By David Wells, editor at Surviving the OU

Part 1 of the journey is completed. David looks back over the course as a whole and plans his next move.

So, that’s year one over and done with, it certainly has flown by. In case you missed any of the articles along the way, you can find all of my Masters related posts under the “Masters” tag so click here to access it.

The EMA

The EMA became a bit of a drag towards the end, I won’t lie. But don’t they all get like that? I reached the point of not caring and just needed to hand it in – hand anything in. As my Twitter friend Ms Culchie says: “There must be a 40 in there somewhere”. That became my approach. I do believe there’s at least a 40 in there. I worked hard on it submitted with a relative degree of confidence. My approach to completing the EMA may not be groundbreaking but I took it one section at a time so as not to become overwhelmed or confused, as had been a problem in the past on TMAs and EMAs. There were four parts and I worked on one at a time, not getting drawn in to the others until I had the Part down to a point where I could edit it at the end and mark it down as done.

H800 overview

Overall I enjoyed H800. I learned an awful lot and got through it well, handling TMAs comfortably and scoring from the low to high 70s in all assignments. The EMA result hasn’t come out yet of course so I may be crying by the time you read this! I plan on doing a ‘5 things I learned from H800…’ post soon so I won’t elaborate too much, but generally I remain pleased with the levels of achievement and how I dealt with the module, amongst other learners who were tutors, teachers and practitioners in this area of study, and I was not as experienced as them.

Where do we go next?

OK so when finishing this part of the F10 MA qualification I had two options of where to go next and boy did I deliberate back and forward over what to do. Whether I decided to carry straight on with another module right away, or left it until next February (2018), I would have an extended break of a few months at some point. My first option was, straight after the EMA was handed in at the end of September, start another module in early October 2017. These were the options (below) which were starting in October 2017 and the same options remain for October 2018 as you can see by the dates.

I carefully read through the descriptions for all five of the optional modules in List B and decided that the first one ‘Addressing inequality and difference in educational practice’ EE814 would be the one for me. That would mean that whenever this module finished, in July 2018, I would have a big gap until February 2019 to start one of the core optional modules from List A. I felt that this gap would be a bit too large and I might possibly lose some momentum so I decided to take the break now and start my next module in February 2018. Here are the options for that:

There’s only one option I am considering here and that is the first one: H817 at the top. It’s a 60-pointer and I have no interest in the 30-pointer starting in April, or the October option which doesn’t make any sense either. H817 costs £2,333 while the optional modules from List B cost £2,000. For the record, the 30-point modules come at a cost of £1,167.

That should do it for now, cheers for sticking by me throughout the H800 module and I hope these posts have been of some use to you. I plan on putting out at least a couple of posts during my course hiatus, so keep an eye on the site here or on social media.

Thanks for reading, fellow Open University students. Don’t forget to LIKE and SHARE if you get the chance and let us know any thoughts, feelings or suggestions you may have about our articles.

The Open University study guide is now available! Click on this image to find out more.