Foreign Perspectives

Thanks to the Child Development exam last week and the revision for it over the previous month, I only got around to signing up for Understanding cardiovascular diseases (SK121) a matter of days ago but this morning the website was already up for me.

That meant that I could download loads of course related stuff and in particular the full text of the course book which in turn meant that I could formally start the course this morning. So far, it’s not too bad though there’s a serious amount of medical terminology in the first chapter. I’m going to ignore most of that for the moment on the basis that they’re bound to come back to it in more detail later on in the course.

It’s the first full online course that I’ve done so no live tutorials but instead there’s an online forum where “tutorials” will be held, starting the week after next. Not sure how that’ll go though if the first one is anything to go by they’ll take me a lot less time than the suggested time listed in the course guide. I’m expecting that’ll be the case for many aspects of the course since it’s a level 1 course which means there’s lots of “this is how a course works” material. All being well, that’ll let me get considerably ahead of the course schedule as I’d like to have the final assignment completed before my February course starts which means I need to finish almost two months ahead of the formal timetable.

The nature of the course means that it’s attracted a massive number of health professionals on it. Presumably they’ll know a whole bunch of the terminology which is pretty much totally new to me; were the tutorials in person ones I’d have been left in the dust I expect!

If nothing else, this course should give me some practice at doing two courses simultaneously which will be handy to get me through 2010 which looks like being a year of overlapping courses. Having said that, SK121 is covering ground that I’ll also be doing in the Human Biology course albeit with a lot more detail in SK121 presumably. The other overlapping courses seem likely to be quite different thus less scope for semi-revision with them.