Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Heading off at 8am got me to the Nottingham campus not too much after 11am so it was quite quiet to begin with and the numbers of students are really only starting to build up now, just after lunch.

Registration runs on ’til after 3pm with the introductory lecture in the biology building just after 4pm so I’ve hours to fiddle around. As expected, the shopping centre on campus is closed over the weekend which meant a long trek down to the little shop in the hospital this afternoon.

Surprisingly the taxi was the same price as last year (Lenton on 0115 9 781 781 do the airport pickups for £19.50, just over half the price of the airport taxis; it’s best to arrange for them to collect you at the petrol station just outside the airport parking area as otherwise they charge for the airport parking.

I’ve acquired a green dot already which presumably has some significance for the division up into groups for the lab sessions that start tomorrow but hasn’t been mentioned in anything so far today.

The introductory spiel from the admin people, learning advisor, OUSA and the course director was a joint one for both SXR375 and SXR376 kicking off just after 4pm and running on to almost 5pm. That was immediately followed by the course specific stuff in our respective laboratories. Just one lab for the course this year as there are only 29 of us but we’ve been split up into two groups to do the experiments over the next two days, which we’ll be doing in groups of three.

They seem quite keen on evening lectures although a number of them are optional, including the one on Populations and polymorphism this evening. It was quite well attended but I’m not sure that a lot was taken in as a lot of people seemed quite tired from the days travelling.

In the room is a phone (free internal calls), wired internet connection (you need a cable for this which you can get (free) in the Cripps security office; the wifi varies from poor to non-existent in the rooms), desk, tea/coffee tray with kettle, sink, wardrobe, towels (with soap & shampoos) and a single bed. The shower-room and toilet is shared  by about half a dozen rooms.

It hardly seems like two months have passed since the course materials for this arrived at the end of April.

It’s been quite a busy time although I don’t think I did anything remotely close to the 60 hours preparation that the course is supposed to take. Still, the CMA is out of the way and I may even complete the reading for the S204 plants book before I go. Also on the cards is scanning the relevant pages of the set book to save carting that along this year (not that it was opened during the summer school last year).

I’m not bringing any of the lab notes as the whole lot are on the ASUS already which combined with not bringing the set book makes for a much lighter case. I’ll probably bring along the baby computer too as the wifi is rather flaky in the university. The lab coat will get its second outing and there’s the sometimes used calculator as well. You sort-of feel that you need to bring along a notebook but in reality not much gets written in it as you’ve to write everything in the lab book. New for this year is a USB key to bring back the data from the experiments.

What’s most important to remember is that there’s a heap of handouts to be brought back. They’ll all be on the course website but not until after the final week which means mid-August this year.

Seems like less packing than last year but I’m sure that’ll change before I reach the plane.

It appears that the OU are allowing a number (all?) of courses to be booked somewhat earlier than normal. Apparently gone too is the nonsense that was pre-registration which didn’t actually reserve a place as you might think. Combine that with the appearance of the phrase “subject to availability” beside all of the reservation buttons and it seems prudent to be booking courses somewhat earlier than usual.

The first impact of that for me was booking a place on the final run of SD329 (Signals and perception) which starts next February. A brilliant course by all accounts and one which is equally relevant to the three degree strands which I’m notionally running with at the moment (life sciences, chemistry and psychology). Ordinarily I’d not have been able to book that until around September (ie six months in advance).

More importantly, the second impact of that much earlier booking time is that the residentials for 2012 open for booking in late June rather than mid-October. Ordinarily that would be an easy choice as I need SXR376 (infectious diseases) for life sciences and it’s a really interesting one too. However, having signed up for S205 I could do SXR344 (drug design) which is the chemisty counterpart to SXR376 and looks really interesting too and one that I’d have gotten around to the following year were it not for 2012 being the final year for all the level 3 science summer schools.

To top it all, apparently there’s a major price increase on its way for courses starting in 2013. That’s encouraging people to rejig their plans to include any 60 pointers much earlier. Fortunately that doesn’t appear to affect me as by then I should only have two 30 pointers remaining.

I have finally gotten around to completing this which “just” leaves the writing up to be done.

Home experiments used to be all the rage in the Open University science courses but they seem not to be so popular these days or at least not on such a widespread basis. That’s not to say they’re not around in significant numbers on some courses though: last years Astronomy (S282) course came with loads of them. For the biology course there are two experimental weeks although in reality it’s more like a couple of experimental days if the first one is anything to go by.

The problem of course is all the health and safety considerations that come to bear on these things nowadays. What’s particularly odd about the biology experiment is that step one is to acquire a chemical that is one of three components that are very popular with bomb makers: something that has caused some difficulty in purchasing said item for a number of students.

The potato experiment comes in three segments. In the first segment we’d to try a pilot experiment with our liquidised potato and hydrogen peroxide to select a suitable concentration of liquidised potato to use in the later experiments. All by itself that part took over an hour for me and I ended up having to repeat it as the catalase in the potato went off mid-way through the second experiment.

The second experiment takes even longer. Despite having got into the swing of it, that one ended up taking several hours which is where the problem in my first attempt lay as the catalase goes off in around three hours so having the mid-point falling at close to that time was asking for trouble. The objective of that one is to find the period when the catalase is working at its peak rate which almost always is going to fall in the first minute so it makes for a very boring 9 minutes for each of the five replicates that you’ve to run.

In the final experiment you get down to the meat of the experiment which is to show that the reaction rate is dependent on the concentration of the catalase which takes another couple of hours.

Add up all the experiment times and you’re looking at around six hours to complete this. And then you have to do some statistical work and write up the experiment.

As in last years SXR270 glucose assay, the problem with this experiment is that you need to do so many replicates that it gets to be very mechanical and boring which doesn’t seem right given that what you’re working on comes with some really interesting theory behind it.

We meet the potatoes again in August when we’ve to devise our own experiment. The devising of it is what needs most thought unless you have a commercial laboratory handy. Thus, things like examining the effect of different temperatures are complicated unless you choose 0C and whatever the room temperature is but even then it’s not so simple as the liquidised potato needs to be kept in the fridge ie you only really vary the temperature of the water you’re diluting it with. Comparing how it works in the light and dark would be nice to do but doesn’t seem practical and neither does varying the colour of the light. Varying the pH would also be nice to do and certainly possible but how would you measure the pH without laboratory equipment? You could even compare different ages of potato but that’s complicated in that you’d need to use the same variety of potato and you don’t know its age (unless you’ve grown it yourself…hmmm).

When you’re starting out on your first degree that’s usually a fairly easy question for most people to answer. They’ve gotten themselves all fired up about a particular subject and are at least intending to follow that through to the end.

It’s different when you’re doing a degree part-time though. Sure, there are people who are all fired up about a particular subject and will follow that through to the end. But there are a lot of others who are fired up about a whole range of courses or are looking upon it as life-long education. For that group, it’s not always obvious what degree they are doing at any one time as it’s quite easy to flick from one to another as you carry along.

Take me for instance. Since the start of last year I’ve done courses in biology (5), physics (3), computer science (2) and history (1) which is fine as I’m broadly aiming to complete a life sciences degree by 2014. However, the pattern for next year is almost certainly going to be completely different. Moreover, when you tot up the points totals it’s currently looking like my “miscellaneous” degree will be completed first and that’s currently a very varied degree indeed with contributions from mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine and history.

Actually, apart from life sciences, I don’t really think of myself as doing a degree at all but rather a whole series of really interesting courses. For a first degree that would probably be a recipe for disaster on the CV but for me the degree is just a side-effect and not an end in itself.