Foreign Perspectives

If you’re starting with one of the main Open University level 1 courses, there can be quite a daunting amount of things to do before the course begins.

Wendy has just received her box of AA100 course texts and the course website opened yesterday too.

It’s one of those courses that is intended to be your first course with the university so there’s much more handholding material than you normally get from them. So much more in this case that I found it at an annoying level when leafing through the course guide although obviously whether you find it annoyingly helpful or just helpful will depend on you and your previous experiences.

Less helpful for a beginner was the amount of stuff on the course website. As a die-hard OU student I know that one of the most useful things that you can do is to get all the course resources downloaded onto your computer but in the case of AA100 that’s the task of several hours as there’s so much of it ranging from the course texts and course guides that most courses have these days through to a massive number of MP3 files. In tandem with that there’s the three DVDs and four DVDROMS that are handy to have on the computer too. You could spread all this copying over the duration of the course but it’s a lot easier to get it over and done with at the outset leaving “just” the course to deal with over the coming months. It also highlights any problems with the materials early and thus gives you more time to get any issues sorted out eg in Wendy’s case, the assessment CD was unreadable.

Worth checking too is that you have all the materials. In Wendy’s case that amounts to six books, four boxes of CDs/DVDs, an assessment DVD and a number of brochures. Newer courses tend to have more bits and pieces than older ones although these days increasing amounts of material are only available online.

Before you panic with the volume (and in some cases there’s a lot of volume: I could hardly lift the S204 box), after you’ve checked that everything is there, it’s best to start with reading the letter from the course team which’ll tell you a little bit about what you have in front of you. After that, it’s the course guide that’s the place to start. What you need to do next varies a lot between courses eg for AA100 there’s only one course guide so the course calendar or course map is your next port of call, S204 is such a large course that there’s an overall course guide and six separate unit guides.

Not too long after the course website opens you’ll find that you’ve acquired a tutor and, if your course has them, tutorial dates. Although you should aim to get to them all the really essential ones are the first one where study groups may get formed and the last one which concentrates on the exam. The in between tutorials usually discuss points related to the assignments.