Learning journal
As part of the T175: Networked Living Open University course I’m currently doing, we’re supposed to keep a learning journal detailing from what I can gather, what we’ve been learning and notes and such like, and action points and lessons for the future and what our goals and targets are. They even helpfully provide an online app for us to keep our learning journals. WTF!!!!
Now having previously done half a teaching degree, and 90% of a psychology degree (which I later combined to make one degree) I am very familiar with the concept of learning journals. Week 1, you fill it in nicely, by the book, dotting all the t’s and crossing all the i’s. Week 2, you fill most of it in but then get distracted by an RSS feed item and never quite get round to finishing it (though admittedly when I started my first degree RSS feeds hadn’t been invented, but that’s poetic licence for you 
). Week 3, you realise you never finished off week 2 but think, what the hell, and start on week 3 anyway, but give up half way through when you realise Neighbours starts in 2 minutes. Week 4, you decide you really can’t be arsed with all this palaver every week and decide to give it a miss.
So far my experience of T175 suggests that it’s aimed at those who’ve no idea what a computer is, or the foggiest inkling of what that internet thing might be about. So far we’ve learned that a computer’s a very clever thing that can do all sorts of clever stuff, and has things like keyboards and mice, and screens attached, but computers also come in many other guises like cash machines, and cash registers, and medical equipment and all sorts of other stuff. We’ve learned that computers talk to each other in 0s and 1s, and that information is actually data, and that’s made up of many bytes, or if you’re a real masochist, many, many more bits. We’ve learned how to talk to each other on online message boards, and what smileys are. Rearrange the following words to make a well known saying: eggs teaching to grandmother your suck.
Actually, I don’t have a problem with that. The beauty of OU courses and qualifications is that you don’t need any prior qualifications to start an OU degree, and like universities the country wide, the OU uses it’s level 1 courses (and that’s what T175 is) to make sure everyone’s reading from the same hymn sheet and all have the same basic knowledge. Your traditional bricks and mortar universities do exactly the same with their first year courses, only it’s slightly easier for them because they at least know that everyone’s going to have a similar educational background, as usually their entrance requirements insist on specified ‘A’ levels. For the OU, they can make no such assumptions. Their students may have a PhD in astrophysics, or they may have a bronze swimming certificate. The only qualification you need to get yourself onto an OU course is to be over 18 years of age.
Coach not thy parent’s mother to extract
The embryonic juices of the fowl by suction.
That lady can the deed perform,
Quite independent of thy kind instruction
What I do object to, apart from being told I should keep a learning journal when from experience I know that their value is at best questionable (”what I have learned this week”: what you told me I would in the chapter summary, “lessons for the future”: for christ’s sake, don’t do any more level 1 courses!) is being charged £380 for the privilege of being taught “good netiquette” (and I beg to differ, a good flame row can be highly entertaining Mr Tutor, especially if you started the whole thing off, lit the blue touch-paper, and then stood well back and watched the ensuing chaos! 
) especially when the M150: Data, computing and information course covers so much of the same ground, at least in the early blocks. It gets worse though, for the first TMA (Tutor Marked Assignment) in T175, 25% of the marks are for having a discussion on the tutor group forum with the others in your course (of course using the principles of good netiquette). Even worse, 5 marks out of those 25% are awarded for being able to copy and paste a message you’ve posted on the course forum into your answer document!
One of the stated learning outcomes for the M150 course is, “You will learn how data stored all over the world in various archives can be found using a search engine.” Can you? Wow! Where can I find me one of them? Like I said, I know that they can’t assume that students necessarily have any prior computing knowledge. Surely though, given that the courses are both all about computers, that information on the courses can be found on the OU’s website (which you must have known how to find somehow), that a lot of the learning resources are on the site, and again that the courses are all about computers, it might be fair to assume that students have at least a rudimentary grasp of what a computer is and how to use that internet wotsit?
M150 though lurches straight from teaching your grandmother to use a search engine and such like though into the basics of programming. Bit of a large leap there. The course team’s idea of teaching basic programming concepts such as if/else loops, while loops etc. is to teach us “basic” javascript. Having recently finished the third M150 TMA, three quarters of which is writing small javascript “programs” from scratch, I can see why the majority of students who drop out of M150 do so right around the time of TMA03. If I hadn’t the foggiest idea what a search engine was and suddenly I was confronted with a page full of javascript, I’d probably throw in the towel too. Personally, I came to the conclusion that given that none of the TMAs on the course are marked on a pass-fail basis, and you need only an overall average of over 40% across all the TMAs to pass the course, that life was to short to spend hour upon hour battling away with javascript that refuses to work, spectacularly unhelpful error messages, and course tutors whose idea of “helping” us through this section of the course is to repeat ad nauseum, “You need to apply the principles of programming you read about in units 7 and 8, but you won’t find a similar solution anywhere in the course materials. Think about the principles you’ve learned.” Logical I usually am (fairly anyway), but psychic I ain’t!
