Personal Blogs

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

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

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