B204 Leadership, Influencing and Change started

B204, my last Open University course for my Business Studies degree officially started on Saturday. It’s about Leadership, Influencing and Change. You might have guessed this from the title.

B204 Course Materials

These have some novel features. B204 is the first OU course where I’ve had a commercial DVD to watch for the coursework.

Leadership and Change

There’s a large practical element to B204. The key part of the end of module assessment is a work based initiative to identify and implement a change using the things that you have learnt on the course.

Although there is a practical angle there is still a strong academic background. Unlike B628 there aren’t marks just for doing things in B204, you need to have the right academic quality. I’m happy about this, because to get good marks in B628 required a lot of extra time that I didn’t have and I got distinction level passes for the academic bits but lost marks in the non-academic bits because I didn’t have time for it.

I’ve also got the EMA to do for T317 because I deferred. It won’t really kick in until after Christmas. However I need to get some of it down earlier to make sure I have enough time to finish it this time. I’ll also need to redo TMA4 and TMA5 for T317 too.

Time Management

The main advantage I have over all my earlier years of studying is that I now have a few guaranteed hours every week to study. With Lucy off to reception I have 9am to almost 3pm on Tuesdays to study. Most of it. So I ought not to run into the issues I had last year with work preventing study time. I’m also in a different department, with more support, so I ought to be able to keep work under control.

Impact on Blogging

I’ve pre-written and scheduled several weeks of blog posts. However I expect that these will run dry eventually. If you would like to guest post, or be the subject of an author interview that would be great. Please get in touch.