Foreign Perspectives

One confusing aspect of the OU is that it’s difficult to find anywhere that comes straight out and says just how many hours a week a course should take you.

There are all kinds of reasons that they put forward for that but to be fair they do state that 30 point courses should take 8 hours a week and 60 point ones about 16. So that means that a 10 point course takes just under 3 then? No, actually a 10 point course can, usually, take either 8 hours a week if you do it over the 2 month period which most people seem to go for or around 3 if you go for the five month period. I say most because TT280 which I’m doing at the moment is over a fixed 12 week period so should take 8 hours a week. 15 point courses also take around 8 hours a week over about 5 months.

I said “should” above because in most cases I find that I can half those times so 30 point courses rarely take me as much as 4 hours a week and 60 point courses rarely take as much as 6. TT280 is currently taking me under an hour which is a “bit” short of the recommended 8 hours. The difference is down to background preparation. If you already know a fair bit about the subject as I do for TT280 then it takes a lot less than the recommended time.

To muddy the waters a bit they’ve recently started running courses over shorter than normal times. Thus A251 and DSE141 which are both on my short list are 30 point courses that run over 5 months instead of the normal 9 months. The net effect of that is that they require about 50% more time per week than normal 30 pointers so have a recommended 11 to 15 hours (ie 60 point equivalent) and should probably work out as something like 6 hours and maybe 3 or 4 respectively for me due to the knowledge I already have (ie nothing for history, quite a bit for psychology). For me that means that I can’t really do either starting this November as I was toying with doing.