In normal universities you expect to meet loads of other students but the perception is that it's a different matter in the OU.However, if you're following one of the recognised paths to a specific qualification you'll often find that you're

Thanks to the funding issues that the Open University are being hit with I find that I, among many others, am having to rejig my planned schedule of courses into something that can seem slightly crazy sometimes.For instance, to pick

Starting a degree at level two causes me the minor problem that I'll be short 60 points by the time I finish what would have ordinarily been the final course had I started at level one.In the course of looking

Although we were working pretty hard in the hotel this time last year, I don't know how we'd manage to fit it into our lives these days.Monday to Friday it sometimes seems like we're operating an almost full-time taxi service.

One of the great things about the Open University is that you can sign up for pretty much any course that takes your fancy yet that's also one of the problems with it too from the student point of view.It's

One of the biggest problems in getting out of France is the sheer quantity of post and email that continues to generate.This wasn't so bad when we were actually working in the hotel as we were online daily and keeping

One of the greatest hassles in our lives at the moment is that we've to try to sort out some administration with the French tax and social security people whilst we're in the UK.You'd think that it would be relatively

Compared to the Child Development course, the Human Biology one is moving along at what almost seems like a snails pace in comparison which probably is indicative of how over the top the workload was on the Child Development course.The

Whilst I'm getting into the swing of the human biology course, the cardiovascular diseases one is something else together.In principle, the human biology course as a level 2, 30 point course should clearly be harder than the cardiovascular diseases courses

The Vanessa George affair showed the major weakness of the CRB system ie that you'll get an "all clear" if you haven't been caught yet.However, the various schools are required to have the CRB check done on anyone who comes

I've been weaning everyone off Windows over the past year so we're getting into the first multi-computer upgrade of Ubuntu.One of the problems seems to be that an Ubuntu upgrade seems to take forever if you've been installing bits and

When John started school this year he only went to noon which wasn't too bad as it gave us a sensible break before needing to go back for James at 2.30pm.However, they changed that to a 1.30pm finish for John

If it weren't for the OU appearing to be about to drop all their science summer schools and consequently their named science degrees, the choices for 2010 would be very easy. First I'd be doing Biological Psychology in February and

Thanks to the Child Development exam last week and the revision for it over the previous month, I only got around to signing up for Understanding cardiovascular diseases (SK121) a matter of days ago but this morning the website was

Throughout the course everyone seemed to be saying that there was "an awful lot of course" in ED209 but I found that I really didn't notice that so much until the time came for revision.Since it's a research led course

One of the advantages of the Open University is that you can do any of the level one courses without any prior knowledge. Surprisingly perhaps there are a whole heap of essentially medical courses within that level one range.For instance

According to the Open University it's 16 hours a week for a 60 pointer and 8 hours for a 30 points but those hours include not only the actual course work but also things like course administration, looking at forums,

Although I just finished the Child Development (ED209) on Wednesday and I'm currently doing Human Biology (SK277) which started in early October, it's actually time for me to be thinking about the next course yet again.You might think that since

This time tomorrow I'll be having my very first look at the exam paper.Today it's time for last minute skimming over of the material that I didn't quite get around to learning properly up to now...There's the TMA questions to

As usual, the last few days before an exam are a peculiar mix of panic cramming and looking forwards to the courses coming up.The ED209 exam is a little peculiar in that of the three questions on the paper, we've