I suggest to anyone out there looking for a challenge to sign up for a course of study in an area which has always interested you – do it now and you wont regret it. If you are like me and have always been interested in the medical side of things – but have better grades behind you but not good enough for doctor training – then how about medical assistant school…? this would be excellent for those of you who have wanted to break into the medical field but are not quite cut out for the long years of study required for becoming a fully-fledged doctor.

I urge you mums out there especially to have a good think about where you want your life to take you after the kids have left school – where will that leave you…? don’t be left behind – go back to school yourself – NOW!!!

Various public bodies have attempted to predict when the ‘tipping point’ will be reached which will push Birmingham’s ethnic minorities into a clear majority. Although children from white families will still make up the largest single group, youngsters from ethnic backgrounds will be in the majority which means the white children will be classed as a ‘minority’. Researchers from the university calculated four years ago that the proportion of children aged under 16 who are from black and ethnic minorities will rise to about 64 per cent by 2026. The study suggests one reason for the reduction of white families is movement out of Birmingham to other areas of the West Midlands and the UK.

Another reason is the continued immigration of people from Pakistan, African countries and China. Ten years ago, the 2001 census showed that 70.4 per cent of the Birmingham population was white and 29.6 per cent were a mixture of various ethnic backgrounds, with British Asians and African-Caribbean dominating. The impact of these changes in the population is already being felt in the city’s education system. The council’s education department has warned that language difficulties among non-English speaking pupils is contributing to poor performances by some schools.

Last year Asian children were reported to outnumber white pupils in Birmingham primary schools for the first time, according to city authorities.

All the paraphernalia has at last arrived; the box of books (quite thick and heavy I noticed..), the CD’s, the DVD’s and then there is the student website to negotiate – the forums, the assignments, the tutorials at the local university. I decided to embark on a course relating to the Arts as my world pre-Arnold was heavily related to music and performance and so AA100 The Arts Past and Present seemed the ideal starting block for me. Basically it covers literature; poetry and plays ranging from Homer, Aesop and Faust through to music from Mozart, opera, films and even Madonna, so it looks very interesting and should keep me out of mischief until October. From this point I can work either towards a degree in Arts/Humanities or turn in a whole new direction for myself and head down the Sciences route – but we’ll see in a while, after I reacquaint myself with Cleopatra.

He now has his computers exam to sit next week and then geography which will be the end of the stress until the real exams come around in May. By that time I will be well into my own studies and maybe I can be a good influence on him and let him see how much his Mum gets into her own revision…somehow I doubt it though.

The OU is a mixture of an online it degree and mainstream university in that you have a tutor online and you also attend tutorials at the local university campus where you also sit your exams. Getting back into serious study will be a challenge and I wonder where it will take me over the coming years…?

What are protests in aid of…? British students pay far less than many other students around the world for a university education, why should it be free, why should it be cheap! why do they expect fellow citizens to pay for them to opt out of the workforce for several years while they study nonsensical subjects like ‘sociology’ or ‘art history’…?

I’d give you easy odds that most of them were not students – one example was the group of arab youths with rags around their mouths (not in them unfortunately) being given camera time by the BBC to whinge and shout about there being no jobs for young arab yobs like themselves…I hope the Home Office was watching and sends them on a free plane ride back to wherever they crawled over from.These lazy non-working losers should have been dealt with in the harshest manner tonight – a few water cannons to give them both a good wash and a dose of hypothermia, in Israel they’d have been showered with rubber bullets…shame our police are too civilised.

Tonight’s business was absolutely not on, unforgivable and I hope the Govt treats this as it would any organisation which threatens violence or acts of terrorism…ignore them altogether. We are always told ‘we don’t do deals with terrorists’ – these louts are terrorists tonight and the Govt must not give in to their demands. Never.

My son has his eye on several areas he would like to work in later on when he leaves school; I always thought he would do well as a salesman and my Mum jokes that selling insurance quotes would be right up his street as he never takes no for an answer…and he has a very thick skin. He is not put off very easily. Science is what he is really interested in, astronomy especially, but if he does not get the marks to do that at university he can always do it via the OU later on.

In reality they are very helpful when you go along to them and many universities even run open sessions where they’ll advise you what subjects are available and give you a chance to talk to some of the tutors. But it’s still a scary thing to do sometimes: the way around that is to check out their website and order a prospectus of their undergraduate courses. That’s basically a catalogue of all of their courses and usually contains a brief writeup of, usually, several hundred courses.

The key to getting going is to completely ignore any thought as to what degree (if any) that you might finish up with and instead to look through the courses to find something that interests you. Don’t worry about what faculty it’s in for now, just look for a course that’s under the heading “foundation” or “level one”.

