Jay Rixon is a Senior Manager, responsible for the MA or MSc Open qualification. In this post, Jay reflects on the recent Student Hub Live session titled, ‘What’s the real value of a master’s degree?’ held on the 4th July.
Taking part in a live Student Hub Live (SHL) broadcast is always an activity that members of the Open qualifications team enjoy. Well, that is until you are in the online ‘green room’ and the countdown to go live has begun and the nerves kick in. Camera, lights and action!
SHL is a real hidden gem at the OU. The SHL team offer OU students a range of events that cover all sorts of general study skills, including academic conduct, critical thinking, problem solving and essay planning. They help bring to life important academic skills, freshers’ inductions and host social and wellbeing events to ensure that OU students feel supported and part of an engaged student learning community. Sessions are advertised from their website here. On the website, you can sign up for their newsletter and never miss out on a session.
This particular session was exploring master’s level study, so being invited to talk about the unique MA/MSc Open was an opportunity not to be missed. I was part of a panel, alongside other colleagues involved in master’s qualifications, who had lots of wisdom and advice to share. Although there were ‘experts’ on the panel, the great thing about Live Broadcast SHL sessions is that they are interactive: students can take part in the live session chat, use the live session widgets, and send in questions, some of which were challenging for the panel and kept us on our toes!
One question that came up was, ‘what do we mean when we talk about postgraduate study and master’s degrees and what is the difference?’ In my day-to-day role as a Qualification Manager, I find that I use those terms interchangeably, so it was a valid question. Rob, the presenter of SHL responded, ‘postgraduate study is anything you do after you finish your undergraduate degree. It would also include doctorates and PhDs. If you look at the OU structure, we have postgraduate study that leads to the master’s qualification’.
During the session, the different reasons for students to study at a postgraduate level were explored – it could be the area of work that they are in requires master’s level study, it may be to improve their current or future employment opportunities, or it might be for fun and to explore a passion they have in retirement. I personally value how the MA/MSc Open allows students the freedom to create a personalised course of study across a range of academic disciplines.
We went on in the session to talk about planning for study beyond the undergraduate level, exploring what postgraduate modules might expect from students and how to prepare for the step up between the two levels.
To help with planning for postgraduate study, we shared a wonderful, free resource hosted on the OU’s free learning site OpenLearn.
This course is called Succeeding in postgraduate study and the course goes into some of the skills required at the higher level.
One of the panel members in the session had this to say about postgraduate study in general,
‘You can start at the most basic level, which is about knowledge, which is about remembering information. And then you go through various things. There’s comprehension, explaining it, application. Analysis is another stage. But then you get to the two highest stages. One is synthesis, which is where you’re putting bits of information together to create new information, and then there’s evaluation where you’re critically assessing the things you know and creating new stuff. At postgraduate level, we’re operating at all levels, but I think the emphasis is more on those deeper levels of understanding.’
The MA/MSc Open has a helpful tool on our qualification website to help our students plan for their bespoke qualification. The Study Plan takes students through the structure of the qualification, helps them map the modules they want to study and encourages them to consider the timing and presentation of those modules.
I really enjoyed taking part in this event. Rob led the session really well and it was interesting to hear from fellow panel members, but mostly I enjoyed the interaction we had with our student audience and the rich discussion about learning, what we get from learning and how it makes us feel. The session is available to watch on demand from the SHL website here.
If you are thinking of studying a postgraduate qualification, or if you are already studying but need a refresher or energiser, then this session is for you. Students who took part in the session shared their feedback, commenting that they felt the session, “was very informative and they learnt about the progression opportunities at the OU”, “they felt part of a wider community”, and, “the session had lots of pointers, about where to find out more information.”
While I was a bit nervous before the session started, once we were streaming live, having conversations and interacting with our student audience I soon forgot to be nervous. Sessions like these remind me how passionate my colleagues are about their roles and what they do and how dedicated our students are to their studies and how they champion the OU with family and friends.
Another bonus is that over the summer SHL are releasing some podcasts with friends of SHL chatting through their experiences of studying, why they started, what they loved, the challenges they faced and how studying changed their lives. They will also be answering listener questions and offering support and advice. The episodes will be posted every Thursday throughout July and August and you can listen here.