Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

I’ve managed to pile in a massive amount of stuff into the first couple of months of the year, hence lack of updates on the blog.

To begin with, the Chemistry course assignments have proved to be both more time consuming and less rewarding than expected. That’s had be starting to rethink the possibility of future chemistry courses. Essentially, I’m shelving them for the moment apart from the residential that’s already booked. That in turn frees up a chunk of time in the coming year so I might do the bio/psych course in October.

The Autism course is barely noticeable in terms of time required. Just this evening I finished the final iCMA with a 100% score in under 10 minutes and without even glancing at the book. All being well the EMA will be equally easy.

I thought I was behind with the signals & perception course but it turns out that I was running at a 60 point rate for a 30 point course so I’m well ahead of the official timetable.

The web design course being fairly full-time has forced me to rejig the times that I do the OU courses and it’s just as well that the workload this year was lower than last year or I’d have had to drop something I think.

The first fruits of the web design course are a radical update of the listings sites producing a major improvement in the look and feel of OurBedAndBreakfasts.com, OurHolidayRentalHomes.com and WholeEarthGuide.com . I’m hoping to double the number of properties listed over the course of the coming 18 months or so and as step one of that I’ve a bunch of adwords campaigns running. Upcoming tasks include refining the adwords campaigns, getting the B&B marketing guide assembled into book form and increasing the coverage of the Whole Earth guide which’ll keep me busy for the next month or two I expect.

After getting over the mountain that was the S204 exam, I feel that I’ve been really getting into the chemistry course over the past month or so.

I’ve the third assignment away this morning and it’s the first one that I feel reasonably confident about (though ’til the results come back it could easily be false optimism). Interestingly the biology course is proving increasingly useful as the course moves more into proper chemistry or rather moves away from the largely theoretical side of things and into dealing with how various chemicals react together.

One problem continues to dog progress and that’s that chemistry doesn’t fit easily into the computer age. Actually doing the assignments doesn’t take overly long for the most part but getting the various symbols and diagrams onto the computer eats up the time. To begin with you need to pick up an entirely different font from the normal ones to even be able to type the symbols required and, of course, those symbols aren’t on the keyboard so every one needs to be inserted as a special symbol. The diagrams themselves are equally easy on paper but need a range of software to prepare them for the computer. Even what would appear to be a simple graph can’t be done with normal spreadsheet software because you need to put sub and superscripts on the titles and axes labels.

Still, the plus point of that is that the course team need to make the assignments a little easier to do than they might do otherwise although with the large potential for a few errors to creep in between paper and computer screen, the marks haven’t (yet) reflected that slightly easier aspect.

Also this morning was the third iCMA for the autism course. As usual, it was four questions that could be answered by finding and reading a few paragraphs of the book for each one. Another 100% mark for me which means that I have passed the continuous assessment part of the course already with two more iCMAs left which, for me, are now effectively optional.

In comparison to the chemistry, the autism course is very much a stop-start affair. It’s around one iCMA per month covering one or two chapters of the book and with each chapter only taking a couple of hours to read it’s working out at two or three hours per month to do the course (compared to the official 8 hours a week). The net effect of that is that I generally do an iCMA then read the chapter(s) for the next one and then there’s nothing to do for three weeks. The problems with that approach are that by the time the next iCMA comes around, I’ve to revise the relevant chapter(s) before doing the questions and that overall it’s a very annoying way to progress through the course.

As usual, the Open University results were in earlier than planned so yesterday I found out that I’d passed S204 and was well clear of 40% too.

Just as well really as there’s no way that I’d have been able to fit in even more revision for the resit in April. From the 297 students around 50 will be eligible for a resit though I suspect that there will be a good deal fewer than that who will actually do it as the revision is something of a nightmare in terms of sheer volume and indeed difficulty in parts too.

It looked like it was a little harder than usual as only 2% picked up a distinction rather than the usual 10% for exams generally.

I’ve been plugging away with biology for a couple of years now. Starting from scratch, biology was seriously difficult at the start but a couple of years down the line I’m thinking like a biologist.

Thus, despite having done quite a lot of chemistry a long time ago, it was a bit of a jolt to restart the chemistry straight after the biology exam. That said, the resulting mark was slightly higher than the biology marks.

What’s quite noticeable is that I’m getting back into the swing of the chemistry. The texts are a lot easier going than the biology ones were, so much so that after just over six weeks into a seven month course, I’m over half-way through the books. It’s a slightly different story with the assignments which are taking ages to do although to be fair most of that is down to the time it takes to draw the various molecules and to get the relevant characters picked out of the chemistry font.

Next up is an iCMA which I hate as even the tiniest mistake is a problem and you can’t even print out the questions beforehand.

Quite what progress will be like when the biology/chemistry/psychology course that’s Signals and Perception starts up next month is another matter, of course.

This is the first course where I’ve had an iCMA to do. In principle they’re the same as CMAs but, if the first one is anything to go by, they’re much shorter (only four questions), you have to do them whilst you’re online and you can’t print them out to mull over.

Shorter is certainly good. There are five iCMAs and an EMA for this course which looked like quite a lot of work. In practice it took about 10 minutes to do this one so hopefully the remaining four will be of a similar length and be equally easy to fit in.

Doing them online is a bit of a pain as is the inability to print them off (or at least to do so easily). That ties you to the computer while you’re doing the questions although you don’t have to do them all at once. Not being able to print them off is probably the biggest nuisance though as you’ve no record of what you’ve put in unless you  type them all out separately (which I’ve done).

The format is not fantastic this time around as all four are multi-part questions of various types. For instance, this time around two were “select one or more of”, one was “complete the following sentences” and the final one was “select two options”. One answer seemed decidedly iffy (definitely wrong in fact) but there’s no “unsound question” option on the iCMA.

Anyway, that leaves the road clear for the chemistry TMA which I will be starting on during the week.