover in the courses available during the course of one’s degree.

For example, when I was going through my (far too long) list of potential courses for the next couple of years recently I found that there’s quite a lot of them that will have reached the end of their life before I’ll have gotten around to doing them. That’s not really so much of a problem as it might appear to be in that the majority of courses are replaced by updated versions of what went before. For example, whilst I’ve got DSE212 Exploring Psychology in my schedule since it only runs to 2011 I may well be doing whatever its successor is. Where it is an issue is that the psychology courses come with expiry dates so that 10 years after a version of a course ceases, you can’t count it towards a psychology degree eg in my case the Child Development course that I’m currently doing will expire in 2023 because this edition of the course will only run to 2012. Granted, that 10 year plus validity isn’t usually a major problem in that the degree programmes generally run over around six years but it means that you can’t really take a break from the psychology degree as easily as you can for other degree programmes.

What’s a little more disconcerting is that A251 World Archaeology which was only introduced last year and which went straight into my short-list as it sounds brilliant is finishing the year before I’d have been doing it. Why that should be so I don’t know for sure but the extreme range of comments about it (“best course ever” through to “total waste of time”) might have something to do with that. If that’s the case, then any rewrite could be substantially different than the current course. Unfortunately, I’ll probably not know whether or not there’s going to be a successor to it for a couple of years so if I want to do it, I’ll have to rejig my schedule yet again.

I raised this question during one of the recent tutorials and was instantly shot down!

However, whilst it’s not a “girly” course in terms of difficulty (I’m finding it harder going than even level 3 French!), it is a “girly” course in the sense that it seems to attract more than the usual number of females for a course. Even though I’ve been doing language courses, a more typically female type of course, I found it very noticeable that the percentage of females was much higher than normal in the Child Development course that I’m doing at the moment. If tutorial attenders are any kind of guideline it seems to be around 80% female.

Of course, the reason for that is quite clear when you look at the range of degree and diplomas that this course counts towards even before you consider that anything with “child” in the title is still, even today, considered to be more in the female domain than in the male one. Those qualifications feeding into it are variations on the theme of what’s known as Early Years ie essentially considering the care and education of young children. Those occupations attract more than their fair share of females so thus it’s only natural that qualifications in that line would do the same.

The thing is though that it’s one of the more interesting courses around for guys. After all, whilst arguably girls are, for one reason or another, generally brought up with the expectation that they’ll be looking after the kids (yeah, I know, sexist but still largely true despite that), the guys tend, on the whole, to miss out on that kind of thing. Sure they’ll play with toy soldiers but you don’t see many little boys playing with dolls generally yet that’s one of the ways that you can get used to considering the needs of a baby. Whilst this course isn’t a childcare course as such I found that it filled in a lot of the gaps in childcare lore that guys tend to miss out on as they grow up.

Don’t underestimate the level of difficulty in it though! This course comes with one serious workload and is definitely not a course to be taken lightly.

Although many people are plugging away with various OU courses with a view, at least in principle, to eventually acquiring a degree in the fullness of time, the long drawn out nature of OU degrees tends to make the degree itself something of a fixture.

Perhaps the biggest difference from a “normal” degree is that whereas in the course of doing a normal degree your life is largely centred around the degree and your life as a student, with the OU that’s rarely the case and over the six or seven years that most people take their lives change and the degree becomes a fixture. Let’s face it: a lot can happen over seven years (and it can take as long as 11 even following normal length courses and without breaks). Children can go right through primary school for a start and grow up saying stuff like “Daddy’s doing his French now”.

That “constant” aspect means that when things go badly in one’s life people tend not to quit their degree as you might expect but rather continue with it. I’ve known several people now who’ve lost babies or close family members yet seemingly continued on regardless. To some that might seem unfeeling but those I’ve known are continuing basically because the degree itself gives them a fixed point to hold onto and get them through whatever they’re going through in their lives.

Of course, there is the small matter of that degree at the end of the road to consider. In my experience many people simply forget about it and it can come as something of a shock to receive the little email saying that you can now accept your degree. It’s only natural really: who could really plan something with certainty that was going to take six years or more to complete? In my own case, I found that it was three years on from the point where I was saying “I’d like to speak French better” that I was at the point where I realised that a modern languages degree was a possibility for me and I’m sure that many people doing OU courses are in the same boat.

However, it’s “worse” than that because the OU let you count a very wide range of courses towards a degree and, for the most part, don’t put any time limit on acquiring a degree. Thus if you have a broad range of interests you can easily find that there are several degrees worth of courses in their prospectus that you’d be interested in. Sometimes they’ll form coherent degrees but that’s far from the case all the time. For instance, in my own case I’m notionally plugging away with a psychology degree yet I also have things like World Archaeology and Medieval to Modern History on my list of courses that I’d be interested in doing which have no relationship at all with psychology.

