Foreign Perspectives

In a typical tutor group forum out of a possible 25-30 users you’re lucky if you get four or five people participating and even then that participation is generally limited to an introductory comment at the start of the course and perhaps one or two replies later on.

Thus in my current astronomy course there are 60 forum comments of which 46 are from the tutor, seven from me and one from each of six other people. In fact, nobody replied to anyone else’s comment over the eight months of the course. Although we’re down to around 15 students now that should still be enough to get some responses.

However, TT280 is at the other extreme. For that the “tutor group” encompasses the entire course (several hundred people I think) which is far too many to keep track of. For instance, the week one seminar which only opened yesterday now has getting on for 200 messages on it. Somehow I doubt that many people have read them all or have any intention of trying to.

Where there does, so far, seem to be a happy medium is in the fast track forum which has only 13 messages on it so far. It’s the one aimed at people who are running up to three weeks ahead of the course timetable. I had sort-of expected that there would be more people participating in that but it would appear that it’s something like 50-ish out of the 1000-ish people on the course (taking the seemingly typical 20% forum participation rate as a guideline) or around 5% of the student cohort.

Already there’s a sign that some people are going to miss the wood for the trees in a big way. For instance, on the accessibility thread everyone is trying to find reasons why you should bother making websites accessible to (mainly) the blind and has totally missed what is by far the most important commercial reason which is that search engines are effectively blind. Thus, if you run up a site entirely in flash (which is surprisingly commonly done), then it’s basically invisible to google et al. From the other end, the tutors are trumpeting the OU rule that assignments can’t be distributed or published in any form yet 1) Nick Athanasiou, one of the students on the Advanced Creative Writing course has had the play written for his assignment performed (and this is even mentioned by the OU) and 2) the main reason for not publishing was related to the potential for plagiarism by future students which can’t happen for TT280 as this is the final run of the course.

Normally I’d be working on TT280 at this point but thanks to the drip-feeding of material I’m as far ahead as I can really go. Well, aside from the first computer marked assignment but I can’t submit that for another week or two anyway so I’ll finish it off during the week.

The two little guys get assessed at the Kip centre this afternoon for both maths and English though we’ve not actually decided on jumping ship from Kumon as yet.

Whereas Kumon is by and large a franchised very standardised system, Kip is supposed to be more tuned to the child and is much more of a franchised tutoring system than Kumon. That in itself brings significant differences eg the Kumon franchisees can come from any walk of life whereas the Kip people are generally from a teaching background. I suspect there’s probably more variability between Kip franchises as a result of that but that’s something that you’d not notice unless you changed from one to another at some stage.

The standardisation in Kumon should make it more scalable but, as we’ve seen, there are limits to that. Since Kip sets limits to the class size there’s an overall maximum number of students that can be taken on by a single franchise eg given that it’s an after school thing, there’s a maximum of around four classes a day (they’re 80 minutes long) ie around 25 kids per day.

As with Kumon, they only do maths and English but rather than a single fixed sequence of things to go through, there are a range of classes from pre-school through to university level and special interest ones too like English as a second language and intensive versions.

At this point, I think we’ll likely move James over to Kip completely and probably leave John doing just the English with Kumon but we’ll see how the assessment and costs pan out.

Since the Open University basically sells its wares online, obviously a lot of effort goes into making sure course descriptions are as accurate and complete as possible.

Thus, not only do you get a description of what the course teaches but you get sections on the entry requirement (ie what experience/knowledge you need in advance), the qualifications that the course can be included in, any issues that could arise if you’re disabled, what course materials you get, how the teaching and assessment work and other courses that those taking this course took. As well as this there are often links to course tasters and reviews of the course by previous students. In short, a whole lot of information about the course.

The problem is that the course reviews for some courses are very misleading. It’s not that they’re intentionally so but that they are, understandably, written with the background of the reviewer in mind. Thus, for example, Exploring English (U211) comes across as a very difficult course that will take much more than the recommended 16 hours a week to complete. Yet, I actually completed the course in around 3 hours per week. How come? Well, the majority of people doing that course come from an English literature background and it’s a language course. I came from a foreign languages background and thus had come across the majority of the concepts before so making the work rather easy.

