Foreign Perspectives

Since the OU claim to have over 200,000 students enrolled in courses at any one time and with a sizeable number of those being quite computer literate, you’d think that there would be more than 15 active blogs written by their students. So where are they?

Although I don’t constantly trawl for them, the 14 that are currently listed in the blog roll are all the active ones that I’ve found and includes those pinched from the blog rolls of those on the list plus some more who are no longer active. Those that aren’t actively writing include some who have completed their courses and don’t seem to be continuing with the blog at the moment.

There’s also at least one OU tutor who went and deleted what was far and away the best ever advert that A207 has had in the form of a blog that she ran whilst tutoring the course. Not only did she stop writing it when she finished her tutoring roll but she deleted it altogether. Why do people do stuff like that? I’d bookmarked it for the day when I get around to doing the course and now it’s gone 🙁

And then there’s the bloggers who run out of steam for one reason or another. That happens to bloggers everywhere so I guess it’s no different when it’s OU bloggers that are no different though with the added issues of time pressure from the degree itself.

But none of that really explains why there are so few OU bloggers around. With 200k students to draw upon I’d have expected at least 100 and perhaps even more given that many of the courses offered are all about writing.