If you follow our earlier example of the Open University you’ll find that there are hundreds of courses to look at organised into around 20 separate faculties (subject areas). It’s going to take you several days to look through the prospectus and chances are you’ll end up with a list of 20 or 30 courses that interest you.

Once you’ve got a short-list, the best thing to do is to go to their website to check out the full details of the course (there’s just a summary in the printed prospectus). For example, say you fancy Engineering the Future you’d go their website and find that it’s a 30 point level one course with start dates in October and February and that it’s got an associated residential course. Eh? What does all that mean?

Well, level one means that it’s an introductory course and you’ll be able to start it without having to do any courses before it. It’s got two start dates means that you can start it either in October or in February. The associated residential means that there’s a one week residential course that will let you practice a lot of what you’ve learnt (associated means that you need to sign up for it separately). Finally 30 points means that it counts for 30 points towards the 300 that you need for a degree (or 360 if you want an honours degree) and therefore it should take you around 7 or 8 hours a week to do it.

It’ll tell you what degrees you can count it towards too although don’t worry about that at this point.

Finally, you’ll also find reviews from previous students. For example, for our engineering course there are two useful comments:

1. “An excellent and very interesting course. I picked it fairly randomly to fulfil a 30 points from another qualification requirement based mainly on the fact the name sounded interesting and am overjoyed that I did so. The course materials were well written and informative and the content was fascinating.” and
2. “I took this course as a filler in between finishing MST121 and starting T207. The course work is not that heavy and it is quite easy to get ahead. The topics covered are quite wide and will give a broad introduction into the field of engineering. I would say that having a decent grasp of maths would help as there is a bit of calculation required. The TMAs and exam are similarly structured and if you are able to complete the TMAs to a reasonable standard the exam should not be an issue.”

The first is typical of this course: nearly all say that it’s fascinating which is a good type of course to start with. The second indicates that you might want to know some maths for this course and that the workload isn’t that heavy (ie you could get it completed in much less than 7 hours a week).

One other thing that it says which you’ll probably missed is “You may be interested in free and open educational resources from this course available on The Open University’s openlearn website.” What this means is that some of the course modules are available, free of charge, at OpenLearn. Whilst you’ll not get course credits for studying them on OpenLearn, it’s very worthwhile signing up for it and trying out some of the courses that they have. None are complete courses but are aimed at giving you a feel for what a particular course might be like.

Finally, don’t forget that it doesn’t matter what course you start with! You can change your mind as to what degree you’d like to finish up with and lots of people do exactly that.

Arnold.

The way to go about it is to look at the distance learning universities. These are set up to let you do degrees by way of part-time study and so you can spread your degree over up to 12 years or so vs the typical 3 years full-time. I’m sure that 12 years sounds like a very long time but that’s around the maximum time and most people complete their degree within 6 years which passes very quickly indeed.

So where do you start? It depends entirely on you and what you’re interested in which is another refreshing difference from full-time universities. You can assemble a unique degree programme personal to your interests if you want to, or you can follow a “normal” university programme if you want to do that.

Let’s take a real example from the Open University (which offers one of the most complete and flexible programmes around). Go to their website and the first thing that may surprise you is that they do research degrees (doctorates and the like) in addition to first degrees: their range is as complete as that.

Continue on to their undergrade subjects and you’ll find the broad university departments listed. If you went through each of those you’d find hundreds of courses listed so there’s sure to be something to interest you. Ah, but you’d need qualifications to enrol? No, you don’t. You can enrol on any course you like without any previous qualifications. Now, in reality that usually means any “level 1″ course as levels 2 and 3 courses may require knowledge that you’ll have picked up at level 1.

If you’ve not done any university study before, one easy way to try it out is to enrol for one of their 10 point level 1 courses. You do these over about 3 months and they’re a great way to introduce you to their teaching methods. If you pass the course, the 10 points are counted towards your degree so it’s not wasted time.

For our example, say you’re interested in learning the French language. If you scroll down to Languages then click on French, it’ll give you a rundown of all their French courses. Don’t speak any French? No problem, they’ve a beginners course. Speak a little but not sure how your level maps onto their courses? They’ve self-tests to help you decide which course is right for you.

What if you don’t want to sign up for a complete degree? You don’t have to. For each course that you do, they’ll ask you what qualification you’d like to assign it to, but that doesn’t commit you to continuing through to the end nor even to doing any further courses. In fact, I originally assigned my courses to their BA open degree but found that I could get a BA Honours in Modern Languages after a few years and started aiming for that instead: all the courses I’d done before that were just transferred over to the new degree.

Once you start though, many people find it quite addictive and end up going right through the programme. Whilst most do the courses part-time and get a degree after about six years, a growing number of people are following the courses full-time and getting their degree in three years.

We’ll cover how to select your courses in the next installment.

Arnold.