Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Oct 26, 2011, 12:50 pm
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...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Oct 20, 2011, 4:47 am
The basic problem that Greece seems to have is that it has never really properly adjusted from the days when it could devalue the Dracma every couple of years. In such an environment, you don’t really need to worry too much about creating a real economy as you can always pull in more tourists by ...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Oct 18, 2011, 5:47 am
Despite downing tools with everything except preparation for the biology exam for the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to remain broadly on schedule with the chemistry reading so far. Unfortunately, there’s quite a lot of stuff to be done on the DVD as well and some of that is required for the...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Oct 13, 2011, 1:55 pm
This morning saw the final S204 exam as it’s being replaced by S294 from next year plus another course a year or two later. As usual the two short answer questions were all over the place requiring quite a comprehensive knowledge of the course contents to be able to fully answer 12 from the 18 on...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Oct 2, 2011, 12:21 pm
The Open University is generally quite far ahead of the game when it comes to producing software to go along with its courses. Snag is, that those courses generally run for around 10 years and that’s a very long time indeed in software. The net effect of that is that it’s not quite so easy to ju...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Sep 24, 2011, 6:13 am
The course books for S205 arrived on Thursday which is usually pretty much a non-event for me as I generally work from the PDF copies of them. However, the seven DVDs that came with the books gave some pause for thought. Books for courses aren’t so bad in that the course team producing them can s...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Sep 18, 2011, 5:53 am
The biggest problem with S204 isn’t the difficulty of the course but rather the sheer volume of material within it. For a start there’s the 1925 pages of course texts and 250-odd pages of study guide. Add to that there’s a whole heap of stuff on the two DVDs ranging from videos, through a mass...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Sep 5, 2011, 2:43 am
Whereas with the astronomy the other year many of the experiments were optional, in the biology course the two experiments need to be written up as part of two seperate assignments. Thus, a week is alloted to each one. Or, rather since this is S204, they are crammed in on top of everything else. Th...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Sep 1, 2011, 5:23 am
The summer turned out to be surprisingly busy, albeit mostly not with the holiday things that we were expecting to fill it with. At the off was my summer school in the first week of July. The write-up for that took an awful lot longer than expected which in turn knocked a number of things back. I f...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Aug 18, 2011, 3:10 pm
I still remember the day over 30 years back when I first went into the Bookshop at Queen’s with my Dad and we came out with a pile of books for my courses that we could barely carry between us. Back in those days it was the only proper bookshop in Belfast and it carried books on every subject tha...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Aug 17, 2011, 5:27 am
With the upcoming change to OU financing in England, there are debates going on in pretty much every OU forum about the implications these days. Most of that debate centres around the Transitional Arrangement (TA) period from 2012 through to 2017 that applies to existing students in England (the ch...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Aug 15, 2011, 5:21 am
That’s t reaction of a lot of people when faced with a longish assignment but usually they’re not so bad once you get started into them. From my point of view, I reckon that if I was able to write a 3000 word assignment in Spanish then one in English must be doable. The key is to plan it out at...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Aug 14, 2011, 5:20 am
By chance we saw a promo for an event during June for the local branch of the Young Archaeologists Club which I took the little guys along to. That was one based around mosaics which kicked off with a short talk to put them into context before we all got going on constructing our very own mosaic. A...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Aug 12, 2011, 8:42 am
In principle, this should be a relatively simple EMA as it’s essentially writing up the results of various experiments that we’ve already done and with the 3000 words spread over four basic experiments there’s not an awful lot to be written about each one. I’ve spent the past couple of days...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Aug 10, 2011, 8:38 am
Yesterday was the day that everyone had been told that registration for the summer schools in 2012 would open so lots of people got going early and received the confirmation of their registration. Snag is that somebody opened up the registrations too early. The arrangements with the various host un...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 20, 2011, 9:08 am
I’d been blissfully sailing along assuming that the 2012 OU courses would, at most, move to the non-subsidised European rate ie from around £700 for a 60 point course to around £1500. To have it move to £2500 is quite a shock albeit, so far, only for those studying in England. The snag is that...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 18, 2011, 4:11 am
It generally takes a while to wind down after an OU summer school but this year I’ve a lot less time to do that than I usually have. Top priority now is to complete an ECA which is due on Wednesday. I’ve most of it done but haven’t yet had a chance to finish the final section nor to check off...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 17, 2011, 9:11 am
