Foreign Perspectives

One of the things that you notice when you’ve done a few courses with the Open University is that over the years successive courses tend to get better and the rough edges disappear.

So, it’s a bit of a surprise to find that the workload for the Child Development course is far from even week to week. Within the current book some chapters have taken nearly twice as long to do as others which is a really major change week on week. Now, you’d expect that there could be, say, 10% or so of a difference between weeks or that there could well be a somewhat more substantial difference over the course of a month or two. But doubling from one week to the next and then back to the normal level the following week seems very unusual.

Even more puzzling perhaps is that one would have thought that the educational psychologists would have had some input to the course design. Or perhaps, that lumpiness is a required feature for effective learning? I guess I’ll have to wait ’til I do an educational psychology course to find out!