Foreign Perspectives

Although I don’t read the blog stats religiously by any means it’s interesting to keep an eye on them now and again to see what’s popular and what’s not.

For instance, at the moment I’m doing fairly well from people searching for a little assistance with the latest ED209 assignment. Not surprising really as this is one of a mere handful of blogs that have been writing about their experiences with the Child Development course as they’ve been working their way through it this year.

Is it actually useful to try to find some pointers for the assignment this way though? So far, I suspect the answer is “not really”. For instance, Tim has been relatively quiet about it of late and my own contribution certainly doesn’t hand it out on a plate although I do say something about identity and there will be more about the TMA over the coming week. What’s more surprising is that there haven’t been any blogs writing about the course before this year. Tanya has been brave enough to upload all of her assignments for the course but it’s for an earlier year and the assignment questions were quite different so you’ll not get a whole lot of help there.

Of course, there’s also the small matter of just how reliable the information that one would find on a blog about a TMA. After all, even if I were to upload the entire TMA answer this evening you wouldn’t know what mark I was going to get for it. Having said that, I imagine that you could probably have a reasonable guess as to where the mark might fall which in turn would indicate how much work you might need to do to achieve such a mark yourself. Would that really be helpful though? Take, for example, Exploring English (U211) where in the very first assignment you’re required to upload the first half of your TMA, the second half being a critique on someone else’s uploaded TMA. With that you can easily get a feel for the overall quality of work that people are doing in your tutor group. That in itself was quite reassuring for me but then I picked up 90% on that TMA and I can understand that others might find that it was quite intimidating. So, grand if you’re at the top end of the marking range, potentially quite demoralising if you’re sitting in the large middle ground (which is why most OU forums ban discussion about marks).

If anything, the child development course and indeed psychology courses in general with the OU seem much worse than knowing how other people were doing was with the English course. Quite why that is I don’t fully understand but it seems to be related to the fact that a large number of the psychology students are treating the courses as vocational training so it’s more important to them to do well than it might be in another area that’s more of a hobby subject. Thus, whilst I’m more than happy tootling along in the 70s, others in my group are very much aiming to be in the 80s. Having said that, although I’m very content with the marks to date I have already more or less decided to up the pace at which I’m pottering along with the psychology degree thanks to some gentle prodding on the part of fellow students.

So, as always, be careful what you wish for. If you’re a consistent 60% person, would you really be over the moon to see a 90% type assignment? For that matter, there’s the not so insignificant issue that all tutors don’t mark in a 100% identical manner.

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