Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

It would appear that the tutors are getting a whole bunch of enquiries about retrosynthetic analysis as the number and length of the tutorials on that is mounting up at a time in the course when you’d expect fewer of them.

So, last week another two hour marathon followed by a (relatively) short 90 minute one on Monday though my own tutor is doing yet another one this Wednesday (at 9pm!!) and there’s another next week on the day that the final TMA is due so I suspect that numbers attending that will be rather small.

Funnily enough, I’m now into a section of the course which feels relatively easy after the slog that the last few months have been. That’s largely down to it being stuff that was covered very well in the residential in 2012 which not so many people doing the course now had the opportunity to go on. It just goes to show that the residentials really were worthwhile and it’s a shame that 2012 was their final year.

On other fronts, I’ve been I’ve been considering what to do over the coming year. At the moment, the best option seems to be to do Empires (A326) which would bring my points total up to around 280 and take me over 60 points at level 3 i.e. I would be able to claim an open degree that would use up all the points from my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree. To make it all unique points, I’d likely add Planetary Science & the Search for Life (S283) in the following year or maybe the next depending on what I do after the Life Science degree.

For 2015/15 I’d really like to get going on the biology masters and I’ve been looking around for options on that front. So far, my favourite is the Molecular Biology degree at Queen’s but I’ve not worked out a way of fitting that in with work yet. Second choice is the Molecular Biology degree at Staffordshire which is distance learning but with two residentials. In third place is the Structural Molecular Biology degree at Birkbeck which is online only and that’s really putting me off it but otherwise it looks quite good.

If you read the comments before you sign up for S377, it sounds like an impossible course to do and one that just about everyone will fail.

Real stats tell a different story. Yes, it is slightly harder than most OU courses but only slightly going by the stats which show a drop out rate about 5% higher than average and a pass rate about 5% lower.

Mind you, you do need to be quite determined not to drop out as nothing makes much sense as you go through and it’s only at revision time that it all comes together. So, in my case the expected resit turned out not to be required by a very safe margin and I ended up with just shy of a distinction!

That’s caused a minor issue as it now appears that I may be able to improve my overall degree classification if I get the finger out with the final two modules.

It doesn’t seem that long since I started S377 back in February but now the final exam is just over a week from now.

It’s a course that’s really heavy going for quite long stretches as it delves down so low in biology that often you can’t see the wood for the trees. So, instead of looking at reproduction as prophase and whatnot, you look down below that to see what molecules are making the chromatin separate out and reform in the various stages. Rather than look at the cell membrane, you look at how proteins get assembled within it, cross it and generally move around. Rather than just considering DNA as a unit, you’re looking at how it reproduces itself and fixes any errors in that process.

So, MUCH more detailed than you find elsewhere in biology. Consequently, you don’t really get a handle on what’s happening until towards the end of the course and the revising is really helping my understanding of what I went through over the last nine months or so. Whether that extra understanding will help in the exam is, of course, a totally different matter.

Anyway, that takes me up to the final course of the life science degree which is SK320 Infectious Disease starting in February with the chemistry counterpart kicking off towards the end of October. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to sweep up the chemistry courses within the biology degree as there doesn’t seem to be enough chemistry courses to make up a chemistry degree as per my original plan (basically I’ve used them up in the biology degree and only have environmental ones that aren’t really that interesting to me). Assuming that I can do that, I’ll be restarting the psychology degree next October.

Looking at before I signed up for it, it looked like book 1 was chemistry and book 2 was biology. That’s what it is on paper but in reality “book 2” is the main book and the chemistry is slotted in as needed along the way with the final chunky section a medical science one that seems to be tying all the other bits together in a fashion.

As with all the modern science courses there’s a lot of it online, mostly for economic reasons rather than educational ones. They could put that final section of the course on a DVD (or at least make it easily downloadable) but they don’t. You can download it but you need to go through the online study guide and online modules to download each of the videos and texts contained within them. That makes it a bit of a nuisance to work through unless you either read ahead and download everything in advance or have Internet and DVD access available everywhere you study.

It fits in really well with S377 really well, so much so that when I’m reading the book for one I sometimes forget which of the two I’m reading.

One downside of it that I’ve just discovered is that it seems I won’t be able to count it in any degree unless I can slot it into one by 2016 as the new-style OU degrees don’t acknowledge courses that aren’t 30 or 60 points. So, rather than lose the points, I’m having to change the courses I was meaning to do over the next couple of years with the running order for my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree looks like being S346 Drug design this October, A326 Empire: 1492-1975 the following October and finishing with AA318 Art of the 20th Century in October 2015.

It’s billed as the science of the senses and that’s what’s behind it all though the emphasis on the various senses changes as you move through the course.

Each of the study guides starts with a pointer to what you’ll need to know to understand each section of the course. For instance, for vision you need to know the physics behind how light works as well as bits of biology to understand how the receptors in the eye work and some psychology to understand how the image on your retina is interpreted as a scene. For taste and smell you need quite a bit of chemistry to understand what all the chemicals that they discuss are. Overall, it’s mainly biology and psychology that you need but at times there’s quite a bit of physics and chemistry so, depending on your scientific background, you’ll find that the difficulty in following the course varies quite a bit along the way.

One consistent hassle is that the assignments are far from clear in what they’re asking for. I basically muddled along never being able to predict what my results would be with anything like the accuracy that I usually can. That’s not just me either as a number of comments on the course mention that aspect of the course. I’m not sure why that should be but perhaps it’s an aspect of it being an inter-disciplinary course and maybe they should be more explicit about saying that “the question is on biology” or something like that although even that would be quite difficult as a number of the questions run across more than one discipline.

It’s quite a large course though you wouldn’t necessarily think that from the volume of books that it’s made up from. Where the problem arises from is that there’s a fair chunk of stuff on the DVD and the reader is very, very variable in readability as it’s written by lots of different authors. The study guide points out a number of chapters in it that are particularly difficult. It’s not really that clear why the reader is there as most of the time it covers much the same ground as you’d have already read in the course text, sometimes in more detail but sometimes not. As became clear in my revision, it’s not particularly well integrated with the rest of the course.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the course. It was in a little more detail than I’d covered in previous biology courses but I didn’t feel that it added an awful lot to that existing knowledge so it didn’t come across as fascinating as I’d expected it would be. For instance, prerequisite courses had already covered vision in almost the same amount of detail and proprioception which was new to me wasn’t really covered in a great deal of detail. On the whole, I wouldn’t really recommend it if you’ve done human biology courses before as there’s not an awful lot of truly new material.