Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

One of the problems in doing three separate Open University courses at once is that the timetables they run to are completely independent of one another.

Thus I find myself looking at the prospect of doing the End Course Assessment for the cardiology course, the third TMA for the human biology course and the first TMA of the astronomy course all in the same week. Fortunately, that week is the third week of March so at least I have the chance of spacing the assignments out over the next month and a bit. Not quite so much as I’d like to though as part of the cardiology assignment involves submitting an essay plan to the tutor sometime in February and the astronomy assignment requires some practical work to be in hand by then and with our weather that’s very much hit and miss.

What I’m still amazed at is how quickly I’m managing to get through the courses. All being well, I’m on schedule to finish the course text for the human biology course in the next week or so which should let me get going on the notes for that which’ll definitely be required come exam time in June. I finished all of the reading for the cardiology course before Christmas so it “only” has the end of course assessment to be done which looks fairly doable at the moment though I’ve not actually started on it yet so that opinion could change very easily. I’m getting through the astronomy reading quite well though I suspect that I’ll be needing to go over a few things again for the assignment as it’s proving to be a more difficult course than originally expected.

Interestingly, courtesy of the astronomy course I have been assigned a “pathway tutor” as part of the pilot project. What that means is that I will retain that tutor throughout the course of my physics degree with the OU. Previously, one of the consistent comments that they’d received was that all the courses were entirely independent which, whilst nice in some respects, meant that a lot of people felt a little at sea when they’d finished a course and weren’t always that sure what they should do next or for that matter how they should go about designing the perfect sequence of courses for them. In the past that planning assistance has come from the regional centres officially and a number of course forums inofficially. Neither are ideal. The official source involved people who didn’t always have the knowledge of what was entailed in particular subjects whilst the unofficial route produced advice that might have been intended to be helpful but wasn’t always as it couldn’t take into account the particular backgrounds of those enquiring nor did those replying have anything like the full picture of what was coming up in a particular degree programme anyway.

So far, it’s in typical OU style: it’s there if you want to use it but if you’ve your own ideas you’re free to ignore it.

Thanks to the Reader I find that I’m getting much more time to read the text books than I ever had previously. It might be only 10 minutes whilst wandering around a supermarket, 20 minutes waiting for James & John to finish their class, or even just 5 minutes when I’m a little too early for them at school but it’s all been adding up.

Thus I find myself likely to be completing the biology texts by the end of the month which is getting on for four months early and when the course is officially 9 months that’s saying something. Even with the astronomy which I only started on at two weeks ago when I checked the timetable I’m at the point I should be at the end of February!

That’s not to say that I’ll have completed both of those courses because I still have the assignments to do and, of course, the exams to revise for. However, it looks like the summer will be much less busy than I had ever expected it to be this year.

One handy consequence of all this is that I should have quite a lot of time to make decent notes on the topics which I’ve rarely gotten around to in the past. All being well, I’ll be getting going on the biology notes (definitely required!) early in January. I might even consider the astronomy notes after that although so far most of the text has been largely revision from my astronomy readings many years ago.

When you’re trying to run a life in two different countries like we are at the moment there’s something of a nightmare in terms of administration load that can backup really fast.

This morning has been one of the days when I’ve tried to make major inroads with it all. Sadly the piles are still there but at least a number of important things have been sorted out this morning.

For a start there’s a heap of communication that needed done re selling our place in France. The combination of French administration plus time delays courtesy of the post mean that it’s sailing along at a snail’s pace and a month can easily go by with no visible signs of progress. Actually, a whole month did go by whilst we were waiting on a letter (nope, won’t fax, won’t email) from one place which I think was down to it being caught in the strikes in London.

Next up was sorting out some stuff re my OU courses. I’ve the flights booked for the residential now which leaves nothing more needing done with that until after the human biology exam in June. Also done was signing up for the Astronomy (S282) course which starts in February. That’s one that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time now but between one thing and another (well, mainly the modern languages degree), far too many years have gone by. That in turn should ease the path towards the astronomy residential in 2011 and indeed get my physics thinking back up to speed again in preparation for S207 in October.

Finally, there’s our Christmas letter which needed tidying up before we get all the cards away. As usual, the prompt for doing that has been the arrival of the Christmas card from Faye in Canada which has consistently been the first one that we’ve received ever since she started sending them.

Starting a degree at level two causes me the minor problem that I’ll be short 60 points by the time I finish what would have ordinarily been the final course had I started at level one.

In the course of looking at how I might pick up those 60 points I’d already started on 30 of them courtesy of the human biology (SK277) course that I’m doing at the moment. That course opened my eyes to the interest of biology generally and the biology short courses in particular which comprise an interesting collection ranging from the likes of cardiology and diabetes through to obesity and nutrition, mostly in the form of 15 point courses. Scheduling-wise, it was cardiology that fitted best and seeing as something like 30% of all deaths are down to that, it seemed like something worth knowing about.

What I’d not allowed for was that this is very clearly a medical subject and the first couple of chapters of the book were seriously heavy going for me. I reckoned that none of the terminology would ever sink in but thing like atria and ventricles make sense to me now although I’m sure there’s a vast amount of the vocabulary that hasn’t yet sunk in.

Sadly, it looks like quite a number of the students in the group have already dropped out of the course. Out of a possible 25 or so, only five have had any input to the recent activity. Ordinarily, I’d have thought that participation in the online forum where the “tutorials” are conducted would be higher as you don’t get the “real-life” issues that generally stop people turning up at regular tutorials.

As usual, I will, of course, be just too stubborn to drop out but I’ll be researching  short courses a little more thoroughly before signing up in future. Certainly the 15 point ones as they seem, by and large, to be shorter versions of 30 point courses rather than a separate breed of course as the 10 point ones are.

Compared to the Child Development course, the Human Biology one is moving along at what almost seems like a snails pace in comparison which probably is indicative of how over the top the workload was on the Child Development course.

The first tutorial is just coming up now, just over a month into the course or rather a month into the official course timetable as I started over a month before that, albeit with a gap of several weeks for the psychology revision. Somewhat to my surprise, even with that gap, I’m running several weeks ahead of the official schedule at the moment though I’ve not so far completed all the notes.

I’ve made a start on the assignment already or at least on the easy parts of it. It’s a three part assignment with two short answer questions and a short-ish essay. The short answer questions seem relatively easy and I’d have completed them already except that I’ve to draw a couple of graphs for them and I’ve not had a chance to do that yet. The essay is basically on the workings of the digestive tract and is what prompted me to get going on writing up the notes as there’s a serious amount of detail in that chapter (and the nutrition one before it).

Funnily enough, although I initially figured that the digestive tract chapter was seriously complicated now that I’ve written up the notes it seems to have largely fallen into place in my mind. The various sphincters make sense as separators between the various sections of the gut and I could even make a passable explation of what the pancreas gets up to. All being well the other parts of this course will similarly fall into place in my mind as it goes on.