Foreign Perspectives

Usually university open days are held on the campus and you get to ask questions of some of the lecturers who you’ll meet should you take up the offer from the university.

However, the Open University doesn’t work like that as the lecturers are all based in Milton Keynes and outside of summer schools you won’t meet the people who actually produce the courses. What happens on an OU open day is that you get to see a whole bunch of specialist study advisers. Essentially there’s one person for each prospectus thus there’ll be someone for maths/computing, technology, art, science, etc. along with some more people able to deal with more general questions.

Thus it’s not necessarily as useful as it might be. Certainly it’s handy for fairly specific questions about the faculties but if you have a very specific question about a specific course you’ll get an answer if it’s a popular course but not necessarily if it’s one of the oddball ones. Having said that, the people there can put you in touch with someone who can answer questions about those oddball courses too so it’s handy in that respect.

The other problem is that the advisers tend not to know about what’s happening to specific courses outside what’s said on the website about those courses. So, for example, in the science field they’ll know that S204 (the main biology course) is being replaced by two 30 point courses and that one of these is starting in February 2012. What they won’t know is that it’s now looking possible that the second course will never appear (if the forum information is anything to go by).

This recession is turning into a much longer and deeper one than anyone expected which is becoming more visible to a wider range of people as time goes on.

Individual house sales are a fairly rare event for most people so we’re still seeing people putting houses on the market at prices based on a purchase price from a few years ago which, in many cases, was a higher price than the current market will support. That houses won’t sell at these prices is obvious but in many cases the owners simply can’t afford to sell them at the current prices so they add to the collection of “for sale” signs which in turn make things seem a little bit worse as their numbers build. As an example of how far away from the current prices these can be take the example of a house a few hundred yards from me which was bought at the peak of the market at around £300,000 whereas identical houses are now selling (slowly) for around £170,000. Had those people bought on an 80% mortgage they’d need house prices to rise another 40% from their current level just to cover the mortgage.

However, even when houses are priced at an appropriate level that still doesn’t mean that they’ll sell quickly as once a buyer is found and the house is taken off the market it’s quite likely to get the “for sale” sign back as buyers frequently can’t get mortgages: in one local case it took three buyers before reaching one who could get a mortgage.

Sadly all this means that people will be stuck in their houses potentially for decades if they can’t simply write off what could be a substantial loss.

If you’re a young driver then insurance companies are basically going to assume that you’re a bad driver simply because of the statistics.

However, clearly not all young drivers are bad drivers. But if you’re one of the good ones, your problem up to now has been proving it. That’s where technology has finally come in for young drivers car insurance in the form of what’s essentially a consumer version of the device installed in trucks to keep track of the driving habits of the professional drivers.

What this does is to record your driving so it’ll keep track of the length of your journies, your speed, how fast you accelerate and brake, etc. From this the insurance company doesn’t need to assume anything about your driving as they can see exactly how you drive which, hopefully, will lead to lower insurance rates for those young drivers who are good drivers.

We’re not quite fully back into the swing of the school run yet as we have yet to adjust to the different route to the new school though we managed to get there on time today for a change.

The kids are fully into their new school uniform now with the bags properly full of the appropriate things for school rather than the accumulated junk that they had acquired over the course of the previous school year. James seems content enough which I suspect is mainly down to him knowing that he’d have to go to a new school anyway. John still isn’t too happy about the change so it’ll likely be another week or two before he adjusts.

It’s a little strange for me too with the kids going to my old school. Although it’s been 39 years since I was there it hasn’t changed a whole lot. They’ve updated the entrance and the desks aren’t the little school desks any more but the biggest practical changes are that they boys don’t wear short trousers now and there’s a roof on the toilets.

Parking-wise we can’t use the old parking space as my granny’s street was demolished 10 years ago and replaced with a totally different arrangement of housing which has messed up everyone as it’s no longer possible to swing down the street and there’s a bit of dodgy three point turns required every morning and afternoon these days.

In computing you’re constantly on a treadmill to keep up with the latest technologies.

That’s not so bad if your employer has been good enough to keep you on some kind of development programme but, of course, these days fewer employers are willing or able to afford to do that. Not only do they have the perennial problem that you might up sticks and move on right after an expensive training programme but there’s the added problem of financing it in these difficult economic times.

Usually these courses cost an absolute fortune so paying for them yourself isn’t an option. However, there are a number of more affordable versions of some of these around these days including fairly general ones like those on Java and Visual Basic through to rather more specific (and quickly dating) ones like Microsoft server technologies all for around £400 for a course running over nine months. Where you get into bigger bucks is in the networking courses with CISCO networking at £850 (albeit a rather larger course than the earlier ones) and Advanced routing at £1250.

Sadly the best all-rounder, a suite of six courses that make up the Certificate in Web Applications Development is just about to commence its final run. This was one of the experimental formats designed to be easily updated which seemingly wasn’t nearly so easy to update as anticipated (ie they probably lost a fortune on it). What’s interesting about this one is that whilst the later modules received a fair amount of criticism, the websites that the students produced are rather good.