Relearning how to study

I went to my first day school today. At the Open University, tutorials take place online, and are generally held during the evening. However, rather than you needing to go to tutorials several evenings in a row, they’ll often run a Saturday day school where you can attend all the relevant tutorials in one day. I decided this would be a good option as I haven’t yet decided which topic I’ll write about for my second assignment, so I figured that covering all the topics in one day would give me a good idea.

The day was quite challenging if I’m honest. I didn’t feel like I was particularly well prepared for it, as I haven’t yet studied all of the materials. This is to be expected. We’re given a week by week breakdown of what we should be studying, and at this point in the course, we haven’t covered all four topics that were discussed to day. So although it was challenging, I’m sure everyone else was in that position.

A second issue came up with my plans, or lack of good planning. My plan was to attend the day school, use it to help me decide which topic to write about, and then attend that specific tutorial again one evening. Unfortunately for this day school it won’t work out, as several of the evening tutorials have already taken place. This is absolutely something I should have checked in advance, and it’s a useful thing to learn so early on in the course. I’ve made sure that for future assignments I’ve not only signed up to the day school, but to the evening sessions as well.

I also realised that I really need to email tutors to get presentation slides in advance. I’ve been to a couple of tutorials with my tutor and I didn’t feel like this was necessary for those. But everyone teaches slightly differently and some lecturers are more likely than others to read the slides aloud. I’ve been to university before so I should know this, but somehow it feels slightly different when studying online. Again, it’s a useful lesson to learn now when I’m at the very start of the course.

One of the lecturers did email us all a short text that we’d be looking at in her tutorial, and I chose to emboss it so I’d have a braille copy as well as the electronic text to refer to. This worked really well and I’m probably going to emboss the presentation slides in future tutorials, so that I can listen and take notes on my computer, but also quickly scan through my braille slides by touch.

All in all, although it was a challenging day, I think the things I’ve learnt will help me study in a more effective way from now on. This is proof that no matter how many degrees you have, you always have something to learn. Not only about the topic you are studying, but also about yourself and how you can study in a way that works well for you. I can’t imagine there is anyone who finds this type of blog post interesting, but I thought I’d preserve my thoughts here if only so that I can look back on them at some point in the future.