A Time of Magic

With the economy being in the doldrums, I’m sure that many of us have wished that we’d added to our skills base before now.

However, it’s getting easier to do that as time goes on. For instance, I’m in the midst of a two year online course which will update my computer skills considerably and have sketched out some courses for the next few years to bring my qualifications completely up to date.

Doing that kind of thing is becoming more and more an ongoing necessity these days. If your original degree is more than four or five years ago then it’s time to update it or to add to your skills base in a different area.

Making university open to all sounds like a great idea, but it isn’t necessarily such a good idea when you get to the point where everyone assumes that they can go to university and succeed.

The thing is that university is elitist. It assumes that you have a certain amount of brains and are prepared to work at something largely by yourself. There just isn’t the prodding that you get at school and there’s a vastly greater expectation that you can and will work along by yourself on the topics. Yes, there’s guidance, but not the hand-holding that you get in school.

Taking the extreme example, in France anyone can go to any university. This leads to the situation that the first year has a massive dropout rate, most notably in the more difficult subjects like medicine. It’s also rather demoralising for the lecturers as they know that virtually all of the students in the first class will have dropped out by the end of the year. Thus they don’t bother too much with any of them. I imagine that even getting a study group together is far from easy as the students know that most of their colleagues won’t be there by the time the final exams come around.

It is good to have universities open to all, but I think we need to get away from the assumption that this means that everyone must go to university. Potential students need to be realistic in their assessment of their own abilities. That doesn’t mean that low marks mean that they shouldn’t go to university for it may be that there are good reasons for those low grades. What they do need to be is sufficiently stubborn to carry on through the difficult times that they will encounter.

One peculiar effect of starting courses early and maintaining that lead is that the end of the course seems to come very quickly.

Thus with TT280 I find myself with only one more week of reading to be done and the final CMA to be done this week and then “all” that remains to do is the end of course assessment which looks fairly easy at this point (says he not having started it). Even more peculiar is submitting the CMAs early: I’ll be submitting the third CMA early next week, only a matter of days after I should have received the result of the second one which I submitted a few weeks ago.

Unlike previous courses, this is one that I’ll not really miss for a variety of reasons. It was very much a last minute addition to my schedule so there wasn’t a whole lot of thinking that went into it beforehand and, for the most part, it has consisted of revision of topics that have previously been largely self-taught. Moreover, the set book is, by and large, a web design encyclopedia which makes for quite a boring read once the first couple of introductory chapters are out of the way.

Also weighing against it is that it’s the first OU course that I’ve done not so much for me but for work reasons which, of course, reduces the motivation to do it somewhat.

Still, the second web applications course starting in late January should be more interesting in that it’s on the client side and covers Java which I’ve done very little on. I might actually have to work on that one!