Foreign Perspectives

S197 is one of those Open University courses that people are rather put off by as it’s acquired a reputation of being one of the most difficult of the science short courses.

There’s reason behind that view too. It seems to have a fair amount of both mathematics and weird terminology if the extract from it in OpenLearn is anything to go by. Having said that, the short courses tend to start at a fairly basic level and get you to a level that you didn’t think you’d reach in surprisingly few pages so I’m sure that in reality this one is no different.

It would have been handy to have done this one before the astronomy course as it covers a lot of the ground from the later cosmology chapters. On the other hand, it’s still going to be handy as a pre-course for the main physics course which I’ll be getting around to in a few years time. Sadly, it’s not going to be around at that time as the last run is in May 2011 so I’ll need to squeeze it into what’ll be a fairly busy summer period.

The one downside of doing it is that I can’t count it alongside S104 which means that it’ll need to be added to the open degree rather than the physics one where it really belongs.