Foreign Perspectives

In the days of First Class (the OU forum system, now all but defunct) there were forums for the various subjects and for the varied interests of the OU students as well. However, one forum stood head and shoulders above all others as the place to go to ask about just about any course you could imagine: the 120 pointers forum.

Although it was intended only for those doing the Open University courses at the full-time rate of 120 points per year, that group had collectively done so many courses that it was the place to ask about a very wide variety of courses. The only problem was in peeking in, it was a very addictive forum. Course suggestions came from all over the OU spectrum ranging from arts to sciences. Interestingly, you quite often saw people doing a very peculiar mix of subjects indeed and it was the place to look for those courses which were unexpectedly interesting to a wide range of people but which you’d not normally have heard about. Courses like the hard to place A251 World Archaeology (is it classics or history?), AA318 20th century art (apparently totally fascinating), along with missives from those heading off for doctorates and doing a totally mad number of courses as well.

Then there were the study tips which I’d been hoping to pinch and insert here but, sadly, FC is closing and that thread has been deleted a few months ago. The last big thing was the choice of “ideal” ebook reader (Sony or iPad) but there were many other things besides.

In time, it may be resurrected in the new-look forums but many more of them are closed these days so no chance of popping into one and asking what a course is really like before you sign up for it. In the meantime though there’s the beginnings of the 120 pointer facebook group which is slowly collecting the FC participants.

Despite ups and downs during the course, the answer is definitely a “yes”.

There’s certainly an awful lot of reading to be done for it. To say that the course text is 800 pages long is misleading as you “only” read about half of it but you also read a lot of material outside the text so count on basically reading that volume of paper. Note too that it’s about A4 size, two up and with a small font: together that means that it’s got a word count similar to that of about four normal OU texts and you’re reading all that over around 5 months. Moreover, it’s source material and not in the, generally, easy-read style of the OU texts ie it will take you longer to read than the corresponding amount of reading from an OU text.

The course has a rather boring start with topics around just what archaeology actually is but after you struggle though that (the first two weeks or so) it’s into the beginnings of agriculture. Next up is the formation of cities, then empires and finally a rag-bag of topics including rock-art, slavery and the dispersal of the Pacific peoples.

You’ve a TMA on each of the first three topics with the ECA offering a choice albeit both choices requiring you to use examples from three of the four blocks. Worth noting is that you’ve an assignment every four weeks. With a course start date of early November that means an assignment at the end of November, December and January with the ECA/EMA due mid-March. Although it’s a 30 pointer, the course runs at 60 point speed and more like 90 points at times given the volume of reading to be done.

Overall, it’s a course that doesn’t hang around. There’s just enough time to get a flavour of one of the topics before you move on. Or rather, it seems like you only get a flavour of each: during the ECA/EMA you’ll find out that you’ve actually got quite a good grasp of the subject.

It’s a course that I’ll genuinely miss doing. Hopefully I’ll find that the medieval to modern history and empires courses will have a similar feel to them.

The final assignment for the World Archaeology course is intended to be something of a research based assignment. This time around you’ve to choose three examples of cultural contact spread over around three or four thousand years and pick out the consequences of those contacts. Yes, that was three or four thousand years. This course covers a lot of ground.

That research aspect means that you can’t fully plan your essay based on what you already know ie it’s quite a different prospect than the previous assignments. What I ended up doing was to draft the conclusion first and use that in turn create a basic template to use for each of the examples that I chose.

The problem with that approach is that it assumes that you’ll be able to find articles to support your conclusion. What you don’t want to end up doing is to have to redo everything after you’ve one or two of your examples written up.

In practice, I found that my framework worked really well for the Pacific diaspora which isn’t surprising as that was the example which could largely be taken from the text book. It also worked well for the Sumerian city-states which was almost entirely research based. Where it fell down was with the Incas which initially looked good but turned out not to be in practice as it didn’t fit well with my original premise. So bad in fact that I ended up having to switch to the Aztecs instead and that worked out perfectly which is surprising for a research led segment.

Lessons learned are that sketching out a conclusion works well and creating a framework from that works well if you have an understanding of the topic areas from which you can choose which is good enough to let you choose those that’ll fit well with your framework. Hence the Incas fell down as I didn’t really know enough about them whereas the others worked almost perfectly.

The other thing to watch is the massive amount of time that a research led assignment can take. I’ve spent easily twice the amount of time on this as any previous assignment down to a combination of time spent looking for the articles to support the arguments and the time spent reading them. Writing it hasn’t taken overly long though I’ve still the tidy-up phase to do before submitting it early in the coming week.

The world archaeology course comes with a massive course text running to nearly 800 rather large and very densely packed pages. During the course you end up reading about half of that plus a whole bunch of online texts as well which adds up to a rather substantial amount of reading over the five months.

