Foreign Perspectives

Due to a peculiar combination of circumstances, I find myself doing four courses simultaneously at the moment which doesn’t seem like an overly good idea on the face of it.

However, whilst I’m now at the “worst” of it with three assignments due over a two week period about a month from now, it doesn’t seem that bad in practice. That’s down to planning (or “panicking early” as some would say) in that I’m running more than a month ahead with all but one of the course texts and have, in principle, a couple of weeks slack to play with if need be.

What’s taking a surprising amount of time is the cardiology course which, as a level one 15 point course, should be taking the least. The final assignment for that looks like it’ll take getting on for twice the time that the comparable assignments in the two level two 30 point courses will take. That’s not so surprising with hindsight in some ways though: 15 point courses aren’t long 10 pointers but 30 point courses done over half the time which in turn means that I’m effectively doing 100 points worth of courses right now.

Still, one of the four finishes next month and another the month afterwards so I’ll be back to a normal workload for a while.

Although I’ve just got the second human biology assignment back that’s enough to get me over the pass mark. Well, apart from the exam that is.

Since I don’t now need to submit any more assignments (there are two to go) any that I do submit can only serve to increase the overall mark which is a nice place to be in. If nothing else, it removes any assignment pressure that there has been to date.

That’s not to say that I won’t be working to improve the mark in the last couple of assignments. The marks have been good but not evenly distributed amongst the various sections of the assignments which means that there’s a lot of marks still to be had and, seemingly, the majority of them relatively easily since I’ve been doing rather well in what’s arguably the hardest question category and not so well in the one that should be easiest.

I’ll have to get going on the next assignment this week as otherwise I’ve assignments for three separate courses due in the third week of March which is a pile-up that I’d much rather avoid.

“Ok, I’m high IQ and easily bored” is how a recent comment on one of the Open University forums begain and it pretty much immediately sparked off something of a war which is still running. I’ll grant that the original poster was rather insensitive to say the least in her post but it is an interesting topic.

To begin with the OU is an open access outfit which means that for almost all courses you don’t need to provide any kind of proof that you can do them before you sign up. The net effect of this is that the dropout rate in first year courses in any subject is generally 40 to 50%. This isn’t solely because people are signing up for courses that they just don’t have the brainpower to do though. As with all part-time courses the dropout rate is a little higher because people have real lives that interfere with their studies. And, of course, there’s quite a lot of people who sign up for courses and don’t fully appreciate what’s involved before they begin.

But, does a high IQ actually help you when you’re studying? Well, yes, obviously it does. The question though is just how much it helps and that’s a more difficult question. One that I suspect is impossible to answer before you’ve tried out one of the OU courses.

From my own experience, it would appear that you can try out just about any course to get a general feel for how well you will do with them taking into account your IQ and indeed all your personal experiences. For example, although the OU recommend around 16 hours per week for a 60 point course and 8 for a 30 point course, I find that in most cases I need less than half that time. The one exception was a 60 point English course which I managed with about 3 hours a week vs the 16 recommended.

Obviously the IQ will be a significant factor in helping you to understand material that is radically different from anything you’ve done before. However, don’t underestimate the effect of previous experience. The reason that English course took 3 hours a week rather than the six or seven that I’d expected was that I’d done similar work in French & Spanish to that in parts of the English course. Similarly, I am going through my current astronomy course at a frightening rate because I’ve met a number of the concepts before.

So, yes, a high IQ will certainly help with the OU as it does everywhere else. However, don’t underestimate the benefit that you’ll get from prior experience of the subject as that seems, for me, to be at least as significant.

We’re all used to the price of computers and electronic items generally dropping in price over the years but it happens to some surprising items outside that arena too.

One major example I spotted lately was the Encyclopedia Britannica. Way back in 1981 that cost £600 for the full set yet now you can pick up the 2007 equivalent for £450. Granted, that’s on an offer at the moment but even without that offer it’s still only £745 (although, oddly, the 2010 edition is only £712!). That gets you a LOT of books: the 32000 pages spread over 32 volumes add up to over four feet of shelf space and weigh in at over 60 kilos.

Yeah, I know, people tend to look towards DVD or online versions of these things these days and, yes, I know that the paper one will date a whole lot but I still quite like having the books sitting there to leaf through. Besides, in reality, knowledge doesn’t really date that quickly. Sure, the likes of the Haiti disaster won’t be in even the 2010 edition but then it’s not so much the immediate information that you want in an encyclopedia but the more historic stuff and that doesn’t change terribly quickly.

Now, if only I could find a corner in the house to fit them in…

One of the problems in doing three separate Open University courses at once is that the timetables they run to are completely independent of one another.

Thus I find myself looking at the prospect of doing the End Course Assessment for the cardiology course, the third TMA for the human biology course and the first TMA of the astronomy course all in the same week. Fortunately, that week is the third week of March so at least I have the chance of spacing the assignments out over the next month and a bit. Not quite so much as I’d like to though as part of the cardiology assignment involves submitting an essay plan to the tutor sometime in February and the astronomy assignment requires some practical work to be in hand by then and with our weather that’s very much hit and miss.

What I’m still amazed at is how quickly I’m managing to get through the courses. All being well, I’m on schedule to finish the course text for the human biology course in the next week or so which should let me get going on the notes for that which’ll definitely be required come exam time in June. I finished all of the reading for the cardiology course before Christmas so it “only” has the end of course assessment to be done which looks fairly doable at the moment though I’ve not actually started on it yet so that opinion could change very easily. I’m getting through the astronomy reading quite well though I suspect that I’ll be needing to go over a few things again for the assignment as it’s proving to be a more difficult course than originally expected.

Interestingly, courtesy of the astronomy course I have been assigned a “pathway tutor” as part of the pilot project. What that means is that I will retain that tutor throughout the course of my physics degree with the OU. Previously, one of the consistent comments that they’d received was that all the courses were entirely independent which, whilst nice in some respects, meant that a lot of people felt a little at sea when they’d finished a course and weren’t always that sure what they should do next or for that matter how they should go about designing the perfect sequence of courses for them. In the past that planning assistance has come from the regional centres officially and a number of course forums inofficially. Neither are ideal. The official source involved people who didn’t always have the knowledge of what was entailed in particular subjects whilst the unofficial route produced advice that might have been intended to be helpful but wasn’t always as it couldn’t take into account the particular backgrounds of those enquiring nor did those replying have anything like the full picture of what was coming up in a particular degree programme anyway.

So far, it’s in typical OU style: it’s there if you want to use it but if you’ve your own ideas you’re free to ignore it.