Your requirements

1. Does your university require you to study or work in Britain? If so, for how long?  When must you be in your own university? (A job that starts on May 1st in Leeds is no good if you have an exam in Boulogne on May 3rd.) Does your university help you find a place and, if so, have you asked there first? Does your course specify the type of work you must do? If you are going to study, check the Erasmus programme and talk to your own university about this.
2. Do you have health problems that limit the type of work you can do?
3. Do you have any family commitments (e.g. your brother’s wedding) that you must attend? Is this going to be a problem for an employer?
4. If you plan to visit home while working in England, how much will this cost? Do you need to look for a place near a cheapflight airport?
5. How soon after arrival will you need to be paid? If you rent a room, it is normal to pay one month in advance and one extra month as a damage deposit (French ‘caution’). You also need to eat. Some jobs pay every week.
6. Which is more important: the job or the English language? If you are applying for a skilled job (e.g. temporary laboratory technician) remember that you will also be competing against British students so your English must be good. Consider a month working in a pub or a hotel or a sports centre instead.
7. Is it really important for you to be in London or Edinburgh? Remember, competition for jobs is strong and looking outside the big cities may be better. You can visit the big cities on your days off.

Plan your applications

If you want a job in Summer 2012, you need to start writing now. If you wait until Easter and want a job starting in May, you will be too late.  If you use an online agency, do not send any money and check all links yourself. Good agencies do exist but they are all busy and only you will make you ‘top priority’. Good agencies also explain minimum wage (see below) and contracts that say ‘I agree to be paid less than minimum wage’ are illegal. Your safety is important so think and check.

Your cv must be in English and show your certificates accurately. It is useful to explain your certificates e.g. “Bac S (Science Baccalaureate with specialism in ….)” because the British education system is different. Change your spellchecker in Word to “English-British” and use it.

Your covering letter, the one that goes with your cv, is different for each application because you need to say why you are applying to that particular company. Think of reasons that are professional.  You need to let the company know why they are useful to you (e.g. “I want to improve my English by working on a reception desk”) and how you will be useful to them (e.g. “I am hard-working and mix well with people” or “I have already worked for six months as a laboratory intern in France.” Applying to smaller companies or companies in rural areas has many advantages so remember to be positive about this.   Note: French students often write “I have Bac+2″ to show they are not school-leavers but this format is not much used in Britain.  Instead, say: “I am in my third year at university” or “I have finished my second year at university”.

The rules on payment are complicated. If you are doing the work as an assessed part of your own university course, payment is optional (frequently non-existent) but some companies will pay local travel expenses. If you are doing a ‘real job’, minimum wage rules apply.  For more information click to see the official Government website on this topic. Of course, you may be lucky and find a job that pays more than the minimum! Remember, you will have to fill in a tax form somewhere.

If you only want to visit a company for a week or two weeks to observe a job (e.g. see how market research is done in England), write to the Head of Human Resources or to the Head of the relevant department (in this case Marketing) and say you would like “unpaid work experience observing market research methods…”. Say why you want this experience and why with that company.  Try to be flexible about dates.  You must expect to arrange and pay for your own accommodation, travel and meals. You may “only” be watching but that still makes work for the company so be prepared to try several companies. In big companies, lots of people may be involved in the decision and it can take a long time.

Whatever you want, remember to give a return postal address and also an email address that uses some or all of your real name, not a nickname. Also, check your other online accounts: would you employ the person that is seen on your public Facebook pages? A telephone number is helpful but remember to prepare answers to common job-related questions and practise saying them.  For example, prepare answers to questions like: “Have you worked in this industry before? “Can you start on June the fourth?” “Can you send me copies of your certificates and your passport?” “Do you have a clean driving licence?” Remember: when British people ask for your passport, Europeans can use their identity card and a ‘clean’ driving licence is one with no penalty points on it. It also helps to keep a list next to the telephone of the names of the companies to which you have applied, the town where they are located and, when you discover them, the names of the contact people. It is embarrassing to tell someone that yes, you want to work in Manchester when their company is in Bournemouth.

When you have a place, remember you will be in a professional environment. Ask the person in Human Resources for the dress code (for example, students may not need a suit but jeans may be forbidden) and arrive on time. After that, work hard and play hard – in English! Good luck and enjoy it.

Personally, I spend many hours reviewing papers for academic journals that are not available as OERs and some that are. I also make some of my own material available for free and grin quietly when I see my own work represented at conferences with no public acknowledgement.  (My favourites are those who, before their talks, want to know what I think of their use of my – admittedly ancient – learning design frameworks.) I have a published academic interest in social capital, used to be in a publishing company, happily and gratefully participate in MOOCs such as Change11 (thanks, @downes and @gsiemens) and work with a lot of universities (expensive and utilitarian alike) as a freelance so I see many sides to a highly complex problem: how can knowledge be shared free to those who need it?

The US debates about publishers stifling OERs are predictable.  Publishers, in my view, usually add hugely to exposure and often to readability and even logic but that’s all aside from the main issue.  More interesting is what happens when states fund study and/or when individuals are totally self-funding. Is the State, in providing a grant, taking a bet on a student producing something really worthwhile and so entitled to require that knowledge to be dispensed to everyone free of charge? Is a self-funding student therefore entitled to charge for anything they care to publish? Who should be paid for mediation of knowledge dispensation and is it ethical to be institutionally supported for experiments in making all knowledge free at point of use?

This whole questioning blog is miles away from my normal ‘help a student’ mode but is equally honest – I hope.

