Foreign Perspectives

I’m doing this one basically to ease myself back into the psychology and a brief leaf through the DVD last week showed up a whole bunch of relatively familiar terminology.

This is one of the new-style online tutoring courses which in principle should be excellent but, so far, they don’t seem to have hit on a totally successful formula for them. The problem is basically that as the tutoring is done in a course-wide group, they need everyone to be moving along at roughly the same speed which for SK124 means that the various assignments are only released three weeks ahead of the due date. Unlike the TT courses, where the course materials were released three weeks in advance, you could actually finish working through all of the course material but that would mean that you’d be doing the assignments weeks or possibly months after you’d covered the relevant material which would make them a little harder.

As it’s a 15 pointer spread over 20 weeks it looks like the course will proceed at a relatively sedate pace. There’s quite a lot of DVD based material but as a rough guide it looks like a chapter a fortnight rather than the usual chapter a week rate for OU courses. The first chapter is largely introductory but as I completed it in a couple of hours it looks like the course won’t eat up a lot of time.

So what is autism anyway? Well, it’s a range of conditions that exhibit in the form of difficulties in communication, varying degrees of inflexibility eg needing things to remain the same and/or repetitive actions, and social isolation. Although there seems to be a big genetic component, there also seems to be an aspect of environmental factors which may trigger it (though nobody knows what they are yet).