Foreign Perspectives

Prepaid cards seem to be breeding like rabbits around the world and every single one is different from the others in terms of charges, features and general usability.

Rather than trawl through all the cards that would pay me to recommend them to you as the majority of card comparison sites do, I’m just going to go through those that are “best” here and tell you why that they’re the best so that you’ll be able to choose which is best for your circumstances.

At the moment there are basically three types of card available:

1. Maestro cards;
2. Visa Electron cards; and
3. Mastercard debit cards.

All of the Maestro cards seem to charge you for the card and a number of them charge you an annual fee too for a card which is very limited in functionality. Therefore, it isn’t worth considering these any further.

At the moment there seem to be only two Visa Electron cards available aimed at the holiday market which is a shame as it’s a very useable card. The Post Office card is free to get, £5 to renew and costs £1.50 per UK withdrawal, £2 overseas; if you get the Euro or Dollar cards their “0% commission” works out at around 3.5% otherwise it’s 2.75% when you use, say, the dollar card in Europe. There’s a 1.5% charge to add money to the sterling card. The LloydsTSB costs £7.50, £5 to renew and costs £1.50 per withdrawal with a 2.75% currency exchange fee when used abroad; on the Euro or Dollar cards their “0% commission” should work out at a similar charge to the Post Office card (they don’t offer a sterling card). That £7.50 initial charge (waived if you have a LloydsTSB Silver account) and much wider availability means that the Post Office card will be best for most people.

The range of Mastercard debit cards is vast. The majority of these cards have a monthly or annual fee which makes those ones very expensive which is a shame as this is the most useful of the three types of prepaid card currently available. However, the FairFX card is free if you load £500 or more onto either their Euro or dollar cards or alternately via this link for £10 upwards (it’s £9.95 for a three year card otherwise) and costs £1/€1.50/$2 to withdraw cash (there’s no transaction charge for purchases). The card is renewed free if you top it up at least twice over the three year validity of the card, otherwise it’s £6/€9/$12. The ICE card is free to issue from £100/€100/$100, £1.75/€3/$3 to withdraw cash and charges 4% for all currency conversions. It’s renewed free if your balance on the card is at least £50 when renewal time comes up otherwise it’s £3/€5/$5. They charge £1.75 per purchase transaction when you use the sterling card in the UK but the euro/dollar cards are free to use for purchases everywhere and the sterling card is free to use everywhere except the UK for purchases. Purely on the published charges this makes the FairFX card the one to go for but it’s even better than that as they only charge about 1% for currency exchange.

So, which of all of these cards should you get?

1. The very clear winner is the FairFX card which is free to issue via this link, £1 per cash withdrawal and about 1% to convert the money to euros/dollars. If you load your card at least twice every three years (the topup when you get the card to begin with counts), renewals are free otherwise they’ll charge you £6. Topups are via debit card or bank transfer; in theory you can topup via credit card but FairFX charge you 1.5% to do this and you could get hit by cash advance fees from your bank too if you do this.
2. In second place comes the ICE card which is free to issue and renewed free if you have at least £50 on the card at renewal time, £1.75 per cash withdrawal and 4% to convert the money to euros/dollars. You can top-up online by credit/debit card or in their branches with cash, cheque or credit/debit card.
3. In third place comes the Post Office card because it’s free to issue, £5 every two years free to renew, £2 per cash withdrawal and about 3.5% to convert the money to euros/dollars. You can top-up the card with cash or credit/debit card in a Post Office branch or by phone or online with a credit/debit card. The big plus point of this one is that you can get it immediately from a Post Office branch so if you’re looking for a last minute card before you head off on holiday, this is the one to go for although do bear in mind that the card needs to be activated before use ie you can’t get one in the Post Office in the aiport, get on the plane and use it immediately in the resort.

What would I get myself? The FairFX card in that the charges are so low. This is a truly excellent card and if you remember to top-up twice every three years it’ll not cost you anything to operate. I’d also consider the Post Office card in that it’s useful to have both Visa and Mastercards as not everywhere takes both and you could come unstuck if you only took one.

