New(ish) courses from the University of London – sorry v. long

Hi all,

It’s been a while since I last did some shilling so I thought I’d better just bring the following new(ish) courses from the University of London to people’s attention. A few of them don’t fall in to the standard fare of MBA’s and business degrees, so probably do deserve a bit of attention. Apologies if one or two of them have been mentioned on the boards already.

Just as a reminder, and for those that don’t know, the University of London is a fairly established DL provider – a century and a half of experience – with over 40,000 students in pretty much every country in the world.

It’s a pretty large university as it’s a federal institution made up of 20 Colleges (although very soon to be 19 - Imperial is going it alone later this year). Each College is responsible for the academic development of their own courses, including those by distance learning. However all of the Colleges award University of London degrees. What this means for our distance learning is that where other universities have departments who would create the courses, we have departments of Colleges.

The first few of the new DL degrees are all postgraduate (Masters degrees). You have between 2-5 years to complete these. You can gain a Masters, a Postgraduate Diploma or a Postgraduate Certificate and you can also take individual modules for interest if you were so inclined.

Masters of Research
The one I’m most excited about is fairly unique and will probably be a whole new type of course for anyone over the pond. It’s called a Masters of Research (degree designation is M.Res.) and it’s from the Institute of Education.

The MRes is essentially a qualification that teaches research skills. Here in the UK it’s often taken as a pre-cursor to a PhD. Many PhD supervisors concerned about low completion rates now recommend a course like this first so people gain the research skills that are going to be necessary and can start their research before committing to a full PhD.

As the course comes from the Institute, which is definitely the largest and probably the most prestigious facility of Educational Research in Europe, it is very much for people who want to focus on Educational and Social Research. However you don’t necessarily have to know what area of research you’re going to focus on when you start the course.

As well as those who want to learn how to do research it might also be of interest to anyone who works in an educational or social policy environment and has to deal with stats, surveys, focus groups etc. and wants a/another Masters degree. (So it’s the first course we’ve launched in a while that I’m tempted to sign up for.)

It’s all taught online, and the course team have been enthusing to me the benefits of this. A rich online learning environment allowing reflective contributions which is better for teaching and learning research skills - yada, yada, yada.

Overall the cost for the full MRes is around £5,985 and there are two intakes per year. Next Application Deadline: 30 June.


MA Citizenship Education / MA History Education
These next two are also from the Institute of Education and they launched last year – apologies if they’ve already been mentioned on the forum. They are basically designed for teachers of History, museum educators and the like. We’ve also had quite a few people who are teaching Citizenship and/or working for charities and organisations where issues around race, gender, religion, nationality are important. Again it is taught online and costs £5,985 in total. Next Application Deadline: 30 June.


MSc Clinical Trials
Again this course was new last year, and it comes from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health, the largest and probably most prestigious school of Public Health in Europe. It’s obviously for people who are already working in the area of Clinical Trials and want the academic understanding of the subject, and those that are moving in to this area. The interesting fact about this course was it came in to being at the request of the Gates Foundation – I guess you can understand why when you think about the problems of trained personnel to run clinical trials in many HIV areas of the world. This one is £8,830 in total. Next Application Deadline: 30 June.


MBA in International Management
The MBA in International Management from Royal Holloway (recently called the “Monarch of the MBA” by the FT, Financial Times) isn’t a new course but it has just been relaunched. It’s now AMBA accredited – although this does mean a residential (which will either be offered at Royal Holloway or at the University of Hong Kong) as well as the online / distance learning. There’s also been a total revamp of the modules available and there’s been some pretty good stuff on corporate social responsibility. They’ve also taken a modular approach adding new MSc, Postgraduate Diploma and Postgraduate Certificate qualifications in to the offer as well. Total cost of the MBA will be around £9,200. Next Application Deadline: 31 July.


MBA Banking
We’ve also just launched another MBA focussed on the Banking and Financial Services sector. This is from CeFIMS at SOAS. That’s the Centre for Financial and Management Studies the School of Oriental and African Studies for those of you who can’t stand acronyms. This department can (probably) uniquely claim two current world Presidents / Prime Ministers amongst their DL alumni. Again it’s taught online. Cost £6,790. Next application deadline 2 April.

The department has also just launched a new MSc International Management (China) Cost £8,690 and Postgraduate Diplomas in Public Financial Management and Public Management Cost £4,565. Again next application deadline 2 April.


Bachelors degrees
We haven’t been sleeping at the undergraduate level either, the following are some new bachelors degrees. They are all fairly traditional courses and cost around £3,500 and have an application deadline 17 Sept.

The BSc Creative Computing is from Goldsmiths, who tag themselves Britain’s Leading Creative University. To give an idea of their creative strength Goldsmiths has had five winners of the Turner Prize – and almost a quarter of those shortlisted for the award since it began – have been Goldsmiths graduates. This course has been designed for those who want to be creative professionals in the computing, media and arts industries.


There’s also a range of new courses BSc Politics, a BSc International Relations, and a BSc in Geography and Environment and there will also be a new BSc Law and Sociology degree (although this hasn’t gone live on our site yet). These have all been designed by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which has a pretty good reputation in for intl. relations and social sciences. I’m sure that there are also some other new Diploma for Graduates programmes from LSE that I’ve forgotten about at the moment. In truth with these programmes what’s happened is they’ve created a lot of new modules which has allowed them to pull together a few new qualifications including the degrees mentioned above.


If anyone has any questions about any of these qualifications (or any of our other 100+ qualifications) that aren’t answered on the website - please do email or call our Information Centre (Tel: +44 (0) 20 7862 8360). The staff at the Info Centre don’t bite - in fact they are very friendly. Also, they’ll probably be able to answer any questions more thoroughly and quickly than I can.

Best wishes,

Brendan

 

Cool stuff, Brendan.

Thanks!

 

The International Management programme is interesting since it is possible to earn either an MBA, MSc, Postgraduate Diploma, or Postgraduate Certificate depending on number of courses you take.

UoL offers Masters of Research degrees as a pre-cursor to a PhD. Are there plans for UoL to offer a PhD as well?

 

Not at the moment.

We used to offer PhD's but these were phased out a long time ago for various reasons - (e.g. difficult to administer, difficult to support, difficult to know students were of the right calibre, had the right background, could build the rappor with their supervisors etc. - when we did offer PhD's it was only to holders of London Masters degrees). However various leaps in technology have happened since then and some of the barriers are being overcome.

Certainly programmes like the MRes are the building blocks for how a proper research PhD should run at a distance - therefore although there are no plans in the pipeline at the moment you never know!

 

Interesting... Of course, minimal face time and non-standard tasks in the dissertation phase makes most of the Ph.D. program a distance learning experience anyway.

Dave

 

If a student earns a MR from UoL it would probably hold that they would like to continue their education using DL. Are there specific DL PhD's programs to which you would refer your students?

 

So true, so true...

 

Absolutely agree - and I think this sort of answers rabbuhl's question. Officially we don't offer distance learning PhD courses.

Brendan

 

I will keep this in mind when I go shopping for a PhD. BTW, the new course offerings look great!!