Foreign Perspectives

Since I’m “between jobs” in one sense albeit still employed in another (career breaks are confusing things) I’ve been signing on as unemployed for the last few weeks.

One of the key things that you need to do if you want to get what they now call “job seekers allowance” is to look for jobs. Fair enough and indeed that’s how it always should have been as the whole idea behind the organisation concerned was to provide some assistance to tide people over when they were between jobs.

Anyway,  in the absense of a job, so far, at the end of the career break I’ve been taking the opportunity to look around for one. Amazingly enough I found what seemed to be the perfect job last week although on first reading of the requirements it seemed to rule me out. Second read of the actual detail of the requirements though and it was a different matter so I thought I’d apply for it. Snag was that by the time I’d identified it as a serious possibility it was coming up to the time that I needed to “sign on” for the “job seekers” allowance

No problem, sure all I needed to do was to call them and let them know I was in the midst of applying for a job, eh? Well, no, because that was my signing on time they said I MUST come down and do just that. But, isn’t the whole objective of the place to get people into jobs? Yes, but you MUST come down now because we can’t change your signing time for anything was their reply.

As it turned out the application took a lot less time than I’d expected so I was able to do both albeit arriving quite late for the “signing on”.

Seems that the renaming of the place as “jobs & benefits” has left the emphasis on “benefits” rather than getting jobs after all.

I was doing quite nicely pottering along with the child development course this last couple of months and keeping my one month lead-time on the official course calendar until now.

However, the next section of the course on the personal and social development of children has started off with a substantial jump in the quantity and complexity of the work involved. As noted earlier that, for me, has fallen at the same time as a dearth in the posts in the course forum which does seem to point to a likelihood of a substantial drop-out rate over the previous week.

Why the big jump though? Well, the first segment in the new section is on parenting and as all us parents know that’s not a simple topic. Secondly, the segment looks in considerable detail at the implementation of what’s called the “strange test” which is basically used as a means of identifying how and in what way a child is attached to, usually, their mother. It turns out that this is quite an important classification as it can determine how the child handles relationships in later life and therefore there have been ways developed of identifying that child attachment classification in adults. Net effect of this is that the methodology segment which is usually quite short seems to take up almost as much time as the rest of the segment which in turn means it’s gonna take me another couple of days to get through it.

On the plus side, it looks like the next segment is back to the normal workload though there is the “small” matter of the next assignment to think about too…

During the couple of weeks prior to the cut-off date for the first assignment for the psychology course the course forum was understandably very busy with all those last minute questions as to how to interpret the question, whether to include this reference or that, and so on.

We’re now in the week just after that date and there’s not been a single message on the forum in that week. Granted, there wouldn’t be the volume of posts after an assignment, but none at all seems a little odd as there’s always at trickle of questions or comments.

Whether that’s an indication that the first assignment was viewed as being quite difficult and therefore there’s been a higher than normal drop-out rate, we’ll have to wait a week or two to find out.

Once you’ve decided to do a new course, there are a few hurdles that you need to get over if you want to be sitting there on the day of the final exam.

First of those is the business of actually getting the application form completed and off to the university. Although in most years I get that away fairly early on in the game and, in particular, before the results of the preceeding course have arrived, this year it was very much a last minute thing. The reasons for that were specific to me but I’m sure that there are a considerable number of dropouts from courses through simply not getting the application in to begin with.

The second big hurdle is once you get the initial wad of information about the course sent to those registered for it. In the case of the Open University the books seem to be arriving earlier with every year that passes. This early arrival means that there can be several months of reconsideration time before the course formally begins. Although that early arrival is welcome in giving the opportunity of making an early start on the work it has the downside that you’re doing that work very much on your own and that lack of support combined with additional reconsideration time means that people drop out at that point too.

However, by far the biggest drop out trigger is the first assignment. One course I was on a few years ago went from 25 to 18 students as soon as the time came to do that first assignment and there were similarly large dropout rates on other courses. That’s a shame really as most of the time the first assignment doesn’t count towards the final mark so you may as well have a go at it. I really hadn’t got much of a clue as to how to proceed with the first assignment of my course last year yet I picked up a mark of 90% on it: how well you think you’re doing doesn’t necessarily correspond to how well you’re actually doing. Although there can be dropouts around the other assignments that first one is by far the most significant in most courses: most people that survive it are still there for the final exam.

So with the submission date coming up this Friday I’ll be expecting to see a few less faces at the tutorial next time.

One of the big differences between the language courses that I’ve been doing over the last seven years and the psychology course that I’m doing at the moment is that there are a whole lot more people doing it: around six times the number apparently.

That great number of students means that there’s a corresponding increase in the number of tutorials and I find myself with three different tutorial groups to choose from. In practice, what I’d normally do is just go to the group run by my own tutor but that’s at 7pm which is rather late for me so I thought I’d try out one of the Saturday morning groups this week.

Since the Open University is, on the whole, run in a very standardised way I was quite surprised at just how differently the two tutorials were run. Both provided equally useful information but one was operated in a very laid back style whilst the other seemed very much in a typical OU tutorial style. Now the question is: would it be even more useful to go to the third tutorial this Saturday and get a third perspective?

Another consequence of the larger number of students is that there’s a whole lot more information online too. For instance, several people have loaded notes on their own tutorials, one current student is producing a very useful series of notes and there’s even someone who has loaded up the answers that they submitted to their assignments.

Finally, that larger number of students means that there are a selection of privately run revision weekend events run during the year and even a published set of notes on the course itself.

The problem with all that is that there’s so much information available that it would be very easy to get so many different views that you’d not know what direction to set off in when trying to answer a question be it in an assignment or in the exam. So chances are I’ll probably not go to that third tutorial this coming weekend and only the one revision weekend.