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Alan Frederick Richards

6. FutureLearn

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I have been putting this off because it's going to be very negative.

I was seriously considering the Open University Creative Writing course and the FutureLearn course was advised as preparatory work. So I paid £100 and did the course.

I learned a few things and felt a bit more confident. But it's not really a proper course. The only assessment comes from other students and the general standard was abysmal. There is only one significant assignment near the end of the course. It's a single piece of writing, severely hampered by a very low word limit. But there is no assessment other than other students being able to comment.

I could have passed the course, with a nice Certificate of Completion, just by saying that I had done everything. But I submitted an assignment, modified from a tiny part of one of my novels.

Most of my comments come from assessments of this final assignment, and also from general chat coming from students along the way.

  • Possible as many as hundreds of people started the course. Most seemed to drop pout after week 1
  • Significant numbers either spoke in foreign languages or very poor English
  • Over several months, only 24 submitted a final assignment
  • Most of these couldn't write good English sentences. Probably half of them were not native English speakers. Others had no idea of paragraphs or creative writing
  • I think only four produced an assignment with any potential. Everone else was wasting their time
  • Only four continued as far as commenting on my assignment. Their main criticisms were about problems I had in cutting down the word count 

When I say that my Creative Writing is better than the others, i am not claiming to be good. But most others on the course were much, much worse.

I am hoping for more professional feedback from A802


Alan

  


 



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Alan Frederick Richards

5. Novelist

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I want to get through my reasons for starting this course, so here's a brief review of my novel writing career.

It started with NaNoWriMo, when I wrote a short novel about life on Earth during and after the eruption of the super-volcano underneath  Yellowstone. This was heavily base on autobiography.

But my real first novel, in 2013 was Science Fiction, firmly based in Mathematics. It was about an intelligent species, looking like a cross between giant ants, spiders and Mantises. Their physiology is unlike the humans who landed on their planet, but so is their psychology. They are emotionless clones of each other. The story is about their life and the lives of a small group of interplanetary visitors from Earth. It's called Transitions and you can find it by following the link to my Author Page as Jason Fredericks, my pen-name. 

That was it until ten years later I went back to writing. In just over a year, I have written another five Science Fiction Novels, one of which is a sequel to the first book, almost completed in draft ten years ago. You can find them via the same author page. The books are all in Kindle format, available from Amazon.

I began to widen my horizons and turned to Romance in more or less the present day. For this I took on another pen-name, Stella Scarlatti, with a younger, female, Italian image. Only one so far, Parliamo Italiano. But the sequel is almost complete.

Almost up-to-date ...




Alan





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Alan Frederick Richards

4. Early Writing. Blogs.

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Thursday, 29 Aug 2024, 12:57

Pleased to announce that my course entry has been confirmed. More about this later.

I am not sure what started my creative writing journey. I was always interested in writing and the English language. Most of my final years at work were very technical writing, about IT Security. I retired at the end of 2006 and wrote a blog about cruising round the world, mostly in pictures.

2011. Another cruise. Another blog.

Then another proper full blog. This time it was about growing up in the Fifties and Sixties. This took a couple of years, With over 100 entries it was my first 200 000 words of proper writing. I still get hundreds of visitors every month. You can find it at: 

https://alan001946.wordpress.com/

After that I did three more blog series. The last one had 365 entries, one for every day, each one describing a species of life found in the UK - plants, insects, mammals, fungi and others - some native, some introduced or cultivated. Here it is:

https://speciesofbritain.wordpress.com/


I love writing. I do it a lot. More to come ...



Alan






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Alan Frederick Richards

3. Postgraduate Study

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Monday, 5 Aug 2024, 18:58

Moving on to 1993, I had another opportunity to study, again funded generously by my employers.

My work has centred around what used to be called Programming Computers back in the Seventies. It became Information Systems (IS) and then Information Technology (IT) as it is now known.

So, in the Nineties, I studied Object Oriented Programming Languages, Project Management, and Intelligent Systems Analysis and Design, followed by M801, a Research project. My dissertation was entitled, 'Staff Scheduling for Maternity Services: A Practical Design and Implementation.'

In 1998, I was awarded a Master of Science degree in Computing for Commerce and Industry, to add to my two Bachelor of Arts degrees.


More to come about my writing. I still have more than a month before the course starts, but I have done some preliminary reading.

... 


Alan



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Alan Frederick Richards

2. The Open University

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Monday, 5 Aug 2024, 18:58

I started learning with the Open University when it was in its infancy. That's why my OU number starts with C. It was in its third year. There was no Internet, and there were no mobile phones. Distance learning meant a course workbook through the post and watching programmes on BBC2 . TMAs were done on a typewriter, with carbon paper, and sent in by post!

It was before the complicated Degree structure we now see. Almost all the students just took an unspecified BA. It may have been the only option.

I started a few years after starting work and I was lucky to have en employer who paid for my fees. But student finance was simpler in those days. There were no student loans. Most University students were given grants to pay for their living expenses. The grants also covered University fees. (When I took my BA in Mathematics at Cambridge in 1969 I didn't know anything about fees. The grant just paid them.)


So my first OU Degree, from 1973 to 1981, was very mixed, starting with D100: Understanding Society. I did courses on Psychology; Language; Soviet Government (The USSR still existed then;) Space and Time; And Music.

Why did I do it? because I always want to keep learning. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, "I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who."



Alan


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Alan Frederick Richards

1. Creative Writing

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Monday, 5 Aug 2024, 18:57

I'm back again:

1966-69: BA, Cambridge, Mathematics

1973-81: Open University BA 

1993-98: Open University MSc, Computing

2024 - ???: Open University MA, Creative Writing


I'm looking forward to everything about the course, apart from paying for it!

More to come later about my life and my creative writing. See the links for some of it - 7 novels published so far.


Alan






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