A Time of Magic » Education

Is education becoming a more life-long experience these days

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:24:13 +0000

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.

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University for all?

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:55:03 +0000

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.

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Nearing the end of the web applications (TT280) course

admin — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:25:43 +0000

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!

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Hi-tech courses, lower tech reading

admin — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:26:19 +0000

I’ve just started a world archaeology course which ironically is one of those listed as a new generation course. That means that it’s largely taught online and uses a lot of online resources albeit with a rather weighty tome as the course book.

Oddly though it means that it’s not so suitable a course for the ebook readers. Whilst the course materials may well all be available online, you’re constantly referred to other online materials. Thus you can’t just download everything to a reader.

Net effect of this is that I’ll be going back a generation of equipment in effect and using the netbook much more than the reader.

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What do you do if you’d like to know more about your disease?

admin — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:56:43 +0000

Although most people’s first instinct is to hit the search engines, realistically that’s only going to give you a superficial knowledge at best and at worst a seriously distorted one.

Another more sensible option is to take a course on your disease. Although, so far, that’s mainly an option for the various chronic diseases, that situation is gradually changing as more universities are realising that people are interested in disease for reasons other than that they need to trea it. Thus, you can take quite in-depth courses on things like diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Although these are available as entry-level courses, don’t underestimate the amount of medical terminology that you’ll need to get through in these courses and don’t let it put you off that many of your fellow students are paramedics and nurses.

Definitely a better option than the superficial internet search approach!

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Education gets a hammering too

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:02:24 +0000

When things are quite so bad with the government finances as they seem to be in the UK just about every sector is looking at cuts.

Perhaps one of the saddest of those is the education sector where there are quite a number of schools that have been cutting back on maintenance for a number of years because they’d a lovely new school building coming along in just another year or two.

Except that now many of those new school buildings have been axed.

Unfortunately it is one of many necessary cuts across the government departments but it means that many of our kids will have to make do with school buildings for perhaps another decade and many of those have basically been let go in terms of any kind of significant maintenance. It seems sure that a lot of that maintenance will simply have to be carried out now as the buildings are very much at the low point of their life by now.

What is a little confusing in all this is that the buildings weren’t constructed better in the first place. One local hospital was only finished in the late 1950s yet is now needing a complete rebuild. I don’t think that 60 years is a very long time for a building to last.

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Just what CAN you do these days to stop violence in schools?

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 10:50:04 +0000

These days it seems to be accepted that children will be violent in schools whilst teachers can’t respond with a touch never mind a smack.

Whilst it seems wrong to return to the days when caning was there as an option, it seems as though the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. For example, we recently found out that it’s forbidden to touch a child in any circumstances. That sounds a laudable thing on the whole but the problem was that the child was touched (restrained) because he was violently beating another child. Not a fight mind you, just a brutal attack by one child on another.

Interestingly, the subsequent interview was entirely focused on the business of touching a child and didn’t even enquire as to the injuries which the victim received. That’s definitely very, very wrong. The whole process ended up seeming to give approval to the violence which I’m quite sure was never the intent behind the rules which it drew upon and yet that’s what happened with punishment actually being, unbelievably, applied to the victim as well as the aggressor.

In this school, it would appear that nothing effective can be done either to stop violence nor to protect the victim of any violence.

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Which online university?

admin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:46:49 +0000

One of the problems in choosing an online university these days isn’t that the number of them is small but because the choice has grown enormously in recent years.

The big plus point in that is that instead of a small number of so-so universities there are some of the major players (still overly expensive) and a serious number of sensible universities like Western Governors. Although not widely known, that’s a situation that seems sure to change with their move into national promotion of their online accredited programmes. That little word “accredited” is quite significant too as many of the early online universities didn’t have that status which in practical terms made qualifications from them largely worthless.

Changed too is the presentation: these days WGU offers a professional looking website. That shouldn’t need saying but sadly that professional look just ain’t there in a number of the early online offerings. They’re much more complete too with an online MBA offering. The significance of the online MBA is that an awful lot of people who should have an MBA just don’t have the option of taking time out of their life to go on an MBA programme; something that many online universities either forget or just aren’t up to providing.

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Isn’t the cost of textbooks shocking?

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:28:47 +0000

The problem is that you’ve normally little choice in what books you need to buy.

Out will pop a recommended list of textbooks from your university and basically you need to buy them. Sometimes you can thin out the list a little but in many cases you can’t as you don’t know ahead of time what ones you’ll need and, of course, the library just doesn’t have enough copies of those books to go around. Secondhand? Well, sometimes but in some subjects the new editions are required and you’ll just be wasting money on older second hand ones.

It’s one of those largely hidden costs of courses that can sometimes substantially increase the overall cost of those courses if the lecturer gets a bit carried away with their recommendations: after all, it doesn’t cost them anything and, in some cases, can even make them money though commissions.

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Should you look online for information about a course you’re doing?

admin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:21:55 +0000

We all do, of course, but what if there’s just too much information?

One of the most significant differences I found when I started my current psychology course compared to the language courses that I’d been doing previously was that the much larger number of students involved meant that there was a correspondingly large increase in the information available online. So much in fact that selecting amongst it is almost at the point where it’s a significant problem.

In addition to the information put out by the university, there are notes from several different tutorial groups that were run in previous years, booklets summarizing the content of the course texts, study weekends, several blogs, student notes on the texts and even one set of answers for the assignments. That last is much less useful than you might think but is definitely very helpful to get a feel for what might be expected from the examiners.

I suspect that there are some people who are sinking in the sea of information out there. Even within our own group there are some people who are flipping between the two options in the first assignment thanks to the different ways that the requirements were put across in the two tutorials that have been run to date.

To my mind this is definitely a case of way too much information. It’s all useful to be sure and I’ve gone to tutorials run by two different tutors myself. Cost will dictate that most people will realistically only consider one of the four revision weekends that I’ve came across but the initial blogs on this course will only grow in numbers over the years adding to the confusion of future students I suspect.

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