Foreign Perspectives

It’s been over six months since I last heard from my previous employer (who I’m still notionally working for) so I was a bit taken aback to get a phone call telling me of two potential jobs.

Even more oddly, both seem quite reasonable jobs too and not wildly out of line with my previous experience either which is itself quite unusual.

The first one seems like a normal systems analyst job for the most part. I’m a bit wary of it though as some parts of the job description seem to indicate that it’s aimed at an insider so I don’t really rate my chances with it.

Slightly oddly given my own situation the second one is a secondment which I’m sure will complicate life a bit and also has the problem that there’s an end date for it with no obvious route “back”. That said, it’s an almost perfect fit for me or seems to me to be anyway. Whether it’ll seem so to them is, of course, a different matter.

Whatever the result, if nothing else it shows that they’ve not completely forgotten about me.

The OU World Archaeology (A251) course is a peculiar beastie in many ways.

For a start, it’s a 30 point course which would normally mean that it would run either February to October or October to June. Instead it runs November to March which is a bit out of sync with other courses and also means that it runs at around a 60 point workload.

That “60 point” workload for a 30 point course means that it feels like it’s racing along, often at a headlong pace. Thus we covered the development of agriculture, cities and empires in three separate four week chunks and have an assignment every month.

The style of assignment changes radically too. The first one was the usual OU assignment based on the course texts, the second required a small research element outside the texts, the third requires a small amount from the texts and a lot of research and the final one looks like it will be all research. Quite a progression and one that finds me needing to do a lot more work for the third assignment due this week than I did for the previous two. The final one is supposed to run over three weeks rather than the one week for each of the previous ones.

On the whole though it feels more and more like you’re doing real archaeology, digging out information for yourself. The downside of that is that it means that this isn’t a course to be taken as lightly as many people do. It looks like an interesting course that you can just slot into even the tightest timetable but in reality it’s rather a full course with frequently massive amounts of reading to be done and increasing amounts of work to be done for assignments as the course progresses.

For all that, it is an interesting course. I just wish that they’d scheduled it over the normal 9 month timetable. That would have let me wallow in some of the topics it covers rather than just watch them race by.

That used to be the standard question when international phone calls first became commonplace several decades ago.

Frankly, with so little contact, there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about. Just as well really with the costs of international phone calls being at totally crazy prices back then.

It’s different now of course with international calls frequently being cheaper than even local rate calls. No, really: check the tariffs from your phone company and compare against some of the cheap calling services. Right now our normal local rate is around 7p a minute but it only costs us 2p a minute to call Australia!

However, despite the increased number of calls, the “what time is it” question still gets asked a lot in our household. You’d think we’d have gotten the hang of time differences by now, wouldn’t you?

We were all revved up for a decisive meeting with the solicitor this morning, nicely spruced up look, early departure to be sure to be there on time and all that. In fact we were so early that there was time for a really nice cooked breakfast which turned out to be surprisingly cheap.

Anyway, the appointed time arrived and a signature was collected. Well, these things always need a signature at some point, don’t they? Not too long after that we were called in and figured we were all set to go.

Well, it turns out that the other party couldn’t be contacted by their representative despite a number of attempts so the whole thing is adjourned until next week to give them a final opportunity. At the moment though it looks like the whole thing could fall through which is good for us though ’tis rather annoying to have had to collect everything together and for naught.

Which left us at a loose end quite early in the morning. All worked up to go for it and nothing to go for.

Oh well. At least it gave us a chance to have a relaxed morning for a change.

If you’re starting with one of the main Open University level 1 courses, there can be quite a daunting amount of things to do before the course begins.

Wendy has just received her box of AA100 course texts and the course website opened yesterday too.

It’s one of those courses that is intended to be your first course with the university so there’s much more handholding material than you normally get from them. So much more in this case that I found it at an annoying level when leafing through the course guide although obviously whether you find it annoyingly helpful or just helpful will depend on you and your previous experiences.

Less helpful for a beginner was the amount of stuff on the course website. As a die-hard OU student I know that one of the most useful things that you can do is to get all the course resources downloaded onto your computer but in the case of AA100 that’s the task of several hours as there’s so much of it ranging from the course texts and course guides that most courses have these days through to a massive number of MP3 files. In tandem with that there’s the three DVDs and four DVDROMS that are handy to have on the computer too. You could spread all this copying over the duration of the course but it’s a lot easier to get it over and done with at the outset leaving “just” the course to deal with over the coming months. It also highlights any problems with the materials early and thus gives you more time to get any issues sorted out eg in Wendy’s case, the assessment CD was unreadable.

Worth checking too is that you have all the materials. In Wendy’s case that amounts to six books, four boxes of CDs/DVDs, an assessment DVD and a number of brochures. Newer courses tend to have more bits and pieces than older ones although these days increasing amounts of material are only available online.

Before you panic with the volume (and in some cases there’s a lot of volume: I could hardly lift the S204 box), after you’ve checked that everything is there, it’s best to start with reading the letter from the course team which’ll tell you a little bit about what you have in front of you. After that, it’s the course guide that’s the place to start. What you need to do next varies a lot between courses eg for AA100 there’s only one course guide so the course calendar or course map is your next port of call, S204 is such a large course that there’s an overall course guide and six separate unit guides.

Not too long after the course website opens you’ll find that you’ve acquired a tutor and, if your course has them, tutorial dates. Although you should aim to get to them all the really essential ones are the first one where study groups may get formed and the last one which concentrates on the exam. The in between tutorials usually discuss points related to the assignments.