Foreign Perspectives

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.

Christian beliefs and the law came into conflict back in 2008 when an openly gay couple turned up to stay at a B&B in Cornwall and were turned away because they were gay and the owners did not believe in unmarried couples sharing a bed. To complicate it a little more the couple were in a registered partnership which, supposedly, is equivalent to marriage however that aside the beliefs of the owners wouldn’t have counted that as a marriage anyway.

They lost their case today but have leave to appeal essentially because there’s quite a conflict between the gay couple’s right to stay and the owners right to their religious beliefs. This is merely the first round. In one corner we have the Equality Commission and in the other, the Christian movement around the world.

The problem in this case is that both the couple and the owners are “right”.

The couple are right legally in that it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and morally right as it seems wrong and intrusive to be enquiring about one’s sexual orientation. Do they ask the marital status of everyone checking in? After all, many heterosexual couples who’ve been living together for a long time would come across as being married so it wouldn’t be as simple as picking out a gay couple as opposed to two male friends who were travelling around together.

The owners are right both legally and morally too though. After all, article 9 of the human rights convention is very clear about one’s right of freedom of thought, conscience and religion:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Morally they seem to be right too in that clearly a gay couple in a bed was a major conflict with their own beliefs.

Given that they’re both right it would have obviously been better if the conflict between them hadn’t arisen. There are a great number of gay friendly establishments for the couple to have stayed with and likewise there are a large number of married couples to have stayed at the B&B. What needed to be cleared was that the establishment was a Christian owned one (there’s nothing on their website to indicate that) although I suspect that they could do little more than that: a “no unmarried couples” policy would probably be illegal.

This is one case that we’ll likely hear a lot more of in the years to come as it trundles along to the highest courts.

There’s just been more and more stuff that simply didn’t work on 10.10 with the last straw being VirtualBox which I’m going to need in a couple of weeks.

So time to work out how to downgrade. The easy way is to backup everything, install 10.04 and restore everything which is what I did on the baby computer a month or two back. Well, I say easy but it takes me a couple of hours to do the backup on the main computer, another couple of hours to restore and then there’s all the software to install and configure.

The backup is a “good thing” so if nothing else it forced me to prepare a full backup which I’m not as diligent with as I should be. The reinstallation and configuration I can’t avoid. Which leaves the hassle of restoring the thing so I had a look around to see how to avoid that.

It turns out that there’s a feature that’s been in Ubuntu for a while now that allows you to install over the top of another version (newer or older) though you need to have a think about what you’re doing as you go rather than just clicking on everything. Well, in theory the feature is there but in practice it doesn’t work for everyone (more testing required I think) and didn’t for me. Worth trying though as it only takes about 10 minutes: just install as normal to the point where it asks about partitioning then select manual partitioning, select what was your old root file system and set the properties (don’t click the “format” box!) and that’s it. Takes a little longer than a normal install as it needs to delete conflicting system files (but apparently doesn’t do this entirely correctly).

Anyway, ’tis off to reinstall and reconfigure everything. First up being the annoying window control boxes on the left which is fixed as follows:

1. alt+F2
2. gconf-editor
3. Go to apps->metacity->general and change the button layout to: “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

After a bit of nagging and prompting, Wendy got around to filling the application for the Art and its histories (AA100) course several months ago.

One major complication in the application was her nationality in that it’s Australian and so non-European. That meant that we had a bit of a job showing the Open University that she was eligible for the UK fees. Although you’re supposed to have been living in Europe for the previous three years and in the UK at the time you apply, in practical terms the OU seem to assume that anyone British or Irish and quoting a UK address has been living here forever.

Wendy however needed to show that she was living in Europe for the previous three years. That might sound simple but in practical terms it isn’t in our case. The usual proof would be stamps in her passport but there aren’t any appropriate ones as the immigration people aren’t allowed to stamp her passport since she has a European residence permit (well, the entitlement to one as it hasn’t arrived yet).

What seemed to happen in the end when we made the final phone call was the manager handling applications figured that it was easier to just mark her as eligible for UK fees and thus bring in another £650 for the OU rather than worry too much about the lack of normal proofs that she has been in Europe for getting on for 10 years.

Anyway, we’re now organising the books for her and the course texts should be here in the next week or so.

The end of the intense overlap of courses seems to be coming all of a sudden as these things often appear to do.

Yesterday, I finally got around to completing the medicine, molecules and drugs (SK185) end of course assessment. One of the more interesting courses that I’ve done in a long time and one which reawakened my interest in chemistry.

I’ve two more weeks of reading of the world archaeology (A251) course to do after which there will “only” be the final TMA (due in two weeks) before getting going on the end of course assessment for it. That’s one course that I definitely wouldn’t want to even contemplate doing an exam for given the sheer volume of reading that the course entails. Having said that, it’s a course that gives a very interesting view of the development of agriculture, cities and empires throughout the world and over a massive timescale. I’d have preferred it if they’d ran the course over the usual 9 month timetable rather than the rather rushed five month one as there’s a lot in the course that I’d have liked to have had the time to properly absorb.

I also finished the reading for The empire of the microbes (S171) course on Thursday and made a reasonable start on the end of course assessment on Friday and, all being well, should get completed over the course of the next few weeks. Already I’m finding that there is a lot of cross-over with the main biology course (S204) which I’ve just started. Although in principle I could submit the January ECA I’m actually going to do the April one and just hang on to it ’til March when it can be submitted.

In principle that should “just” leave me with S204 (a major undertaking) and TT281 (hopefully a reasonably easy going course) to run through to May. If my calculations are correct the workload of those two combined should be somewhat less than that of the previous couple of months.