Foreign Perspectives

Thanks to our Kumon centre taking on rather too many new students than they seem to be able to cope with and hence arbitrarily halving the number of worksheets per session (without reducing the fees, of course), we’ve been looking around at other options.

The Kumon issue arose because there’s no set limit to the number of students that a given centre can take on. Thus, with a sudden increase in numbers following the free trial at the end of August, the numbers in the class seemed to pretty much double. Due to the way the in-class marking is handled that in turn meant that the time taken to get through the work in class went up from around 40 minutes for our guys to over an hour which might not sound like much of an increase but had the overall effect that there just wasn’t enough time to get through all the students. Rather than recruit more supervisors, the centre just halved the number of worksheets so that 60 minute time-slot now takes about 30 minutes.

So we’ve started looking for something similar that places explicit limits on the maximum number of students that they can take on. That’s thrown up Kip McGrath which operates rather differently in that rather than trying to run the kids through a standardised programme, they tailor their programmes to the children and there’s a maximum of six per class. Anyway, we’re getting the kids assessed for their programme later this week.

Ironically, we would have stuck with Kumon as it showed steady progress for the kids but it’s just too expensive for what they’re providing at the moment.

Courses that are largely online are even more difficult to judge ahead of time than book based courses.

You might think that student reviews would be a good place to start in assessing how long a course will take to do but in reality it’s very much based on your prior knowledge and experience. Thus whilst the comments on U211 a few years back indicated that it took getting on for 20 hours a week to do, in reality it rarely took me more than three ie about 1/5th of the recommended time of 16 hours. It looks like TT280 will be even worse. The OU guideline is 8 hours, which I usually divide by two, but I finished the first three weeks worth of work in something like three or four hours (and, no, I didn’t skip things). That leaves me with just one chapter of the book to read to complete week three which is as far as I can go ’til October the 1st when the first CMA is released.

One of the exercises was to run a W3C validation on a website. For that I thought that I’d give some of my own websites a spin. Turns out that the one with the most problems is this one and all because of some of the plugins that I use; my completely DIY inns sites were fine apart from a couple of typing mistakes.

Anyway, all being well, I’ll be able to maintain this pace in future courses in the web development certificate as I’ll be running some of them alongside quite a heavy workload. The medicine course is slipping back a ways at the moment though I’m still on schedule to complete it sometime in October even with my “pottering along” pace.

Friday was Culture Night in Belfast which means a very, very packed night of entertainment all over the city and all free too.

We took the opportunity to finish off some things that we didn’t manage to fit in to the Heritage Weekend earlier in the month. The easy way to include them turned out to be to go on one of the three Community Taster Tours. The listing for these was a little confusing in the booklet about the culture night but it turned out that there were three entirely different tours to choose from, each lasting three hours.

For our purposes the 4pm tour seemed best in that it included the Titanic pump house which we’d missed out on earlier and which normally has a very confusing car parking arrangement that seems best avoided. Surprisingly the tours weren’t anything like fully booked and we found ourselves on an open top bus that didn’t even have a dozen people on it.

Frankly the pump house was a major disappointment. Effectively it’s a small, very overpriced, cafe with one stand containing an assortment of Titanic gifts and a dozen or so panels about various aspects of the Titanic spaced around a very bare room. Next stop was the Engine Room Gallery which is nowhere near the Titanic area as you might expect but instead at Hollywood Arches.

From there we were off to what was supposed to be an Ulster Scots event at the Spectrum Centre on the Shankill Road. Unfortunately the organisation fell apart at that point so we only saw the Lambeg drummer and didn’t see the highland dancing, the flute band nor the lone piper.

Finally, it was on to the Indian Community Centre where they were rather optimistic about the amount that could be included in the short time available. Thus we missed out on the henna and sari demonstration, Hindi class information, Indian dance and musical performance and we just about managed to fit in the Indian tea, food and snacks.

Although three hours seemed like an awfully long time for a bus tour round Belfast when we read about it in the brochure, in practice the time just flew in and really it needed to be around twice as long to do justice to everything but then that’s only to be expected of a taster tour. In fact, it was almost perfect as a taster and has highlighted a couple of places that we will be revisiting at the next opportunity.

