Foreign Perspectives

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

Dropout rates in the open university are a very tangible thing. You can see that there are fewer people in each tutorial as the year progresses.

Where it’s by far the highest is in the first course of a given subject. That’s not necessarily at level 1 though as some subjects only start at level 2. Thus the drop out rate for something like psychology is quite high at level 2 because there is no psychology course at level 1 (or wasn’t until last year anyway).

The drop out rate from “hard” subjects isn’t necessarily that high. Or, rather, it is but the students drop out of the subject before they get to the point of choosing it thus the people starting “hard” subjects tend to be more committed to them.

I was actually quite lucky during the modern languages sequence of courses as, by chance, the drop out rate in my tutor group was unusually low. In fact it wasn’t completely by chance as what happened was that we formed a study group consisting of almost everyone within the tutor group early on. All but one of those people went on to complete the diploma and several went on to do the modern languages degree. Getting into a study group early on is that important.

However, in courses within my life sciences programme, the drop out has been very, very noticeable. You notice it when half the group isn’t there by the third or fourth month into the course. Even after the first assignment the drop out was quite noticeable and also noticeable was that the tutor seemed to start with the view that many of those at the first tutorial wouldn’t be there at the second one. She was right.

What’s generally worth noting for prospective students is that some courses front load the course texts with difficult material, seemingly in an effort to weed out those students who will drop out as early as possible. Not all do that mind you but if you’re finding the first unit or two of a course very difficult, have a leaf through what’s coming up as often it’s much easier. Being way too stubborn to drop out saw me right through the modern languages degree and frankly that is something that I would never have believe I’d have ten years back.

The TT courses have developed something of a reputation of slipping up with the assessments resulting in numerous questions needing to be “zero-weighted” ie not counting towards the final mark.

It looks like the first CMA of TT281 is continuing in this tradition. In TT280, the preceding course, the marks for the three CMA worked out to have around 80% of students achieving the top grade and 15% getting the next highest grade ie a total of 95% or so getting grades 1 or 2. For the first CMA of TT281 the figures are rather different with only 18% getting that top grade and 61% getting the top two grades and 89% in the top three grades. Overall, it looks like most people have dropped something like 20% to 30% in their marks which is pretty bad.

The reason basically is down to a combination of rather less clear questions and what appears to be quite a high number of iffy “correct” answers. In my own case I count six where the “correct” answer is rather iffy and three where it’s definitely wrong which equates to over 20% of the answers.

Naturally a lot of people are currently fuming about this. The response from the course team is that the explanatory paper will be released sometime next week. Somehow I think that’ll spark even more argument if a whole raft of the questions aren’t zero-rated.

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB flash drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such. Even more interesting was that a) Grub loaded and b) it was able to access all the files on the disk (you can try this via Grub’s ls and cat commands eg cat (hd0,6)/boot/grub/menu.lst).

Anyway, I thought I’d have a go at reinserting the drive. No luck, but since Grub could see the drive contents I thought I’d have a go at copying off the files. Nothing doing re booting the machine via the live USB flash with the drive in. However, it booted up fine with the drive taken out which in turn opened up the option of installing Ubuntu on a USB drive. That worked just fine.

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such.

Next step was booting the system up from the USB drive that I’d just created but with the old disk attached. That worked fine too and I figured it was off to buy a new drive. Last thing software-wise worth trying was to run the Ubuntu disk-utility on the old drive which sorted out whatever was the problem with it and it’s working fine now.

So minus a day or two of messing around but plus a fully bootable Ubuntu drive and fresh backup.