Since my last ‘Quiet Times’ post things have been, well, quiet in astronomy terms, personally speaking of course. I did complete the OU S194 Introducing Astronomy course and submitted the end of course assessment material at the end of January and a couple of weeks ago got a letter advising me that the result of the course was ‘Pass’, just that. Now I understand that this course is small beer, and I am not deterred from doing further study with the OU, considering a similar course on Cosmology, but if my submission was read then how much more time is required to offer a couple of sentences by way of feedback? On the whole my answer would be not a whole lot. I don’t have comprehensive details of the number of students who did this course at the same time as me, I suspect that the number is between 25-40, and I also suspect that if the end of course submissions were similar to my own, and received a modicum of scrutiny, each would have taken 15-20 minutes to review. If we take 15 mins per and 40 assessments then the time taken is 10 hours of someone’s time, does the addition of a further minute per assessment to, say, choose from a suite of pre-defined responses to the assessment really break the model? As it is, it’s hard not to feel that I would have got a pass if I’d just submitted perfunctory instructions on how to boil an egg. I’m not party to the financial mechanisms that drive the OU, how much revenue they are expected to raise or what the targets are for the take up of their courses but I expect that more is better; I paid for this course and will pay for the Cosmology course and therefore they win on both counts, so why do they not offer even superficial feedback which would offer significant encouragement towards the take up of further courses?
I definitely expect to get the scope out this month to have a look at Saturn in Leo but I have to confess that this was my thinking on Mars some few months back!!