For true emergency use the Post Office card comes into its own as you could get someone to get one for you in the Post Office and post/courrier it to you whilst you were on holiday.

You should consider these cards only as backup to your normal credit/debit cards. For use abroad, the best bet remains the Nationwide Building Society‘s Flexaccount (Visa debit or Cirrus) which has no charges at all for withdrawing cash or converting from sterling to any currency [sadly as of November 2010 it’s no longer free]. Alternatives to this are Abbey’s Zero Card (Visa or Mastercard) which appears to be even better than the Nationwide offer. Other credit cards with no foreign exchange fee include Thomas Cook (Mastercard), the Post Office (Mastercard) which charge nothing where-ever you are and Saga which charges nothing in Europe and 1% outside. Finally there’s the Egg Money card (Mastercard) which charges 2.75% for currency conversion but has no transaction charges for cash withdrawals and pays a quite respectable rate of interest when the account is in credit; it’s an excellent choice if you like to budget your holiday spending as you can use it like a savings account [sadly now one of the very worst cards to have after Citibank “improved” it].

I’m nearly through the first week of the course now which hasn’t taken quite so long as the 16 hours it suggests. It looks like about two to three hours will be enough to complete although the course hasn’t really quite started in the first unit of the course so that could change.

The first week is basically introducing the course although it doesn’t go overboard as there aren’t massive numbers of different booklets as some courses have these days. Some hand-holding is there too as this is billed as a potential first OU course but it’s not too onerous eg it tells you to read the book organisation section in the course book.

The first bits that you do are mainly introducing archaeology as a subject so there’s a few exercises on that interspersed with readings from the course text (hereinafter known as the doorstop) and listening to the first track from the CD. So it moves on from the “digging things up” aspect to introduce a few terms covering things like experimental archaeology and distinguishing it from history (anything relying on written records). It gives the impression that there’s a bit of fighting going on between the archaeologists and the historians over ownership of some parts of the past. Actual archaeology doesn’t start ’til the last reading of the week where it begins to introduce the development of agriculture or at least it seems to as I’ve not read that bit yet.

Going by the course guide, the course motors on at a fair rate. Work on the first TMA begins after three weeks of reading so I don’t think much is expected from the first one as there will only be about 2 1/2 weeks of reading for it. Thus far the reading is quite heavy going at the moment as it’s a totally new subject for me so there’s lots of new terminology.

I see from the website that I’ve just acquired a tutor. Rumour has it that the tutors are supposed to call in the week before the course officially starts although I don’t think there are any in-person tutorials with this course.

The package for this arrived the same day as the astronomy exam which gave me a chance to have a first look in that brain dead period following exams.

I wasn’t planning on having a look at it quite so soon but a look at the calendar changed that plan pretty sharpish. The first assignment is due in the first week of December, only four weeks after the course starts with the next ones due at the start of January and February with the ECA due on March 18th. The March 18th date suits me in some ways as it means this course will be finished before S204 gets fully under way and may get it completed earlier. Downside of that is that it’s a fairly hectic schedule for the archaeology course.

Anyway, what I’m going to try and do is to make a proper start on A251 this week and, perhaps, build on that two week lead time if I can. Slightly messing that up is that I also want to get the medicine course completed over the next couple of weeks too although I should be able to do that in my new “Kip McGrath” slot.

So what’s in the box? There’s the absolutely massive (784 pages) and heavy The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, the course guide, letter from the course team and the assignment booklet (unusual in these “everything online” days) plus a CD. Going by the course guide, the book is available in PDF on the website but that doesn’t open ’til the 28th so I’ll have to lug the doorstop round ’til then. Going by my brief flick through the early parts of the course guide, it requires access to online reference texts quite a lot.

The course guide seems to weave in the content of the course text in almost as though it were an OU written text which is good in the sense that it comes across almost as though a real-life tutor were sitting with you but not so good in that you need to cart both books around all the time (roll on the arrival of the PDF!). Actually, for a change they seem to have gone out of their way to write it as though you had the tutor beside you rather than the more formal OU style.

