Open University Courses

[barakta]

I'm seriously considering doing some OU courses while I'm stuck at home bored of my balance. The two courses I am considering are Breakthrough to Mathematics Science and Technology and Another Breakthrough to Mathematics, Science and TechnologyI'm going to email the financial people and see if I'm entitled to financial support cos I'm on Income

Comments

[feanelwa]

Ooh! Ooh! ali_anarres did/is doing maths related things with OU and probably wouldn't mind being asked about it.

[barakta]

Cool, thanks for that. I will go and take a look at ali_anarres's journal and maybe say hi. I'm only doing the 'here is how to do basic science' courses because I've forgotten so much since 1999.

I'm hoping that if I like the OU stuff that they'll give me credit for materials science courses I did in 1999-2000 when I was attempting to do a chemistry degree.

[barakta]

Thanks for that info, it's useful to know. I've seen your LJ from parallelgirl's friends list too having seen you on snagglepat's posts too

[barakta]

I have the cash for the two short courses which I can register before nevernever. After May or so I should also have an idea if my health is likely to sort itself out before 2007 or not - which affects what I will consider doing longer term.

I need to go and prod the benefits people too, see if I can get myself a ECDL and poxy IT qualifications done to improve my shorter term employment chances.

[36]

Sounds like a really good idea. Good luck with funding issues.

[barakta]

I've/we've got the cash for these two short courses upfront. They're only 85 quid each and worth it for stopping me being bored shitless like I am now.

Just have to wait until Jan for a reply to my email, and decide whether to actually register or not. Then March for the official start date for the course. I should also be getting my Tai Chi by then, and feeling more confident with sign stage 2 stuff.

[drdoug]

I work for the OU and am very proud of our stuff and our support for students in general. It so happens that one of my mates is chair of the team that looks after those courses! I've not looked at them in detail, but what I've seen of them in bits and pieces has been pretty good.

Obviously I'm a bit biased.

[I won't pre-empt the email response from our financial and disability people, but my guess would be that you should get some financial support for the fees and at-least-reasonable-adjustments from us on the disability front. If you don't on the latter I'd be interested to know about it, particularly if it's anything at all to do with technology, since my Centre has a group specialising in access to educational media.]

[barakta]

I was just about to see if you'd replied - having just seen your "I'm baaack" post. I didn't even have to point you at it :)

Biased is fine as long as I know about it, which in your case I obviously do. You non-pre-emption pretty much what I hope for with the financial and disability people. Mainly I need people to know about disability stuff so if I fall apart I can defer stuff as necessary and not have to use telephones.

I don't see them having a problem with me asking to use OtherRealTime chat medium of choice instead of phone tutorials, as only a masaochist would use typetalk for the purpose *grin*. Hell I kimble can even set a chat system up so they just go to a website URL and it takes them to our irc server on a set channel

[drdoug]

I didn't even have to point you at it :)

Well, I couldn't resist! *grin*

I don't see them having a problem with me asking to use OtherRealTime chat medium of choice instead of phone tutorials

I wouldn't have thought so, no, although there's a lot of institutional push towards the OU-supported tools. It strikes me that it might be worth mentioning up front that for your access needs and preferred interaction styles, it's probably more important to have an associate lecturer (=personal tutor) who groks IT than, say, one who has many years of experience with Deaf students but who only uses typetalk and that in a following-a-fixed-recipe sort of way. Hopefully that would emerge anyway from the discussion about how the OU can support you, but it may not be something that would necessarily leap to an advisor's mind.

I have heard mostly (about 95%) good about their access with only a few cases of less good experiencesThat matches my experience. We do an awful lot of good stuff but there are patches where fwapping is very much in order

[barakta]

it's probably more important to have an associate lecturer (= personal tutor) who groks IT....

Very good point. Typetalk is usable, but it's clunky and not ideal for tutorialesque discussion. I've got that not really fitting any deaf label thing which makes for prescriptive solutions often being unhelpful for me.

improve the quality of the information about access for individual courses

I definitely saw a lot of that on the website, where they explained what was already available for disabled students, things like spiral bound or large print coursebooks etc etc. That was really impressive and useful as well - tell your friend + his team to keep up the good work. I'd definitely take courses which were more visual/text based than coursed which required lots of audiotapes - although I note transcripts are usually available which would make them usable for me.

$Specialist_software for the second assignment or whether $Generic_alternative would do, etcAh that reminds me... How is the OU on it's non windows software these days

[belle_marmotte]

Hi just to chime in, I am disabled and studying with the OU since 2001. (yes my degree is taking me far too long, I took a couple of years off along the way