In a similar vein, Web Applications (TT280) which I’m doing at the moment has received a string of really bad reviews yet when you read blogs about it, they seem to be talking about a completely different course. Part of that is down to changes that have been made in the course over the years but a larger part is down to this being an almost entirely online course. Now you might think that those doing a web apps course would be more likely than normal students to expect to be reading things from a computer screen but many of the complaints are from people who couldn’t and gave off at having to print off mountains of paper. Similarly, you whilst you’d want such a course to be quite up to date, other complaints are that parts were being written as the course was being run which is obviously as up to date as you’re likely to get. Still more complained about the extremely high workload yet I’m three weeks ahead in less than one week and haven’t been knocking myself out doing that either. Very much a love it or loathe it course I think.

What’s really needed is a short background to the people making these comments though I guess that would be problematical with data protection these days. It’s, of course, why the most useful comments are from bloggers where you can usually get a flavour of their background.

The Connswater greenway is a project which will, over the course of the next two or three years, link up pretty much all of the existing smattering of parks and walkways from the Titanic quarter through to the Castlereagh hills.

Although it’s an area that I’ve been in and around for most of my life their booklet highlights a whole bunch of things that I never knew existed. In fact, it comes across as a much more interesting area than you would expect, picking out as it does interests ranging from George Best’s home and Van Morrison’s home and haunts through to a 400 year old bridge in what it a fairly compact area.

That bridge is the most surprising for me as I went to school right beside it yet never knew of its existence until Wednesday morning! To be fair, it doesn’t look that impressive these days but then ancient footbridges rarely do and this one crosses the river at a point where the flow tends to collect a whole heap of junk ranging from fallen branches through to the Tesco trolley which seem to get everywhere these days.

Whilst the majority of the open spaces exist already, many of them have seen better days and the walkways have generally fallen into disuse over the years. Thus one of the major tasks of the project is to spruce up what’s already there which is no small task given the span of the greenway. This will include re-routing some of the stretches of river to both create a more typical meandering look and to sort out the flooding problem that arises along some sections of the rivers. In addition to all the prettying up the playgrounds scattered along the route will have their numbers increased somewhat and upgrades to those that are already there.

One of the most staggering figures that was quoted in the presentation on Wednesday was that over 50% of the population in the area is “economically inactive” ie there’s a very high level of unemployment. Whilst this project won’t directly change that, it should help to pretty up the area substantially which may in turn attract more businesses to move to what was once an area with close to 100% employment thanks to the shipyard, aircraft factory and all the supporting businesses which they drew in.

Largely because it’s a course that I need to think about I’ve not established a proper time slot for it yet so the work on it has been slipping back over the last few weeks.

That said, I’m over half way through it so over the point where it’s worthwhile having a look at the ECA. Since the first submission date is the end of October which clashes with the astronomy exam and the first web development CMA I thought that I’d aim for the second date which is the end of January. If nothing else, that gives me the option of backpedalling a little with the course if needbe.

Anyway, I’ve made a start on the ECA as some of the questions relate to chapters relatively early on in the book and should be able to complete the first question sometime this week and perhaps part of the second one. Unlike in other courses the questions don’t follow a neat progression through the course so it’s not entirely clear in advance what questions you’d be able to answer by the time you’ve reached any given chapter. That contributes to making it a little more difficult to do than typical short courses are and there’s also more of an element of needing to understand things generally with this course than I’ve seen before on a short course too. It’s not that the questions are overlly difficult but you definitely need to think more about this course than is usual for the short courses at this level which, of course, is no bad thing and should help me when I start the big chemistry course this time next year.

At the moment it’s starting to look like I would be able to hit the first submission date but since I’ve started on the ECA for the second date I’ll just be plugging away with that and I’ll hang on to it ’til December when I can submit it. Having said that, I may have a look at the earlier ECA if I finish the course really early.

It covers some ground that I did way back in the anaesthetics section of A-level chemistry many years ago but in more detail. Thus, whereas the A-level largely concentrated on telling the story of the development of modern anaesthetics, SK185 tells that story but goes on to explain how the various compounds were developed. Fascinating both in terms of the story, of how the chemicals work and how one goes about developing a new medicine. Very much a recommended course if you’re at all interested in how things like painkillers actually work.