Put together a wide range of courses with the wide range of people who sign up for them and it’s not unknown for people to be working towards multiple degrees simultaneously. The record so far is someone who had 60 odd courses behind him amounting to several degrees but I’m sure that it’s a record that will be broken many times in the years to come. Age is no barrier either and just a few weeks ago I heard of someone in their 90s who’s now reached the point where they’ve three doctorates and are still going strong!

That’s the problem with the OU: it’s quite addictive. Although I’ve just completed a modern languages degree with them I’ve already started on a psychology degree and a few days idle skimming through the prospectus over the summer produced a list equivalent to two or perhaps three degrees worth of courses for my “short” list. It’s not that I’m explicitly planning on doing all of those but it gives me a menu to choose from at least over the next couple of years.

What prompted this little missive? Well, ’tis almost time for me to be signing up for the next course. At the moment it’s looking like it’ll be Human Biology which should make a course later on in my psychology schedule much easier to do but, more importantly, it looks like a really interesting course to do. This one’s something of a rest course for me in that it’s only a 30-pointer so should take much less time than the 60 point courses I’ve been doing for the past three years.

The first time I came across ELQ (Equivalent and Lower Qualifications) was a year or two back when it was mentioned in one of the rare rallying cry type emails that come out from the Open University. What’s it all about? Well, basically the government are intending to drastically reduce funding to universities for those students who are studying for a qualification that is equal to or lower than one that they’ve already got. For example, if you already have a BA or BSc degree then if you sign up for another BA or BSc degree, even if it’s in a totally different subject, then you come under the ELQ rule.

In practical terms, the number of ELQ students is fairly low in most mainstream universities but it’s quite a different matter for the OU where many people start on a different degree for leisure purposes (the proportion of retired students is pretty high on some courses), to change career or to acquire a degree in a more relevant subject to their existing job. Thus, something that would largely have affected the night classes run by mainstream universities is going to affect the main business of the OU. Ironically it would appear that an excellent institution created by the Labour party way back in 1969 may well be killed off by the Labour party of 2009.

So how significant is this reduction in funding? Well, that’s the problem: nobody really knows for sure. Yes, there’s a figure for the reduction but the snag is that the reduction in funding is being met by an increase in course fees and nobody knows what impact that will have on the uptake of courses by students.

Plucking some figures out of the air might give some idea of the impact though. At the moment the OU charges around £10 per point degree courses thus overall a 360 point honours degree costs about £3,600 or around £600 a year on average spread over the typical six years of their courses. Depending on the subject that you do residential schools may increase that to more like £4,600 so say £800/year on average.

However, were the university to double those fees which some would say seems likely, what would happen? Would people find it so easy to justify £1,600 a year over six years? The snag is that it’s not quite so simple as that because there are a lot of quite major universities around the world offering distance learning in similar ranges of courses. Whilst an overall cost for a degree of under £5,000 is quite a bargain generally, that’s not the case were the overall cost to be twice that.

Already discussions are ongoing in the university as to what to do. For example, the science faculty seems likely to drop all but one of its named degrees and is looking for ways to drastically cut the cost of running the residential schools. Whereas right now you can do degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, life sciences and natural sciences in the future there might only be the option to do just “science” albeit with at least some of the currently existing degree programmes continuing to exist as strands within that. Although as they say most of those named degrees were only introduced in 2003 taking them out just six years later seems rather a rapid move on the part of the OU. I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one of their students who ruminated over doing a degree with them for a number of years before actually getting around to it.

Now whilst they argue that they need to drop the residential courses because they don’t make any money on them, they’re in this situation largely because they separated out the residential courses from the courses to which they were originally linked. For example, S103 included a residential whereas S104, its replacement, has SXR103 as a separate residential course. Thanks to the way that most companies sponsoring students on courses work the non-compulsory nature of SXR103 means that fewer people will get funding to go on it.

That’s just the science faculty too. Other faculties attract more hobby students and could see substantial number of courses needing to be dropped if the prices go up too much. For example, how would the various history courses fare at double their current cost? Yes, many of them sound fascinating (and are on my own short list) but realistically I’d have thought that they’re more likely to be done by the retired hobby student population (who tend to get much better marks than the rest of us) and so could be more price sensitive than other more employment oriented courses.

Supposedly none of this affects us students registered for the courses with addresses in Northern Ireland. Not yet, anyway. I imagine that it’s none too ethical but presumably the OU could just supply all students with an NI forwarding address and thus continue to claim the full funding. I wonder if anyone’s floated that suggestion yet?