As a very part-time and distance/open learning “academic” that gives many hours to reviewing academic papers, I rather object to being asked for hundreds of dollars to view a paper I may not even find useful. It is even more galling, when self-financed, to find own work given for free is being used but not accredited by some really big institutions and I did have to chuckle recently when viewing a presentation clearly based on this: http://www.elemente.co.uk/learning_des_framework.pdf .

Open Access is complex. If sat in a university on a salary, it may make perfect ‘payback’ sense. If a reviewer or a publisher/curator or not in a university, it may appeal – but how does one eat?

Nothing is free. At the moment, much in the publication of research is donated and, proportionally, very few of the donors are making a living from making research available. Is it ethical – or even academically sound – to rely on donated opinions? Personally – and I do review for free! – I do think donated reviews can be academically sound but if money is being made, should it not be shared?  If industry is giving research to academia, shouldn’t there be company tax breaks or individuals awarded PhDs? And if websites are being created, money must be being made somewhere, somehow.

The Open Access movement still has many questions to answer.

1. Any user of Wikipedia or TripAdvisor or ‘bestrecipes/cars/widgets’ knows that sites need curation.  Someone needs to kick out the bad guys if the information is to be worth having.
2. The ‘cloud’ is not free: someone somewhere has to pay for server space and maintain it.
3. Standford has a policy of open access to its published papers. It is not alone but the big problem remains: can ‘anyone’ submit a paper to Stanford for peer review and acceptance on an equal basis? Universities have a name to protect and very limited resources for reviewing papers from outsiders.
4. Universities are not the only places where real research and thinking goes on. All innovative global companies (and many smaller ones) have people who contribute hugely, not just to the sciences but to the arts and humanities.  Think of all the work going into the online presentation of museums and art galleries where the technology may have come out of universities but the broader scholarship is elsewhere.  Or think of farmers who often publish their research to other farmers.
5. Peer review, as suggested in first point, is essential but it is time consuming and, when done well is a form of teaching. It also follows from the above that it is not necessarily the preserve of those in universities.
6. In a global society (which is what the internet has become), it is indefensible to charge huge sums for reading peer-reviewed papers.

As I recently tweeted, the annual price that seems about right is ‘cup of coffee’ so that everyone with access to the internet thinks it only fair to pay up as they are likely to want to use it.  If any publisher feels like taking this on, I’m up for making sure it sticks to the ideals!

• Content experts are a necessity, but there is no excuse to be media illiterate
• “Media Literate” means willing to learn continuously about tech.

Last week, I was in a room full of technologically-interested educators and the majority had never attended a webinar, even a free one.  Opportunities are not lacking.

Formal education systems may not make it easy for teachers and professors and those who are really reluctant to try anything are unlikely to read this blog but it is up to us all to encourage the reluctant and if anyone wants to try out systems by responding on here or use my Twitter address (@gillianp) then please do.

1. I have never forgotten the look of complete bewilderment that swept over the faces of all but one august academic when I asked one world-leading institution what they wanted to be the outcomes of their proposed new course.  Eventually the Chair gathered themselves enough to try and put me down with a rather tentative, ‘To be able to think?’
2. For Research specialists to set curricula for others to follow will inevitably lead to a time delay in quality assurance led delivery of knowledge.  This is:
1. Reinforcing the supremacy of the RG and those fortunate enough to gain a post-graduate space there.
2. Relegating all other academics (even previous RG graduates) to ‘mere teaching’
3. Utterly useless if trying to deliver higher education that is time sensitive and useful to industry as various Governments claim to require.
3. The best teachers have, historically/pedagogically, not been those who drum in ‘the facts’ but those who inspire curiosity and nurture exploration so it must be inconsistent to state that ‘good teaching’ institutions deliver to syllabi set elsewhere?
4. It plays into the hands of big business and commoditised learning.  I have no real objection to commoditised learning if it is useful but for a commoditised degree to be useful in a capitalist society, it must lead to a job – and is that guaranteed? That way lead many societal questions. Nor is ‘big business’ necessarily wrong; but it takes a really big-hearted big business to look at the social effect in twenty years’ time instead of the bottom-line performance in two years’.
5. On a broader international scale, great thinkers and innovators can run their own courses without so much as a glimpse of a ‘moderation panel’.  That’s not necessarily a good thing but it is where the competition is at so heavy centralisation is going to make international competition very difficult indeed.
6. There is no obvious understanding that there are other methods of useful learning (e.g. MOOCs) and other more flexible ways of combining high end university education and work.

Rant by no means over but please weigh in!

University courses take about two years on average to crawl through the design and approvals stages.  Most universities will not advertise them until they have been approved so that means about another year before students start them.  Allow four years for the degree.  You already have students entering the job market with training that was approved seven years previously.  Are entreprises really so slow to develop?

If universities work in appropriately worded ‘outcomes’, the picture may not be so dire because courses can be adapted to immediate contexts but that requires a very close ongoing, time-consuming partnership between specific industries and specific courses.  Students may well regard that kind of specificity as useful if there is a guarantee of long-lasting employment along with the graduation certificate but how many employers can genuinely offer, say, ten years’ employment to an enrolling student (i.e. forecast employment needs 14 years ahead)?  The reality, however, is worse because the vast majority of industry-related courses work in ‘objectives’ and custom demands that those objectives are so tightly defined that a first-class degree seven years out-of-date is very possible.

Turkeys are pretty stupid birds.  Pre-wrapped oven-ready ones are bland at best.  Education at its best produces thinking, adaptive, flexible people who fit quickly into a give changing work role rather like someone joining a moving walkway or ski-lift.  These graduates also challenge, develop and grow their jobs so that their company and, by extension, their national economy progresses.  Oven-ready graduates? Saints preserve us from bad politicians!