Foreign Perspectives

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.

Frankly I figured that the relabelling of “unemployment offices” in the UK some years ago as “job centres” as just a PR gimmic by the government but it would appear that there’s a little more behind it than I’d thought.

As y’all know I’m technically between jobs at the moment. However, I hadn’t really thought about myself as being unemployed until Wendy pointed out that I should probably be off claiming some sort of unemployment benefit. These days, of course, it’s called jobseekers allowance to distance it both from unemployment and benefits but ’tis still the old unemployment benefit office that you go to if you want to claim it, so off we went last week.

That relabelling brought with it a lot of other changes. For instance, in the “unemployment office” you now find two separate groups of people that deal with you. First, there’s the people who handle the benefit payments who are basically the same group as have always been there and who are interested in seeing that you’ve made the appropriate social security payments to entitle you to the benefit. Separately from them are the employment people who are there to do what they can to help you back into work and who will prod you into getting up and looking for work if needbe. Formerlly the two were quite separate and in buildings separated by several miles so there wasn’t the sense that there is now of the payment being there just to help you along whilst you’re off looking for work.

One side-effect for me is that there’s what’s almost a trick question on the form: are you currently studying? I am in that I’m doing a child development course but seeing as it’s not a full-time one that means that I’m actually available for work which is what the question is really asking.

Full marks though for that relabelling and the reorganisation that happened almost behind the scenes. Although, in theory, I have a job waiting (sort-of), it has prompted me to have a look around anyway.

Clearly there are topics that are largely of interest to males and those that are largely of interest to females but which is which isn’t always as clear ahead of signing up for a course as you might expect.

For instance, languages are usually very much seen as a female thing. However, the mix of the sexes on my courses was generally around 75/25 in favour of males. Even on the English language course that I did last year (generally taken as part of an English Language & Literature degree) there were quite a number of us guys on it.

Although the current Child Development course is basically filling in a slot of a psychology degree, considering children is generally seen as womens’ work (yeah, I know, a stereotypical sexist generalisation but still largely true these days), what really struck me was that it looks like it’s something like 90/10 in favour of females. To be fair a lot of them are coming to the course from the perspective of being teachers or otherwise looking after kids professionally but if anything it’s a course that the guys could do with going on.

Despite us having to go through all kinds of hoops to try and register Wendy with a doctor, it’s been surprisingly easy to get a European Health Card issued.

In fact, all we had to do was to quote a name and address for them to post it to. They took our National Insurance numbers because we had them to hand but didn’t need them.

That’s pretty odd when you think about it as it means we can bill expenses from abroad for Wendy to the very health system that won’t register her to be treated locally!