How much contact with other students when studying with the OU?

[Hurryupfashion]

I’m considering enrolling for a postgraduate OU when I retire next year - possibly an MA History or MA Open.

I feel like I’d like to understand a bit more about the approach to assessment etc. for example, when my DD did her first degree a few years ago, she seemed to spend quite a bit time working in groups where they would be marked as a collective following the presentation of their work. I honestly can’t be bothered with that - I’ve spent 35 years working in roles that require me to collaborate in teams and I don’t feel I need to learn this skill at this point! I like the idea of having support and contact in tutorial groups etc, but when it comes to producing assessed work, I’d rather just get my head down and work on my own.

I’d appreciate any insight as to how this works with the OU, thank you.

You can look at the assessment strategy for the modules you're interested in. You can call or email them if you want to double check there's nothing like that on the module you're considering.

I haven't seen any OU postgraduate modules that feature group assessment other than the ones that are explicitly described as team projects (eg engineering).

There are a very small number of OU PG modules hosted on FutureLearn which uses much more of a "social" approach - but still not group assessment as far as I'm aware.

@ouimp thank you, that sounds encouraging. I’ll have a look at the website in more detail and send an email as you suggest. I feel a bit overwhelmed at the moment!

Yeh it can be a lot to get your head around. There's different information shown depending on whether you're looking at the qualification page or the module page.

For the MA in History, here's a direct link to the detailed learning outcomes and assessment page for the qualification:

https://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/f89-learning-outcomes

The details on assessment are at the end of the page. There are two modules for that qualification, so the module pages for each of them should give you more details.

Do you have a shortlist of modules you're interested in if you did the MA Open? (Just curious, there's so many!)

I'm ou undergrad and some of my modules contain group work/assessment - bloody hate it! But, if you chose a none named degree (so the open) then you can specifically chose mods that don't contain group work/assessment.