Open University - thoughts/experiences?

[Lord Percy]

I'm a 2nd year mature student of physics at Leeds uni and have always said I prefer private study and self-teaching, and that lectures are just a nuisance and a chore.*

It suddenly occurred to me that the OU might be the solution I'm looking for.

Has anyone got any experience of this? I'm certain I'd be better at private study, I just worry about my future prospects if doing it via the OU. The Unistats website says employment prospects for the OU physics degree are as good as any other, but I wonder how many of the people they surveyed were part-time learners already in employment...

Cons:
- I'd be quitting Leeds uni from 2nd year
- Presumably harder to find careers advice, links to employers etc.

Pros:
-Tons more free time to:
-- Actually learn the course content
-- Get a part time job
-- Find relevant work experience around my studies

Thoughts?

Thanks


*
/*rant
In fact the entire university timetable is a chore. I hate it all and would rather just buy every academic textbook and teach myself in peace. What's the point in lecturers and their shitty powerpoint slides when there are proper, well-established, professional books out there to learn from without having to waste time in lectures (>20 hours a week if you consider commuting and also the useless 1-hour gaps between many of my lectures here) and cope with the pointless 'everything in the lecture notes will be in the exam' bullshit. Just give me a good book and I'll learn the lot.
*/

[Itchy]

Are you trying to break the record for longest ever taken to get a degree? In that just get it over and done with instead of dithering!

In the time that you went to China and back I went and got another MA degree.

The OU may make it take longer.

Something you also might not realise until it's way too late is that entire countries may not recognise your degree. It may well be accredited and real in the sense that it's not a diploma mill.

But this doesn't matter to other places. The entire Middle East in 2012 instituted a no-distance learning policy. Quite a few people I know can't get jobs because they degrees are considered distance qualifications in Asia.

The OU FAQ pages even warn about this. Who knows where the future will bring you.


You might also want to stay at your current university because the 3rd year is supposed to be dissertation/project time. Which means you kind of go in now and again for your supervisor meetings and stagger your writing/research. During my 3rd year I was told you're not communicating with your supervisor! Do eet! I visited her twice and had my literature review, methodology etc written by December along with a research proposal with ethical stuff done. I had the final submission done in February.

So what you've got 3.5 months till April when there are no lectures/classes anyway. Then a few sessions on how to write your dissertation then the writing of it.
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[Rogerborg]

Mrs Borg is doing an OU degree in... something. I dunno, there's loads of books lying around and she vanished every few weeks and comes back reeking of 17th century satires.

It's not cheap, it takes ages, and you'll always be asked why you dropped out of a real university (again, right?). I'd put some work into that answer.
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[monkeybiker]

I would say stick with the degree in uni. All you've got to do is finish this year and do one more and your done. I think it would be a crazy move to stop now and go to OU.

Got to agree with you are the lectures. It seam a silly way to teach. Would be better they give you there lecture in written form and you read it at your own pace. Then have a few lessons in small groups were you could talk about parts you did not understand.

[Ariel Badger]

Stick to your real degree, end of.
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[GhostRider]

Crack on with what you're already doing, you're over half way there.

Besides you'll have plenty of time to study the additional stuff whilst waiting to hear back from that Starbucks job application once you graduate*

*spoken as someone who has a BSc, MSc, currently doing a DipHE, which will probably lead to either a PgDIP or another MSc a few years down the line, and has 10 years working in their relevant field.



GhostRider
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[Robby]

If I had two CVs in front of me and one had a degree in physics from Leeds, and one had the same degree from the OU, I would pick the Leeds one. If the CV had more granularity and showed that the person did two years at Leeds, spent a while bumming around in China, then switched to OU to finish off their degree, I would definitely pick the Leeds one.

New employees in any fairly complex job typically spend the first year being useless, the second year being average, and in the third year I'm getting value out of them. If they work for me for less than two years, I would have been better off not hiring anyone.