The time during the exam just flew in and for the first time ever I didn’t have the luxury of having enough time to check the answers. Having said that, I usually end up “correcting” things to the wrong answer when I’ve lots of time to play with. It was also amongst the most tiring exams that I’ve done too. Since it was effectively made up of around 70 short questions (ie 8 multiple choice, and six from eight short questions with up to 10 parts each) you needed to keep the concentration full-on right through the paper.

The multiple choice questions turned out to be generally quite doable and I’ve only one almost complete guess amongst them when my brain just couldn’t get around a question on red-shifts and Hubble’s constant. Overall on that I reckoned I picked up, on my pessimistic view, around 19.5% out of a possible 28% so half-way to a pass on that bit which was a good start.

Part two on the sun & stars book was generally fine and I could have had a reasonable stab at all four questions. It’s harder to estimate the performance on those ones so I reckoned something like another 18% from that although it could have been higher. Picking the third question turned out to require some thought as I couldn’t do 100% of either of the two remaining with certainty so I followed my thinking from last week and did the one where I could get the highest score rather than just plump for the one that was in my more comfortable topic area.

Part three on cosmology looked horrible at the start. I started off on my two least worst, choosing the one that I thought I could do most parts of first. As it turned out, that was actually my worst question in that section and I think I did really well on the two almost-essay questions in the hard-core cosmology bit. I say almost-essay as whilst the answer for them took the form of an essay the questions were effectively broken up into 15 parts for the second of the two (although it was the most essay-like of the two). Net effect is that for an essay question it looked easy to estimate the marks for it. In the exam I was estimating another 18% for this bit but I think it’ll be a little higher as I checked some of the stuff afterwards.

Taken overall that gives me a pessimistic estimate of around 60% which is nicely clear of the pass mark. High end mark? Maybe into the 70s but I’ll know better when the exam paper is released later this week.

What does seem clear from this is that it’s better to consider the second and third parts of the paper as if they were around 40 short questions that just happen to be presented in four groups. For instance, in one case the part that I couldn’t do in one question amounted to only 2 out of a possible 12 per cent. In fact, with that thinking it’s probably better to aim for the questions with the most parts.

Also notable is that in a lot of cases you had, say, part b (i) introducing a term then parts ii, iii, and iv went on to talk about things related to that. For example, you might have something say “define a black hole” whilst the next part asked what a massive star would leave behind. It’s going to be a black hole, isn’t it? (no, that’s not an actual question from the paper) Because of that, it definitely pays to read the whole question before answering any part of it.

Turnout was extremely low with only three from seven there. As one who’d not been pointed out this was a very lonely course without the proper number of tutorials and I think that contributed to the high dropout rate throughout the year.

Since the OU claim to have over 200,000 students enrolled in courses at any one time and with a sizeable number of those being quite computer literate, you’d think that there would be more than 15 active blogs written by their students. So where are they?

Although I don’t constantly trawl for them, the 14 that are currently listed in the blog roll are all the active ones that I’ve found and includes those pinched from the blog rolls of those on the list plus some more who are no longer active. Those that aren’t actively writing include some who have completed their courses and don’t seem to be continuing with the blog at the moment.

There’s also at least one OU tutor who went and deleted what was far and away the best ever advert that A207 has had in the form of a blog that she ran whilst tutoring the course. Not only did she stop writing it when she finished her tutoring roll but she deleted it altogether. Why do people do stuff like that? I’d bookmarked it for the day when I get around to doing the course and now it’s gone 🙁

And then there’s the bloggers who run out of steam for one reason or another. That happens to bloggers everywhere so I guess it’s no different when it’s OU bloggers that are no different though with the added issues of time pressure from the degree itself.

But none of that really explains why there are so few OU bloggers around. With 200k students to draw upon I’d have expected at least 100 and perhaps even more given that many of the courses offered are all about writing.