By the time we got back, it was almost the perfect time to go on the tour round the offices of the Belfast Telegraph. No smell of fire and brimstone as you sort-of expect from seeing newspaper back-offices in movies but rather a very automated newspaper production factory. Sadly we didn’t get to see the presses running as they don’t kick off ’til a couple of hours after the tours finish but a very interesting tour nonetheless and the hour just flew in.

Both the little guys were running on empty by this point so we finished off with a brief look round some of the activities going on before heading home.

The Open University TT courses are a set of six courses on various aspects of web development making up the web development certificate. Sadly, it proved a form of course that was a) too hard to keep updated sufficiently frequently and b) not sufficiently attractive to students towards the latter end of the certificate (a recent run had 800+ on the first course, 80 on the penultimate).

Anyway, as a result of that I’ve just started on what’s the final run of the suite of courses. The first one is TT280 which seems to be essentially a run through of XHTML and CSS along with a lot of related stuff such as the various web standards (boy, are they long, or what?).

Supposedly this course should take around 8 hours a week but it looks like I’ll be scooting through at more like two hours a week as I’ve already finished the first week’s worth of material (yes, all of it) this morning and that included downloading the first four weeks of material. One thing about this course that is a real pain is that the material is drip-fed week by week so that you can’t run more than four weeks ahead of the official schedule. Thus in place of my normal complete download of the course at the start, I’ll need to download a weeks worth every week from now on. The first of the Computer Marked Assignments (CMAs) won’t be available ’til next week which is something else that I don’t like as I always like a look at what’s expected early on in a course.

The course has heaps of references outside the course material if the first week is anything to go by. So, although I’ve “everything” downloaded I ended up having to read through the course guide online and download the additional documents as I was going along. That multiple document format is typical of the OU material (because it gets you more engaged in your learning) but having to be online as you read the course guide simply so that you can go off to another website for material is a bit of a nuisance. Still, it has saved a few hundred quid as I initially thought that this was the course that would force the purchase of one of the Android tablets. Oh well, I guess I might have to wait for Christmas.

One ongoing awkward part of the suite of courses is that I’m having to add them on top of my nicely planned out schedule which will be particularly difficult at some points. For instance, I’m having to start this course before the astronomy course is out of the way since the first CMA is due about a week after the astronomy exam. And, of course, there’s the medicine course as well though doing that whilst the kids are in their Kumon class seems to be working out quite well.

The kids new school has what they somewhat confusingly call the Community Room. It grew out of an initiative a few years back to establish links with the local community.

It’s different from the PTA in a number of aspects. For one thing, it meets every Wednesday morning for about 90 minutes rather than once in the evening every couple of months. That of itself means that the make-up of the group is largely mothers with a few fathers and grandmothers (not to mention around a dozen pre-school kids). To some extent that almost makes it a parents and toddlers group and it does take a bit of effort to steer things away from that.

The regular meetings mean that relationships are established much more quickly than in the PTA and similar groups but more importantly it means that it’s easier to organise events through this group. Thus, one of the interests at the moment is in setting up some courses to help the parents with the homework that’s starting to arrive in surprisingly large amounts. The courses run over six weeks so a regular setting is required for such things. Somewhat overlapping with the PTA there are a series of events organised by way of this group with the first one being Halloween. That’s a little confusing as there will be two events happening: one directly for the school and one only for the community group and their families.

As well as the larger courses we were treated to a basic first aid for children course this morning which covered a whole bunch of stuff that falls into the category of “stuff that you should know but hope you’ll never need to know”. So, it covered CPR, choking, bleeding, meningitis and what to do with teeth knocked out, which made for a very full 90 minutes! On the meningitis front, the deciders are if your child is getting bad fast and if they’ve cold hands and cold feet: calling 999 is the way to go if that’s happening.

Although the group was established as a means of establishing links with the local community, it seems to have become a kind of “year 8” class for the parents which is no bad thing as it will help with the kids’ education.