As usual, the final day was something of a winding down for the most part. In the morning, everything got dumped into the case and, surprisingly, it closed without too much poking and prodding. Typically for the final day, the breakfast reached a new low but then, on the whole, that’s normal for ...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 14, 2011, 5:12 pm
Starting off on the experiments was somewhat delayed whilst we waited for the water bath to heat up but with a bit of tightening up on the organisation, we managed to complete the planned experiments around noon. That left the afternoon to finalise various calculations and get going on writing the ...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 13, 2011, 5:46 pm
The week has really flown in and it’s hard to believe that there’s only a day and a half to go. We collected our horse chestnut leaves this morning on the way down to the lab. First thing was to finalise the experimental plan that I’d knocked up last night. With that approved we set to work o...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 12, 2011, 4:46 pm
With everyone having had a go at the experiments on both sides of the lab there remained a number of things that various groups hadn’t had the time to do for one reason or another. So this morning was aimed at mopping up those gaps. After an early lunch we set off on a tour of the Millennium and ...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 11, 2011, 5:36 pm
We moved on to the pigments section today. For the morning, each group chose a plant from the selection to extract and identify the various photosynthetic pigments in their plant. We chose the tobacco plant which it turned out was the most reliable one to use for the thin layer chromatography (TLC)...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 10, 2011, 5:05 pm
We were split into two large groups yesterday with one group doing experiments whilst we were looking at some aspects of stress responses in the algae. What we were doing initially was examining the response to light of two initially identical algae, one of which was exposed to a bright light and o...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 9, 2011, 8:44 am
Heading off at 8am got me to the Nottingham campus not too much after 11am so it was quite quiet to begin with and the numbers of students are really only starting to build up now, just after lunch. Registration runs on ’til after 3pm with the introductory lecture in the biology building just aft...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 6, 2011, 4:36 am
It hardly seems like two months have passed since the course materials for this arrived at the end of April. It’s been quite a busy time although I don’t think I did anything remotely close to the 60 hours preparation that the course is supposed to take. Still, the CMA is out of the way and I m...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jul 4, 2011, 4:12 am
After much debate as to the best tablet to get I finally settled on the ASUS transformer. Why that one? Well, my first criteria was that I wanted a bigger ebook reader which eliminated all the 7″ tablets. In practice it seemed to leave the Motorola Xoom and the ASUS transformer. Ignoring the pric...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jun 18, 2011, 4:24 am
Mum had a fall a few months back and managed to break her hip which was replaced surprisingly quickly but unfortunately even after a couple of months worth of rehabilitation, her mobility is still way down from what it was and stairs aren’t a runner for her. That’s something of a problem as she�...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jun 6, 2011, 4:21 am
It appears that the OU are allowing a number (all?) of courses to be booked somewhat earlier than normal. Apparently gone too is the nonsense that was pre-registration which didn’t actually reserve a place as you might think. Combine that with the appearance of the phrase “subject to availab...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Jun 3, 2011, 9:07 am
Mum had a fall a few months ago and managed to land that little bit too heavily and consequently broke her hip. That in turn led to a new hip so the fall actually helped her in that she now has the new hip that she needed but would otherwise have needed to wait a couple of years to get. That then le...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - May 5, 2011, 3:04 pm
Northern Ireland has had a variant of the Alternative Voting scheme for many years and in the vote today one of the biggest downsides of it is very plain to see. In place of what was once a relatively short voting paper were two around two feet long with around 20 candidates on each. Even reading d...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - May 5, 2011, 2:16 pm
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing the Open University’s main chemistry course for a while now but it’s one of those courses with widely varying opinions which put me off. Basically there were those who rated it pretty much as A-level and at the other end of the extreme those who rated it...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Apr 20, 2011, 7:23 am
In theory it’s easy to calculate the amount of time that you need to set aside to do an OU course. On the face of it the only complication is that you need to do one course to let you estimate the scaling factor to apply to their estimates. Thus they quote 16 hours a week for a 60 point course and...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Apr 2, 2011, 1:50 pm
I have finally gotten around to completing this which “just” leaves the writing up to be done. Home experiments used to be all the rage in the Open University science courses but they seem not to be so popular these days or at least not on such a widespread basis. That’s not to say they’re ...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Mar 24, 2011, 2:21 pm
