As I go into the two week Christmas/New Year break, it's time to reflect on last week's activities, which according to the study calendar, was Week 11 out of 32. For this module, teaching/learning stops at Week 29, with the last 3 weeks set aside for completing the final TMA and end of module exam revision. As you can see I am 42% of the way into the course now, at least in terms of the consumption of content.
Over the last few days I have had five tutorials, and it's fair to say that some were better than others
One evening, I had a tutorial which was truly dire. Lots of long pauses, with underprepared, unrehearsed delivery. Poor slides, which appeared to have been prepared for a different purpose, confusing explanations, and off-topic ramblings. It was really really bad. I felt sorry for the 9 other people that had to go through that. It wasn't just the worst OU tutorial I have ever had, but the worst ever in my 55 or so years of education.
There was a non-recorded tutorial on how to tackle TMA02 by one of the better tutors which was a bit of a disappointment really. Too long was spent on the Python question and not much of interest said about anything else. I found parts of the rest confusing in places, but having said that, I changed the graph in one of my TMA questions as a result of the new information. The trendline is now thinner and the plot points are now vertical and horizonal crosses not dots. I think on balance it looks a lot better.
I had another tutorial from a tutor who clearly knew a lot about science education and was an excellent communicator, but I was left with the impression that they didn’t actually know that much about the OU module they was teaching on. Encouraging students to not use gridlines for graphs where values needed to be read, and not knowing that Trinkets had been discontinued from the module, were real howlers. They also appeared to be using somebody else’s outdated PowerPoint slide deck and didn’t really know what it contained because some of the content took them by surprise. I don’t think they had much interest in being an OU tutor, but just did the job because they had overstretched themselves on the mortgage and needed the extra income. Having said that, the presentation of the tutorial was handled very professionally, it was just aspects of the content which were not great.
There was another tutorial in the middle of the week with a tutor I have had before and liked. The worst part was the timing really. 10.00 am isn't for everyone and it wasn't being recorded so anybody at work or with other daytime responsibilities would have missed out entirely. SM123 borrows quite a bit from S112, especially the early part of the course, and I feel that the chemistry/materials science component is being used as a filler rather than as an enhancement to the physics and astronomy material. The tutor did their best to make it as interesting and relevant as possible though, and it was well worth attending.
On Thursday evening I was supposed to have a 'deep dive' tutorial on 'Material Worlds' but the tutor didn't turn up. A staff tutor posted on the forum a few days afterwards that the tutor had been taken ill, and gave a link to a previous tutorial given by another member of staff.
