I have finally caught up with myself after a busy time where I had not found the time to do the course. Makes me wonder how our students manage. I had thought about it and decided I would work on the course on Monday and Wednesday evenings - and Friday if necessary. However, on Monday I was in London at a meeting of our Welsh reading group, and on Wednesday evening a friend was staying over.
So I have caught up last night today, and that is fine with a course that takes around 3 hours a week - but would not be possible with a course needing much more input. I've enjoyed most of it, and have learnt from it - whilst last week was looking at ecosystems in woods, this week focussed on adaptation and ecosystems in more extreme conditions, using deserts and the arctic as case studies. I've particularly enjoyed the OU/BBC videos, although I suspect I shift into a 'leisure watching' mode, rather than a more active learning mode. I have not taken notes at all - which I would normally do if taking a course, and might still do.
The materials and teaching are very good, as I would have expected. The part that is not working so well for me at the moment is the discussion. The forum is arranged fairly simply with the most recent posts at the top - but this means that a) the questions have already been answered by other people and b) it is not really a discussion but a series of posts. I don't have a sense of how many people are taking the course, or their interests or background, so the social element is not really there. And it is not helped at all by the fact that there are technical problems with contributing to the forum on both this Macbook and on my iPad - manifesting themselves as the page essentially crashing. I hope to try and do some from my work desktop next week if I can to see if that is better.
