Foreign Perspectives

It seems like aeons ago when we were all routinely pampered with blankets, pillows, endless food & drink, socks, little “do not disturb” signs, toothbrushes, combs and even flight bags. Actually, you needed the flight bag to carry off all the goodies that you were given in those days. That was in economy too… in first class you’d have needed porters to take everything with you!

Everything is different now of course in the age of the discount airline. The food & drink only turns up if you pay for it, the flight bag has long since been consigned to history and they’ve even cut into the basics such as blankets and pillows which often aren’t even adequately stocked on planes never mind being at least the little bit overstocked as they were yesteryear.

Funnily enough it’s actually the summer season when travellers end up feeling cold or even freezing. That’s the season when everyone’s heading off to the beaches and leaving home when it’s fairly warm too so they’re travelling in their summer attire of t-shirts, shorts, skirts and light clothing generally.

What do you do about it though? Well, you could cart on a blanket and pillow but, frankly, you’d look like a complete plonker doing so and besides you’ve got to factor the weight into your greatly reduced luggage allowance. It’s also two carryon items which may not be allowed but anyway, do you really want to juggle two more things on your vacation?

With the science courses that I’ve been doing over the last few years, the books generally turn up about a month before the course officially starts and the associated website opens a few days before the course opens. Psychology is clearly a little different and the books have arrived nearly two months before the course starts with the website opening a month before the start.

In the box are:

• Exploring Psychological Research Methods, the 400 page book that I think you dip into throughout the course;
• Mapping Psychology, two volumes totalling 600 pages; and
• Challenging Psychological Issues at 200 pages which finishes off the course;
• a DVD video which has a number of relatively short programmes on it divided into five sections (these will play in a normal DVD player);
• a DVDROM which has a couple of animated sequences (although it’s easier in Windows, you can watch the videos by browsing to the folder on Linux and Mac or, of course, via VirtualBox); and
• SPSS (this is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows and you can use the OU license key for any of them).

Total page count at around 1200 pages is way below that of the equivalent science courses which generally weigh in with around 2000 pages plus associated DVDs (the extreme case being S205 with its seven DVDs). So, in principle, less work to do though I imagine that it won’t work out like that.

On the website will be the assessments, SPSS guide, audio clips and “much more”. Quite why they couldn’t have popped the guide and audio onto the DVD I don’t know as there seems to be the space for it.

One thing that I have noticed already is that I have already covered some of the ground in other courses. Thus one of the DVDROM animations is on perception which I did in some detail in SD329 a couple of years back and some of the topics touched on in the book were covered by the social psychology course that I did with coursera last year. That pre-knowledge should make some sections easier to work through.

With the SK320 exam looming in October, I’m planning on making a start on DSE212 now so that I can take a break from it when the revision work steps up.

A long time ago, there used to be a single induction course for new entrants here but now that the induction seems to have been passed on, rightly, to the appropriate line manager, the subjects that would formerly have been covered as part of that are now taken up by courses in their own right.

The reason for that seems fairly clear: the personnel people want to be sure that the subjects are properly covered so that the company doesn’t get sued. However, that reasoning leads to the “flight safety” problem i.e. that the courses are just being done for the sake of saying that they’re being done.

So, we have the, clearly important, fire safety course which is generally seen as a chore to do when, of course, it could be rather important one day. We have a data protection / freedom of information course which skims over the information. We have a diversity course which is one that really seems, unfortunately, to fall into the “we have to do this, so we’re doing it” camp. Then there’s fraud awareness which seems mainly to have the message “we’ll catch you on”. Finally, for now, there’s the display screen awareness course which does have some useful points but which needs to come with a little manual as most of those points will be quickly forgotten.

As all of those except for the main fire safety course are online, personnel don’t seem to worry about targeting them in any way and, as they find their feet with the technology, it would seem that we can all look forward to a diet increasingly made up of mandatory courses, many of which may well be on the mandatory list because they can be put on it.

No matter how much I see Wendy put it on, I still haven’t a clue what all the various items in her “paint box” are actually there for.

I think the single most confusing one is probably the eye-liner which seems a particularly weird thing to me. Not far behind are the various creams which range from day and night creams through to dark circle eye cream. At least the dark circle cream has the advantage that I know what it does: quite what night cream is for is beyond me.

That’s, of course, just a selection too and I’m quite sure that there’s a mountain of stuff that also remains beyond my understanding.

Not so long ago, you used to be just click on the “register now” button to sign up for any course with the Open University.

That led to some people doing crazy things like registering for level 3 courses when they’d no background in the subject and where the courses in question explicitly stated that you needed to have quite a lot of background. You might think that all such people would fail but they didn’t as a number of them had acquired the relevant background in an unofficial way.

However, now the pre-requisites are being enforced in a growing range of subjects. First to complain were the mathematicians who found that they were required to have specific modules as a pre-requisite to do later ones. Quite a number of those actually did have the knowledge required but they’d acquired it outside the OU and sometimes in a way that wasn’t documented. No complaints, yet, from the languages people where you definitely need to have a level 1 level of knowledge before doing level 2 but perhaps they’re not enforcing the pre-requisites there yet as it’s quite common in languages to acquire fluency in an undocumented way.

It’s coming up in the last of the residentials too. In the case of psychology, the original timetable of DSE212 of February to October meant that DXR222, the associated residential, fell in the middle of that. Now though that you can complete DSE212 in the October to June slot it’s possible to do that before doing DXR222 yet they enforce a registeration of DSE212 first, even though you could drop out of it after registration. Net effect for me was a worrying couple of days waiting whilst they processed the DSE212 registration before I could register for the residential when in the past I could have registered for both at the same time.

Oh well. At least my remaining modules don’t seem to have officially listed pre-requisites. Or, perhaps, I should say “not yet”.