New to PG OU study, starting in October, anyone else!?

[ForkInTheForeheid]

Hi there, will be studying E807 from October - it's 60 credits at PG level over 9 months. Never done OU study before, my undergrad was psychology (hoping to go into Ed psych and that this course will be a good way to keep my brain working and add to my CV).

I'm guessing it's going to be a big workload and I'm on summer hols just now but not got any course materials which is a bit frustrating! Anyone else starting studying soon/just done a similar course and know what the workload will be like?

Hi ForkInThe I'm studying at Postgraduate level with the OU and have am on my third course at the moment. I've only done 30 points at a time but they are over 4 and a half months. I had a gap of 2 days between this and my last course and I am seriously flagging at the moment because the pace is so relentless. The courses are are well prepared and interesting but they are hard work and there doesn't seem enough time to stop and look into anything in any more detail or think about the concepts you are learning.

My advice would be to try and get ahead with some reading to do with the course and if you have a research project or literature review to to do to think about what you might be interested in studying.

Hi webwiz. Yes, that's what I'd like to do ideally but I can't seem to find any information on useful reading for the course aside from the course documents which they don't send out til August I think.

I was going to ask, when studying with the OU are there facilities to access journal articles like you would if you were studying with a normal university? Like an Athens login or something like that?

What's your field of study out of interest?

If you are going to have a course text book (it usually says on the course description page) I'd stick the title into amazon and see what similar stuff comes up you might be able to find something that catches your eye.

The online OU library gives access to masses of journal articles which is really useful.

My undergraduate degree was in psychology (a long time ago) but I'm taking the MSc in social science research methods so I'm on the social psychology/sociology border!

Ah, thanks webwiz. Had read that several times but hadn't clocked the actual name of the text for some reason. Has definitely given me a starting point! Do you have a copy of SPSS then? Was thinking about getting a student version as might come in handy for research part of course and I want to re-familiarise myself with it anyway. Probably should be doing research methods myself - all my statistics knowledge feels far, far away (although I'm sure it's still in my brain somewhere... :) )

Hi fork I did E807 two years ago and really enjoyed it. I found the workload ok bit busy around assignment time and there is a long piece of work at the end. I got ahead with the reading and that really helped. Tutorials were very good as well

Good to hear andie, did you choose to do the literature review or the research project?

I did the literature review as I work in child health and I thought it would be too difficult to do the research. I enjoyed it and have managed to get it published in a journal so it was worth the effort