Atomic.edu: Open learning

Can’t travel, but desperately want to study? Chris Taylor has a look another alternative.

The past couple of years have seen Australian universities put a lot of time and effort into promoting their study-by-correspondence options. Seven of our universities – Curtin, Griffin, Macquarie, Melbourne, RMIT, Swinburne and South Australia – have banded together to set up a service, Open Learning Australia, that offers you the opportunity to study in as many different fields and topics as you’d find at a more traditional university. To be sure, Open Learning Australia began in 1993, but it’s only been quite recently that it’s been heavily advertised and grown in popularity.

For those who already work full-time, learning at home – either through the Open Learning Australia service or via a more traditional university’s correspondence options – can be great. The advantages are numerous and fairly obvious, but there are certainly some serious disadvantages to be found.

Of course, learning by correspondence is very convenient. If you’re working full-time, it may be your only option unless you’re willing to cut back to part-time or casual employment – not necessarily realistic or desirable, if you’ve a mortgage or a family or simply don’t want to go from a respectable, gainfully employed, honest-to-God human being to a poverty-stricken student surviving on MSG-flavoured noodle snacks and Dolmio’s range of heat-and-eat pasta sauces. Learning by correspondence can be great if you simply live too far away from a university and have no desire or ability to relocate, either due to suck-arse economic realities, or family or work commitments.

Learning by correspondence allows you, the student, to fit your studies around your many and varied commitments. And if you’re a mature-age student (as in older than 21) or have been out of home for a few years, that’s just brilliant.

Of course, too much of a good thing can, as that old saw goes, be bad. Having to be on campus isn’t necessarily a downside – sure, you have to travel to get there – but you’re able to access the library really easily. While universities now place a lot of their learning materials online in .pdf or a similar format, having access to physical books and journals is a benefit that shouldn’t have its worth underestimated. Reading everything off an LCD is shit.

Furthermore, if you’re learning on-campus you have a timetable. You’re told be at Room 341 at 2pm and then to move to Room 269 at 4pm. At times that just sucks if you’ve other commitments, but it does enforce a sort of discipline. While going to university is all about learning independently, the fact is we are more likely to do stuff if someone tells us what to do and when to do it. When you learn by correspondence, it can be very easy to put things off until tomorrow or the day after that if you’re tired, are working over-time or some family commitment pops up.

Without a tutor who expects you to have done the readings before you walk into their room at 11am on a Wednesday, you may find it hard – unless you’re really disciplined – to maintain the motivation to do them. Furthermore, by having university as such a flexible thing in your life, one could see it as being somewhat devalued – if you can just push it to another day every time it’s slightly less than convenient for you, you may not take it as seriously as you should.

That being said, if you are really disciplined and generally interested in what you’re studying, the convenience of studying this way outweighs the negatives. So long as you can establish your own timetable and ensure you stick to it, you’ll be fine. If, for some reason, it is unavoidable that you miss out on your planned 8-10pm study session tonight, be sure you fit it in tomorrow or, better still, at 10-12pm. If you can’t promise yourself that you’ll fit those two hours in somewhere, come hell or high water, learning by correspondence may not be for you. While you already have a full-time job, you’re doing this degree to get ahead, yeah? And even though you might be claiming government assistance, you’re paying a lot of money for it, right? Keeping yourself consciously aware of the immediate cost of your studies, as well as the potential economic gains, could prove an excellent motivator for getting through those dull readings and time-consuming lectures.