Foreign Perspectives

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?

The Child Development course has what’s called a “seen question” on the exam paper which is sort-of a misnomer. Yes, they’ve given us the actual question that’ll be asked but it really more of a project than a simple question to answer in that we’ve to research the topic and provide a coherent answer citing research evidence to backup that answer.

That wouldn’t be too bad (says he, not having done it yet!) but the first hurdle is that there are five very different topic areas which we need to choose between first. Going by the study guide that choice should only take a day but that only works if you’ve a strong preference for one of the topics or a dislike for four of them and otherwise you could easily find yourself reading through quite a chunk of stuff just to make that choice.

In practical terms, I found it relatively easy to eliminate three of the topics. The legal one sounds interesting in principle but highlights right at the off that it contains quite upsetting material on child sexual abuse so doesn’t sound like something that would be pleasant to work on to me. The education one is very much a “for teachers” topic and doesn’t grab me. The health psychology one just sounded like a lot of marketing drivel. Which leaves the ones on autism and specific learning difficulties.

I’d thought initially that it would be very much a toss-up between these two but the presentation of them made it quite an easy choice. In practical terms I think that, although the autism one would be very interesting, you’d really need to have some experience of the condition to be able to do it as it’s presented in what seems, to me, to be a very confusing way. To be fair, it’s trying to show what autism is like to those with that affliction but it just served to confuse me as to where it was going with the topic.

Which leaves me with specific learning difficulties and that’s the option that I’ll be running with.

One of the challenges that people face as they get older is the increasing number of health problems that tend to crop up. The question, of course, is what to do about them.

In most cases these start as relatively mild problems. So mild in a lot of cases that people can wait quite a long time before they go to see their doctor about them which can make them a little more serious issues by then of course but not necessarily serious in a dramatic way.

For instance, if you’re like most people in being a little overweight and not taking as much exercise as you should then chances are that you’ve higher blood pressure than you should have for your age (it’s something that goes up as you get older). Go to the doctor and, if it’s high enough, chances are they’ll prescribe some medication to get it down to where it should be. The snag is that, in most cases, this medication is a “for the rest of your life” deal which is obviously not such a great idea if you can avoid it. And, you can usually avoid it in this case if you’re prepared to put the effort into it. That effort entails getting that weight down, taking more exercise, reducing your salt intake and taking charge though measuring your own blood pressure. Sadly, most people just don’t bother to put that effort in yet the effort required, in most cases, is minimal. After all, it’s not that difficult to change from normal salt to the “low salt” variety, we can all fit a little walking in and blood pressure monitors are very cheap these days.

In terms of mental health, if recent studies are anything to go by, it seems that similar options are open. We’re seeing the first of the anti-dementia drugs these days but they’re likely to be “for life” deals as well. As with the exercise for your body, those recent studies seem to indicate that exercising your mind tends to, at least, alleviate dementia. Surely it must be a better plan to exercise your mind than to go onto medication?

Although you’d expect that most holiday accommodation would be completely full over the majority of the peak summer that’s not always the case.

For instance, whilst we’re expecting to be close to full capacity over the period, in fact we had several days last week when we were completely empty. How come? Well, what happens is that the place fills up completely at the weekend relatively early in the year which in turn means that people who are looking for a longer holiday often can’t get booked in if it crosses the weekend.

Now, in principle, we could block out a few rooms over the weekends for those longer holidays but then that’s taking the risk that those blocked out rooms wouldn’t fill at all. In practical terms it’s quite difficult to do that blocking out anyway as many online reservation sites don’t allow for that to be done, or at least not in a way that saves those rooms for longer bookings.