Tutorials

A few points on face-to-face tutorial allocations arising from a discussion in the FC Forum Overseas Students Problems.

Firstly, the good news is that it is definitely the case that any student is welcome to attend a tutorial anywhere - if tutorials are available they will appear on the Tutorial Finder program on your Student Home Page. Bear in mind though the TF may not be up to date so ringing up the Regional Centre http://www.open.ac.uk/about/organise/p3.shtml or asking students in the Region you're passing through (e.g. on First Class) is the way to go. It may mean a bit of legwork (or fingerwork in ringing round etc.), forward planning and so on.

The kind of 'bad' news is that because of low attendance the OU is not 'keen' on face-to-face tutorials and certainly in Continental Europe this will mean that tutorials are unlikely in most cases. This affects UK students too - it is not uncommon in low population courses that a student will be allocated to tutorials in another region.

It seems the OU is thus inevitably pitched towards maintaining the drive towards online synchronous tutorials. My personal view is that online synchronous tutorials probably are the way to go, but there should still be core face-to-face tutorials in areas with a large student population, and the way in which they are advertised could be further improved. Also personally speaking, some of the best tuition I have had has been by traditional means - ie snail mail advice from a tutor - and I would hope that that kind of creative on-a-shoe-string stuff would continue to be encouraged.