A Time of Magic

The writing style and presentation of courses tends to reflect the subject matter of the courses involved.

Sounds obvious I suppose but unless you’ve done courses in a range of subject areas at the same level most people won’t really notice it.

Take the language courses I’ve been plugging away with over the last six years. In comparison to the laid back, typically Spanish style, the French courses seemed to reflect the more rigid approach to rules in France itself. The latest course is very much based in educational psychology so you find all the little reassuring sounds at the start when you’re generally in panic mode with any new course.

I’ve been looking at other universities over the last month or so and there you’ll find the untidy physist (almost a movie style mad scientist) and a few others that I probably shouldn’t comment on to avoid legal action

OK, they’re not all that pretty as buildings go but steel buildings are amongst the most practical buildings around, coming in all shapes and sizes to meet a very wide range of different requirements ranging from the simple portaloo through to, probably surprisingly, churches.

Although the shapes and sizes are wildly different, some are standards whilst others are bespoke productions, what they all have in common is that they are amongst the quickest buildings to erect from start to finish since the majority of the hard work is done at the factory rather than on your site.

To my mind, one of the educational wonders of the world is the Open University which started life way back in the early 1970s with the aim of being a truly open university ie open to all, regardless of their prior educational achievements.

Way back then, the university operated by posting out course work books and text books and broadcasting lectures on BBC2 at crazy hours (in the pre-video recorder era I’m sure that the thought of attending 6am lectures thinned out the student numbers no end!). Since then they’ve moved on somewhat moving first to posting out the lectures for some courses on video tapes as the number of their courses overflowed the available airtime. Next came the DVDs with a fairly quick move onto DVD ROMs in recent years although funnily enough they only recently moved from cassette tapes to CDs for the language exams. Naturally, there’s also quite a substantial web based element and it’s quite possible to have online language tutorials (they actually work a lot better than the face to face ones).

However, I do wonder if all the technology is really necessary or even desireable. For example, in the last course I completed the course workbook had been replaced by a DVD ROM version. The DVD ROM brings videos right in the middle of the text which is definitely better than having to fire up a video but not being able to scribble notes right onto the text books. Oddly, to me, the course texts themselves are still books: I’d have preferred the work book to be the book and the texts to be on the DVD.