Why no search facility?
I’ve just submitted my assignment for the OUs Effective Leadership Skills course (GB003). It’s only a short course (approx 20 hours), and non-credit bearing but it’s taken me little while to get through. It’s different from most of the other OU courses as there are no fixed start and end dates, which I think the OU should probably be doing more of – though I know there are plenty of reasons as to why the OU still has fixed start/end dates for the vast majority of it’s courses (including tutor workload planning and exam timing). But there have been lots of times when I thought about doing a particular course, only to find it’s not running for another 6 months.
This course content is pretty much what I’d expected, though there was less reading than I thought there would be – especially compared to the Law course (W200) I took couple of years ago. My feeling is that most of these types of courses (e.g. effective time management etc) generally contain common sense approaches to work that you should probably know anyway – but sometimes they just need to be reinforced.
The assignment itself was very reflective and making you look at how you going to apply what you’ve learnt directly to your work, which is the whole point of doing the course in the first place, though I generally find these types of reflective activity quite hard!
Only had a couple of little niggles about the course and these are totally related to how the course delivery software (Moodle) forces content to be given to users (rather than anything to do with the course content). Firstly, that the navigation was quite poor, once you were on a content page, there was effectively only 3 links to navigate the content – (a) return to course homepage, (b) go to next page or (c) go to previous page. There was no quick way to jump back to a particular page in another section that you wanted to refer to. This is also a problem I’ve had with course content in OpenLearn (but we’re working on that one).
The second problem was that there was no search facility on the site, so the only way to try and find the page that I’d read about ‘virtual leadership’ on was to just scan through all the pages. Not a huge problem for this course (not too many pages), but frustrating nonetheless, but this would be infuriating for much bigger courses. I had a similar issue with the law course, in that we were provided with the course manuals in paper form and I asked to have the manuals in pdf format too, basically for ease of searching and for taking away with me (didn’t want to be lugging around heavy course material when I’d already got my laptop). My request for this was rejected (on what I thought was a fairly lame excuse), even though I know the manuals are produced in pdf format to send to the printers!
Hopefully as Moodle (sorry, OU VLE!) is rolled out and more courses have their full content online, this search issue will be sorted out!