Also OU is seen as being something for grown-ups that have careers and/or children and are learning for the sake of learning. The OU degree may lead to better pay, but the courses aren't cheap so it takes a while to break even.

Get you head down, stop whining and learn to put up with it. Your first few years of work are going to be a lot harder.

[Matt B]

[Lord Percy]

Thanks for the advice

@ Ithcy - Soon after making this thread I realised an OU degree might not count for anything outside the UK. I don't like the sound of those limited options.

@ Everyone else -

Input greatly appreciated. As I suspected, the OU doesn't quite have the impact of a 'real' university (though maybe it should, at least in terms of the material you learn. But that's another matter altogether).

On second thoughts, my real issue is with the nuisance of lectures and poor timetabling which really messed things up for me this semester. I just don't learn from lectures, so when each week is clogged up with 17+ hours of them, it really leaves no time to properly learn stuff.

So scrap my OU idea. It was the thoughts of a burned out, man-flu ridden, exam-stressed individual spending yet another evening in the campus library until 10pm. I think in this coming semester I'll just download the lecture notes, get all the recommended textbooks and email my professors to say, "Sorry, lectures aren't for me, I'll be teaching myself and will be in touch if I have problems." As they say, university is mainly for the bit of paper anyway. How I learn is my business.

Although, @Robby I think the stuff I'm learning now is far harder than the world of work, if I'm honest. Waking up at 730am and not finishing the day until late evening is far more than the average joe 8-5 I was used to before - I worked full time for 5 years before getting into this uni malarkey. I think it's different depending on the subject. The 'lazy student/tons of free time' thing has never been a thing for us on our physics course. I hear of people boasting of only needing to go to campus 2 or 3 days a week it amazes me.

And I'll have you know it wasn't just some gap yah bumming around in China, it was at a major Chinese university learning to read, write and speak Chinese, with a qualification at the end of it, complete with a big red Chinese Party stamp of approval! Probably/hopefully quite useful in the future and I expect would look quite good to future employers. Part of me actually wonders if the 'Chinese' part of my experience is going to prove more useful than the physics degree. A mate of mine with a comparatively worthless degree in history (Birmingham uni) whose Chinese skill/experience is only about 1 year ahead of mine has landed himself a job at the British embassy in Beijing. And he actually did start out by just 'bumming around' in China!

[DrSnoosnoo]

Dear OP

University is frustrating. Especially the relatively elite ones.

You suggest you would prefer to get the text books to just teach yourself and talk about >20 hr per week lectures, I'll assume a number of 25 to give this a value.

25 hours is not a long time to be in lectures and still gives you A LOT of time to be able to conduct private study. You will have a recommended reading list for your modules so have you considered asking the Academics for titles of their lectures for the term and you could then spend some time to do your personal tuition prior to the lecture. Then use the lecture time as a way to confirm what you have learned or to clear up particulars. Private study could even be conducted in your 1 hour gaps between lectures but I would encourage attempting tutorials applicable to that lecture to enforce what you should have learned.

You say a pro of quitting would be time to find a part time job and relevant work experience. This should not be your focus when entering into your third year. This will be the hardest year of the course. Have you asked about the option of a sandwich course? I had a year internship and completed some distance learning modules before entering my final year - this even boosted my degree to MChem rather than the BSc.

I then concur with the other replies that your dropping out to attempt to complete via OU would not be favourable in employment terms and you pretty much throw out potential options for postgrad degrees.
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[Rogerborg]

In the 2nd half of my senior honours year (4 year courses in Scootchland) I went to one lecture. It turned out to be a revision lecture for a course that I wasn't on.

I got a 2.1, then on to an MSc.

[angryjonny]

2nd term of my 3rd (final) year at university an email came around the department from a software consultancy in London, basically saying "who wants a job?" I replied and within a week, following a couple of fairly full-on days of interviews etc, I had an unconditional job offer for when I graduated.