When you’re starting out on your first degree that’s usually a fairly easy question for most people to answer. They’ve gotten themselves all fired up about a particular subject and are at least intending to follow that through to the end. It’s different when you’re doing a degree part-tim...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Mar 23, 2011, 8:40 am
Thanks to the massive amount of work that the final course assessment of the World Archaeology course entailed, I recently rediscovered the benefits of studying in the local library. Quite why it should be so, I don’t know, but I find that I get through a considerably greater amount of work in the...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Mar 17, 2011, 6:36 am
The registration for the Open University October start courses opens in mid-March so it’s time to start thinking in more detail about the courses to be done in the coming year. Ordinarily, it would be a relatively simple choice for me as I’m plugging away with the Life Sciences degree so next u...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Mar 14, 2011, 5:07 am
Despite ups and downs during the course, the answer is definitely a “yes”. There’s certainly an awful lot of reading to be done for it. To say that the course text is 800 pages long is misleading as you “only” read about half of it but you also read a lot of material outside the text so c...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Mar 13, 2011, 8:54 am
In the days of First Class (the OU forum system, now all but defunct) there were forums for the various subjects and for the varied interests of the OU students as well. However, one forum stood head and shoulders above all others as the place to go to ask about just about any course you could imagi...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Mar 12, 2011, 6:06 am
The final assignment for the World Archaeology course is intended to be something of a research based assignment. This time around you’ve to choose three examples of cultural contact spread over around three or four thousand years and pick out the consequences of those contacts. Yes, that was thre...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Mar 9, 2011, 3:00 am
The world archaeology course comes with a massive course text running to nearly 800 rather large and very densely packed pages. During the course you end up reading about half of that plus a whole bunch of online texts as well which adds up to a rather substantial amount of reading over the five mon...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 28, 2011, 4:35 am
Whenever the subject of keeping to the official timetable or deviating from it on an Open University course is raised, the argument nearly always gets heated. Up until a few years ago it wasn’t an issue as the OU sent out the course material no more than a week or two ahead of the course start da...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 27, 2011, 1:14 pm
Dropout rates in the open university are a very tangible thing. You can see that there are fewer people in each tutorial as the year progresses. Where it’s by far the highest is in the first course of a given subject. That’s not necessarily at level 1 though as some subjects only start at level...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 26, 2011, 5:54 am
The TT courses have developed something of a reputation of slipping up with the assessments resulting in numerous questions needing to be “zero-weighted” ie not counting towards the final mark. It looks like the first CMA of TT281 is continuing in this tradition. In TT280, the preceding course,...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 23, 2011, 4:09 am
Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB flash drive that I keep for such situations. Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boo...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 16, 2011, 4:20 am
I went for a job interview yesterday which was unusual in that, whilst I felt that I did meet the requirements for the job on the whole, I didn’t fulfil all their essential requirements. So, I shouldn’t have been asked for the interview. The snag is that, as with many other employers at the mom...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 14, 2011, 4:11 am
For the most part, the relative valuation of currencies isn’t something that affects day to day life for most people. After all, outside holidays, how often do you directly buy something from overseas? Even with Internet sales sites as numerous as they are, in reality most people buy from their c...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 9, 2011, 4:52 am
After a bit of a to-do between students and faculty as to why they were forcing us to use CafeScribe (a truly dire piece of software by all accounts), things settled down as we got into the second week of the course (or week 3 according to the students) for the simple reason that everyone seems to h...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 8, 2011, 8:41 am
It’s the usual equation for me though seemingly never for an obvious reason. With the archaeology the tutor has been giving really good comments on the assignments that I’ve put in. Just as well as I’ve studied neither history nor art subjects in any form for a very long time indeed. So, in ...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 5, 2011, 12:06 pm
Are you going for the sexy undies again or are you going to buy your girl some chocolate this time? The downside of the undies is that men tend to buy something sexy whilst women are looking for something comfortable. The two rarely meet in the middle. Sexy stuff is generally tight and made of thin...
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Arnold S. posted an article on Foreign Perspectives - Feb 2, 2011, 4:22 am
It’s been over six months since I last heard from my previous employer (who I’m still notionally working for) so I was a bit taken aback to get a phone call telling me of two potential jobs. Even more oddly, both seem quite reasonable jobs too and not wildly out of line with my previous experie...
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