While I understand the concept of if/else loops, and while’s and for’s and such like, and generally don’t have a problem with them when it comes to PHP, with javascript, I have a mental block. I did a javascript course (which they call “client side development”) as part of the Certificate in Web Applications Development and never really managed to get the hang of it fully then, though I managed enough to pass the course, and as I use javascript so infrequently, and there’s an abundance of it on the web free to copy and paste, and I understand it enough to be able to tweak pre-existing scripts to do what I want them to do, I see no need to kill myself trying to do a TMA question that’s tiny in the scheme of things.
Which leads me on to my next gripe around OU ‘TT’ courses, the technology and computing courses. When I did my first degree, it consisted wholly of 60-point courses. An OU 60-point course is the equivalent of half a year full-time at a traditional university, and with the OU is 8 months long. An OU honours degree requires a total of at least 360 points worth of courses. For the 60-point courses they recommended 14 hours of study a week. Now with the 30-point courses, again 8 months long, I’m currently doing (which certainly aren’t half the price of the 60 point ones) they recommend an average of 8 hours of study a week, admittedly close to half of 14 hours for a full 60-point course, but within those courses, you also have 5 TMAs to do, and at least one CMA (computer marked assignment – a multiple-choice affair), and T175 has more. Then you have an ECA, an end of course assignment, which in my experience takes considerably more than 8 hours and a week’s work to do justice to. Add those together and against a 60-point course with say 7 TMAs and an exam, at 14 hours a week, for two 30-point courses done together, you’ve a minimum of 10 TMAs, at least 2 CMAs, and two ECAs, and there’s no comparison between the workload.
For the 10-point courses that make up the Web Apps certificate the situation is even worse. Each of the six courses that make up the qualification is 10-12 weeks long. During that time you lurch from knowing zero to very little about the subject in hand (though if you’re a total newbie to web design and getting down and dirty with the code, forget it!) to having an ECA to do consisting of putting together a series of pages/a series of pages making up a complete basic application, depending on the course. Along the way you’re learning in depth about whichever language is the subject of the course (or two in the case of the databases course, as you’re learning the principles of relational database design and MySQL, along with Coldfusion Express to be able to interact with the database you’ve just created) and doing three CMAs as well. The ECAs alone take at least two week’s solid work to do in my experience.
Don’t get me wrong; though my friends and family no doubt recall me complaining bitterly about each course at some point in my study of it, I enjoyed doing the Web Apps certificate immensely, possibly with the exception of the javascript one and the ASP one (which I cheated with on the ECA because I couldn’t figure out how to set the required cookie using VB Script, to get you into the rest of the app, so I used javascript instead). I learned a hell of a lot from doing it, and it forced me to learn stuff I might otherwise have put off, or stayed content with using pre-built apps for, and the fact that during the course of all but one of the courses I ended up either in hospital or having some sort of medical disaster meant it was a small miracle I managed to pass all of the courses. The amount of work required for those courses though in no way is reflected in the credit available on the successful completion of them. Somewhere in it’s calculations the team responsible for the OU’s ‘T’ and ‘TT’ courses seem to have seriously lost the plot. I don’t know of another OU qualification that in the OUSA (OU Student’s Association) section of the OU’s conferencing facility has a forum dedicated to it; the “Web Apps Survivors” forum! It’s a badge of honour completing that qualification with your sanity still intact.
So, back to the learning journal. I’m a firm believer in not re-inventing the wheel when there’s nothing wrong with the round shape it is already, so as far as a learning journal’s concerned, if I’ve anything of any importance/interest to say on the subject of my OU studies, I’ll be saying it here. What have I learned already? Well, apart from a few interesting bits of trivia I didn’t already know that may come in useful for pub quizzes, the main thing I’ve learned is that probably doing things arse about tit and doing a qualification that involves level 3 courses, and then embarking on another degree and going back to level 1 courses probably isn’t the best way to go about things. Will I be carrying on and completing the whole degree as I’d intended? Time will tell. There are a number of factors to take into consideration, including not only my health situation, but the financial position with the government’s latest harebrained decision on the funding of equivalent level qualifications. For the moment I’ll be quite happy to get through M150 and T175 without doing serious bodily harm to the course team.
