No such thing as student support Be careful when you ask for it or apply for open university. Really low standards for people high hope future for anyone who have dreams
Agree with the below. Plus, Student Support Service is really not about any real support. They are call handlers, people who don’t know how to handle other students looking for proper guidance and understanding. The culture seems to be stressed, Advisors come as tense, often passive aggressive and unhelpful, not having proved experience of how to deal with those who turn to them to truly need help, rather than anything unrelated to the queries made. There are no lectures. Only poor quality, often cancelled tutorials. Tutors are less present if you asked them for help and teaching as you want to learn. they just mark assignments. Poor relation to current job market requirements and preparation to this via courses.
Absolutely appalling registration process, the credit transfer is ridiculously long winded and they deliberately deduct credits lowering your value of units studied elsewhere so that you have to resit and pay again for the same units with them very discriminatory and stressful process been trying to sort since January spoke to numerous staff and on every call information given is contracting to the previous calls absolutely sick and fed up they wasted a year of my study and definitely discriminate against disabilities
Overpriced compared to 'normal university' on a course by course basis (partner is doing a distance learning MSc at strathclyde and courses are £200 cheaper). Communication is abysmal, constantly get we will endeavour to respond in 3-5 working days email responses, often takes weeks after that. Courses are contradictory in material, unfinished, riddled with grammatical, spelling and poorly cited material. Marking practices are awful, unexplained and tutor often incorrect and have to appeal marks. Avoid and go to a 'real uni' if you can. Money and time wasted.
The quality of O.U courses have drastically declined during the past decade. Lack of support from tutors and the O.U, errors in materials. Materials are spartan considering the cost of the modules. You can wait weeks for a reply from your tutor. There are far better and cheaper alternatives to the O.U, sadly. Check out Edx and Udacity for their micodegrees which are far superior to O.U equivalents.
The OU gave me the opportunity to retrain in the field of computer science, while also working full-time and having a family, and I will be eternally grateful to them for this. The teaching and assessment have generally been of a high quality (although I think the OU could also adopt some of the things that make MOOCs work so well too, e.g. recorded lectures broken into 15 min segements), and I would recommend it to everyone.
The Open University in Scotland discriminates against those with a disability. Reasonable adjustments as defined in the Equality Act 2010 mean nothing to them. The blind following of regulation is all the OU in Scotland care for.
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