I don't imagine OU students get approached in the same manner. The company I ended up working for tended to approach students from the top dozen or maybe fifteen establishments. Leeds qualifies, for example.

One more year and you'll have a BSc. Just get it finished. Yes, lectures are a ballache (we all had to do them), but this "I don't wanna" spiel is a bit spoilt-kiddy and it doesn't suit you.

[Lord Percy]

You're right, it was just a late night moan really.

It's just the lecture commitments that get to me as I truly learn barely anything in those rooms. So when the timetable is bulked out like this, it's not helpful at all to me:

https://i66.tinypic.com/23h9is0.jpg

I know plenty of you will see that and think, "Meh, my week was similar." It's just a pain when almost every single one of those filled in blocks is clutter to me, like a deadweight.

My main complaint was the annoying 1 or 2 hour gaps between them, which bulks the week out to being almost the same as 'full time work', with barely the time to actually sit down and learn the 5 modules I was doing. Well, I did sit down and learn stuff but it was always well into the evening, most days of the week. Although for the record I didn't begrudge the time spent studying, I actually quite enjoy learning. This 'OU' thread was more about trying to find a way out of the part involving lecture attendance, which is a thing I'm not a fan of.


I'll take Roger's advice and drop out of more lectures I think. To be honest that's what I was going to do anyway.

[bikertomm]

This is what pisses me off with education. It's all just complete hoop jumping bullshit. (From my experience)

I'd pay good money to find a decent course ran by a decent person who actually taught things relative to the real world (and career direction).

I always get the feeling it's just an exercise to prove you can do something rather than 'learning' anything worth learning... which I suppose is fair enough, just frustrating. Signed up to it in good faith I suppose.

I finished two years last year and hated every moment, useless lectures, finding out things google didn't even know etc. I didn't give up though and got the highest marks in my papers & coursework coming out the other side with a distinction. Only myself to pat on the back for this as I paid the fecking fees. I'd say stick it out. Unless your unhappy to the point of not enjoying life. Actually no. Then stick it out some more. (I was hating it )

Unfortunately it looks like I've become a player in the 'game' of corporate bs!
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[angryjonny]

[Lord Percy]

Oh no I really do enjoy it, it's great . It's just the lectures seem useless to me.

It makes me wonder how universities used to be, back in the day when it was free and was a reserve for the intellectual 'elite' who deserved to be there. I'm not saying I'm part of that elite either way, I'm just wondering how it was when student numbers were less and the focus was entirely academic, rather than the strange, administrative, bureaucratic style it is now. I even have so sign an attendance sheet for lectures..! Feels more like adult high school to me.

[bikertomm]

[Matt B]

[angryjonny]

It was still free when I went (96-99) and the folks there weren't academic elite at all. Bs and Cs at A level were enough to get in to a top-10 university with only Oxbridge and a couple of others (St Andrews, Durham maybe) worrying about whether you had any As at all.

You didn't *have* to attend lectures but I did, mostly, because I'm not disciplined enough to study in my own time if I don't have to. So I learned most of what I learned in lectures and did my coursework in the evenings. I think I had about 18 hours a week of lectures and maybe another half-dozen or so of lab-time which seemed to be mainly run by PhD students.

I found I took a while to adjust to an environment where you're free to slip through the cracks if you want to. I disliked students as a concept and envied my housemates who seemed to do 3 hours a week on their humanities courses. I had more money than when I started my first *real* job.

[Lord Percy]

[Rogerborg]

[angryjonny]

Back then, in A-levels at least, there was nothing higher than an A. These days A is the new B. I guess it makes sense that requirements go up a grade.

I got offered places at Warwick and York (both top 10 at the time I think) without either seeming to require an A. Sheffield (where I ended up) wanted two Bs and a C.

[Robby]

I read through that facebook thing.

Percy, why even associate with such people?

[Lord Percy]