It's arrived!
Sep. 22nd, 2006 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_schrapnellThe first module course pack from Roehampton, that is. Of course, I promptly went into a tailspin because the cover letter said we should receive a module course-material folder and a module excerpts folder. A little asterisk beside the latter helpfully informed us that there are references to excerpts 'at the back of your folder' in the course material, but these are now located in the separate excerpts folder, as their supplier stopped making folders large enough to hold everything. So, guess how many folders I had? Yup. Just the one. With about half of the pages bound in the (broken) binder and the rest just tucked inside.
Poor Charlie got the full blast of my hyperventilating (no, that wasn't all the tail end of the hurricane!) and worrying about how I'd even know if I had everything and how I'd just emailed yesterday to find out where the stuff was and I couldn't get into the student services on the website and ... general hair-pulling. But an hour or so of reading through each section in turn, making a list of what was required for each, and checking whether all the extracts were actually there (in the back of the folder) calmed me down even more.
I've no wish to become an OU bore, but will say - hopefully no more than once a semester - that the OU was really wonderful at all the institutional-level organisation that makes students' lives (especially distance learning ones) so much easier. And that included things like a username and password as soon as we registered, so we could use their extensive online stuff. And being automatically given a password to use the online library facilities. And I also have to say that I haven't seen such sloppy photocopying since my original undergraduate days, when I was doing it - some pages complete with unreadable top or bottom lines, filled in for us. And the reference scrinched in teeny tiny writing near the top on some.
But. The material looks very interesting, and not at all impossible with which to cope! (Well, of course that copability factor may depend to a degree on feedback from the first 'formative assignment'. There will doubtless be moaning.) And I'm sure some of the worryingly vague directions about those assignments will be made clear later on. And I've already been stationery shopping, and got 2 notebooks and a small binder and two dinky little highlighters - very fun. What more could one want from the student life?*
* Some brain might be good - originally wrote that there was an asterix by the folder and that I'd been stationary shopping...
Poor Charlie got the full blast of my hyperventilating (no, that wasn't all the tail end of the hurricane!) and worrying about how I'd even know if I had everything and how I'd just emailed yesterday to find out where the stuff was and I couldn't get into the student services on the website and ... general hair-pulling. But an hour or so of reading through each section in turn, making a list of what was required for each, and checking whether all the extracts were actually there (in the back of the folder) calmed me down even more.
I've no wish to become an OU bore, but will say - hopefully no more than once a semester - that the OU was really wonderful at all the institutional-level organisation that makes students' lives (especially distance learning ones) so much easier. And that included things like a username and password as soon as we registered, so we could use their extensive online stuff. And being automatically given a password to use the online library facilities. And I also have to say that I haven't seen such sloppy photocopying since my original undergraduate days, when I was doing it - some pages complete with unreadable top or bottom lines, filled in for us. And the reference scrinched in teeny tiny writing near the top on some.
But. The material looks very interesting, and not at all impossible with which to cope! (Well, of course that copability factor may depend to a degree on feedback from the first 'formative assignment'. There will doubtless be moaning.) And I'm sure some of the worryingly vague directions about those assignments will be made clear later on. And I've already been stationery shopping, and got 2 notebooks and a small binder and two dinky little highlighters - very fun. What more could one want from the student life?*
* Some brain might be good - originally wrote that there was an asterix by the folder and that I'd been stationary shopping...
