My name's Debbie and I'm following an
MA course distance taught in Applied
Linguistics at the University of
Birmingham. I chose the University of
Birmingham distance programme because
it's one of the top universities not
just in this country but I mean in the
world, and because my field is
linguistics, I already knew a
lot about the University and the fact
that was a bit of the leader in this
field really compared to other places, so
I thought well if I'm going to study I'll go for the best I can. For me the
thing I liked about it so much is the
fact that it's covered so many different
areas of linguistics and I just
feel it's just being not only something
that's interesting that I've just plain
and simply enjoy looking at but it's
also being really helpful to me in my
work as well. My favorite thing about
the course so far is the fact that I've
had a chance to look at subjects like
sociolinguistic which I find really
interesting, but it actually is that
the whole range of things that I've been
able to look at, and new material like
multimodal communication. I've discovered
that I've an interest in
things that I didn't realise I
had an interesting in before and that's
been great for me. I've done conventional
and on-campus type courses before and
I've also done other types of distance
learning courses and I actually really
like distant learning because I can do
things at my own pace when I want, where
I want, how I want, and that seems to suit
me, so that was really why I chose the
distance learning programme. I'm hoping
that the MA will help me to further my
career because I've already found
that it's really being useful to me in
the work I do at
the moment because I work in a
university as a Language Support Tutor
working with deaf students and so it's
really helped me to broaden my knowledge
base but also go into things in far more
detail and I'm noticing I'm already
bringing those things into my work but
I'm hoping that it will help me I don't
know, say to work with other staff members
and work on training with them and
opportunities like that in the future so
it's been great so far. The main difference for me between
studying on campus and studying by
distance is that as a distance
student I don't have to keep to a
timetable, I don't have to work to
anybody else's time frame, or to have to
be in a certain place at a certain time.
I work from home,
I've got everything set up where I want
it and I work when I want to and how I
want to, and I get to choose what
happens and I like that. In terms of
tips for students who might want to
study distant taught in the future I
would say definitely keeping touch with
your tutor, your personal tutor. I found
my tutor has been really supportive and that's
great. Basically all the materials are
available online so that's basically how
the course is delivered and sometimes
there are amongst the materials there
are videos so you can watch people
actually getting that some more
face-to-face field to things, but I
download all the materials and I can
access reading materials as I need to
and of course there's the summer schools
that are offered as well which is really
great because it gives you an
opportunity to meet people,
lecturers and various people
connected with the course which is great.