Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

Now that I’ve realised that I can use some of the short courses to bulk up the life sciences degree to the 360 points, it opens up a whole range of options for the October to June slot for the next two or three years.

Since it’s now basically a free choice in October I could include the World Archaeology course which I’ve been wanting to do for a while now and with its new November start date it’s looking very doable.

A second series of options relate to the psychology degree. I’d been planning on skipping level one altogether for that but as I won’t finish it before 2015 I’ll have to include both Discovering Psychology (no exam) and Introducing Health Sciences (a life sciences course obviously). In fact, postponing S205 gives me both October 2011 and October 2012 as slots for those.

Finally, there’s Planetary science and the search for life which would complete my Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science.

I don’t need to decide between them ’til after Easter which is handy as it’ll give me enough time to see how the certificate in web applications courses run alongside larger courses. At the moment I think my front runner would be the world archaeology course probably followed by the planetary science one the following year.

The Open University have an interesting type of degree called the “open” degree which is essentially a degree where you can plonk just about any combination of courses into subject only to it meeting the broad requirements of a degree. So, for example, you need to have 120 points at level 3 for an honours degree but those points could be made up of courses in, say, physics, history, English and art.

Since I’m basically aiming at a named degree I’d ignored anything to do with the open degrees. However, the other night it struck me that there’s a semi-open degree option available too in that my life sciences degree only requires me to have 300 points of life sciences subjects and the remaining 60 points can be any subject.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t really matter to me but as I have to collect the life sciences degree no later than 2014 any help along the way to that is welcome. So I had a think about that. In fact by this time next year I should already have those 60 miscellaneous points accumulated in the form of my current astronomy course and part of the certificate in web applications. Of those two, the astronomy course forms part of what will, some day, become a physics cum chemistry degree but the web applications certificate (a total of 60 points) doesn’t have a proper home at the moment. So, if I find that doubling up on the courses is becoming a bit much I could transfer the web applications courses into the life sciences degree.

That option has a lot of appeal in that my original plan was to do the main chemistry course next year and use those 60 points but longer term that causes a problem in that I would ultimately need to acquire 60 more chemistry points for the chemistry degree. It also has the plus point that it doesn’t leave the web applications certificate just hanging there unattached to any particular degree.

With me changing tack towards biology/chemistry over the next few years I thought I’d see about getting up to speed with at least some of the upcoming courses by way of taking a related short course in advance.

It turns out there are quite a number of courses for which this can be done. So many in fact that I probably won’t be able to fit them all in over the time that’s available. Still, I’ll have a go when it is possible.

So, for the big S204 biology course there’s the S171 Empire of the microbes short course. Whilst it obviously doesn’t cover all the ground that the large course does, it should get me up to speed in some proper biology terminology.

Similarly, for the big S205 chemistry course and S377 there’s SK185 Molecules, medicines and drugs which is reawakening the memories of previous chemistry courses.

For the S366 evolution course a few years down the road there’s S193 Fossils and the history of life. Unfortunately that’s in its final presentation this November so I’m going to have to make a point of squeezing it in.

And so it goes on, with S173 Plants and people having a passing relationship with SXR375, the plants residential.

As well as introducing me to some terminology in advance of the corresponding main course this approach will add 10 points for each of the short courses which is 40 points just for the above and I’m sure more mini pre-courses will turn up over the next few years.

It turned out that the writing up didn’t take all that long once I got around to sitting down to actually do it.

I ran with the experiment which we’d done on the respiration rates of skin and brain tissue basically because that seemed the most complete experiment that we’d done. Second choice would have been the one on the chlorophyll response to light but, as with nearly all the plant experiments, that one didn’t pan out quite as expected.

I had a look at the equivalent write-up of the virtual experiments that I did for the psychology course last year and they’re totally different. The overall feel of the psychology one is very much that of a virtual experiment with little of the gritty detail that the biology one contains. Sadly, next year is the last run of this particular biology residential but at least I’ve the two level 3 ones to look forward to over the next two years and, perhaps, to two chemistry ones as well.

All that remains now is to get that printed, packaged and posted and then I’ll have no excuse not to finish off the astronomy TMAs.

The results are in a couple of days early as these things usually are.

A year ago I’d have laughed at anyone who’d have said I’d be going down the biology route to my science degree but it turned out that the human biology course was both fascinating and much more doable than I’d ever expected it to be. Fascinating in terms of all aspects of the course really as pretty much all of it was new to me. That newness was something I’d have expected to make the course somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for me to do but in practice, whilst it was certainly hard going at the start, the fascination drove me on.

For a variety of reasons I’m embarking on my first “proper” biology course next February and, going by the extracts of the course texts that I’ve seen already, it looks like it will be a similar mix of fascinating and difficult. I’ll see how that mix pans out by Christmas next year when the results are in.