In the final assessment for the course we need to pull out information from all over that chunk of reading and indeed more as we’ve to quote sources outside the course texts as well. That makes for a rather time consuming assessment which has been eating up massive chunks of time over the last week and it’s not completed yet.

One big difference in doing this assignment is that you can’t produce detailed notes for the essay in advance as you need to do the reading before writing each segment of the essay. That’s not to say that you can’t do any planning and in fact given the scale of the reading required you must have a plan to enable you to select out relevant information.

That plan is quite different in nature to normal essay plans though as it’s basically a framework to enable me to pick out what I need from the texts. Essentially, what seems to be required for this is to start with a rough conclusion and use that to choose examples to support it. We’re required to pick examples including a city/state, an empire and a diaspora. I’m using the Sumerian city states, probably the Spanish colonisation of central & south America and the Austronesian diaspora basically because there seemed to be enough information to support my conclusions for each of them and they fall neatly into the trade, colonisation and dispersal categories too. Not quite co-incidentally that seems to be the set that most people are running with if the course forum is anything to go by.

The consequences of those contacts are mostly easy to pick out and, as you could work out in 10 minutes yourself, basically fall in the domains of language, technology and social organisation plus, some would argue, disease. Nothing earth shattering about that but it seems a reasonable framework with which to compare each of the contact types.

Interestingly though, I wasn’t initially planning on covering the Pacific dispersal but when you start looking at the page count in the book for the diaspora segment there’s really only that and the African diaspora (ie the slave-trade) that have anything like the volume that you need for this assignment. Thus most people seem to be doing one or the other now and rejecting the option of doing something on rock-art that was initially quite popular.

It’s quite a good assignment to tie together the various strands of the course and a great way of showing the advantages of looking at the world as a whole rather than just, say, Roman archaeology. The downside is that it makes for a massive volume of reading in the final weeks of the course.

Next up for me in the historical line will probably be the medieval to modern history course which starts where the archaeology course finished and the empire one after that although it’ll be a few years before I can fit them in.

Whenever the subject of keeping to the official timetable or deviating from it on an Open University course is raised, the argument nearly always gets heated.

Up until a few years ago it wasn’t an issue as the OU sent out the course material no more than a week or two ahead of the course start date. Thus, except for those that planned on packing in a couple of weeks worth of work for a period, by and large everyone was following the official course schedule. Then it all changed. Around four years ago they started sending out the materials when they were ready so I ended up getting the materials for one of my Spanish courses almost three months ahead of time. Sense seemed to prevail after that and they now aim to get the materials out around a month early although generally speaking it seems more like six weeks early.

So now, if you start the course when the material arrives you’ll find yourself running four to six weeks ahead of the official schedule. And that’s where the differences of opinion arise. For example, in the computing course I’m doing at the moment you’re limited to being at most two weeks ahead which is too much for some, not enough for others and just right for nobody apparently if the ongoing debates in various places are anything to go by. To be fair, there’s a particular issue with the TT courses in that the material is drip-fed week by week just two weeks in advance which, for me, is a real pain. For all other courses, pretty much all the course materials turn up around a month before the course begins.

So, should you start early, wait ’til the course officially starts or build up even more of a lead-time on the official timetable? That’s really down to you. For me around a month in advance works well. It’s enough to deal with lifes ups and downs and it’s not too much that you become detached from the tutorials. OU degree programmes run on for so long that you’re bound to hit all kinds of real-life issues that’ll take several weeks out of your own schedule. Those with courses starting in October will have Christmas to contend with, the February starts will have the summer; in both cases you’re going to “lose” at least a couple of weeks. Then there are more major things like holidays, weddings, births and whatnot that can easily take a few more weeks out. On the whole, I’ve found that a four week lead can cope with just about anything but, of course, your life will be different.

On the other hand, running in lock step with the official timetable means that you’re always at the right spot in the course when the tutorials come around, at least if nothing has happened. The problem is that things do happen which is why it’s quite common to have forum messages asking in panic what to do when you’re X weeks behind and those talking of dropping out of the course. Great idea if nothing happens in real-life, not so good if anything does.

Finally, there’s the racing ahead approach. That’s fine if there’s no exam at the end but if there is then you’ll finish the course months early and, more importantly, months before the exam which can make revision more difficult as there’ll be a long gap between the end of your study and the exam itself. Tutorials become pointless as you’ll have finished the corresponding TMA two tutorials ago.

If you’re one of the crazy people doing multiple courses, a bit of lead-time is essential to avoid logjams of assignments; four weeks can handle up to four courses although having done just that in 2010 I wouldn’t recommend it