Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

S197 is one of those Open University courses that people are rather put off by as it’s acquired a reputation of being one of the most difficult of the science short courses.

There’s reason behind that view too. It seems to have a fair amount of both mathematics and weird terminology if the extract from it in OpenLearn is anything to go by. Having said that, the short courses tend to start at a fairly basic level and get you to a level that you didn’t think you’d reach in surprisingly few pages so I’m sure that in reality this one is no different.

It would have been handy to have done this one before the astronomy course as it covers a lot of the ground from the later cosmology chapters. On the other hand, it’s still going to be handy as a pre-course for the main physics course which I’ll be getting around to in a few years time. Sadly, it’s not going to be around at that time as the last run is in May 2011 so I’ll need to squeeze it into what’ll be a fairly busy summer period.

The one downside of doing it is that I can’t count it alongside S104 which means that it’ll need to be added to the open degree rather than the physics one where it really belongs.

Since I finished reading the week 2 material so early in the week, I’m making a small start on week 3.

This moves on from consideration of the invention of agriculture in south west Asia to look at how it developed in south-east Asia. For the first time this highlights some differences in how things are spelled in the American spelling used in the course text compared to how they’re spelled in the British English of the course guide. Nothing major so far but it’s odd to see the Yangtze River appearing as the Yangtzi River.

On other fronts, I’ve started on my course summary rather early based on the chapter summaries on the website. As summaries go, they’re a bit too complete as they weigh in at 250 pages. In practice, it’s not so bad as that sounds as quite a lot of the page count is taken up by long lists of key terms and the like from each chapter. Stripping those out seems to leave around 7 pages per chapter which should mean something like 70-odd pages worth of summary for the chunks of the book that are used during this course which would be rather a lot of reading for exam but should be manageable in the smaller chunks required for the TMAs and ECA.

I see that the book is available as an ebook so all being well the OU will provide the searchable PDF version rather than what seemed to be a scanned version going by a student who’d done the course a few years ago.

I left this course to the one side for a couple of weeks whilst revising for the astronomy exam so it was Saturday before I found that I’d my expected two weeks worth of work to be done (which took a couple of hours) and that the ECA had arrived the day before.

In terms of marking it’s 60% for the two reports (1000 words for the client, 2000 words for the design team), 30% for the four web pages and 10% for the overall structure and presentation. Sounds like quite a lot of writing at this point although a quick glance at the ECA shows that there are quite a lot of sections to both reports which always makes for easier writing. To a large degree those sections are even stated in the ECA. With six sections listed for the client report, 1000 words doesn’t sound much, the five sections for the colleagues report doesn’t sound like enough for 2000 words.

Arriving at some stage today is the second CMA for the course which I hope to complete sometime this week along with the SK185 ECA. The last one took under an hour so hopefully this one won’t be a major undertaking either.

I’m at week 6 of the course material (a couple of weeks ahead of the official schedule) which means CSS. That chapter of the book is heavier going not because it’s difficult but rather because it’s going through every keyword of CSS which makes for quite a boring read. Still, only 10 pages to go and that’ll be completed. I’ve picked up a couple of things from it which would have been handy to know a few years back when I was writing the Inns sites though mostly it’s been revision for me, hence rapid pace through the reading (boy was the tables chapter tedious!). There’s a longer than usual course guide for this week which I’ll be reading during the week (thus far they’ve basically said “read chapter X of the course text and do these hands-on assignments”).

As far as the hands-on assignments go, thus far I’ve been able to skim through them fairly quickly but if you were using this as a course to learn HTML and CSS you’d be looking at a fairly serious time commitment which is something that I must bear in mind for later courses in the certificate as I’ll be running some of those alongside a logjam of other courses now and again.

On other fronts, reading on A251 is progressing quite quickly now as it’s on to concrete developments in the agriculture of south-west asia (where it was invented) so it looks like the 30 or so pages a week of reading won’t be the chore that it looked initially. The course doesn’t officially start ’til November 6th by which time it looks like I’ll be three weeks ahead and so be starting into the first TMA. I’ve had confirmation that the course text is available as PDF from the end of this week but it looks like it might be an image scan rather than a proper resizeable PDF so I’m not sure how that’ll work on the reader.

Although we’re constantly reminded that the Open University has all kinds of checks in place to detect plagiarism, there’s a constant stream of hits on this site around TMA/ECA submission time looking for “SK185 answers”, “molecules medicines and drugs answers” and all kinds of variations on those. Since SK185 is a short course there’s getting on for a thousand students studying it at any one time (double the number for one of the main science courses) and this makes for a whole lot of people searching for inspiration given that the ECA submission date is October 28th.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I’ve not reached the end of chapter 6 so I can do another one of the ECA questions which I may run up this evening as it seems fairly short. The final question is on chapter 8 which I should be able to get through by next week and then there’s just the final couple of chapters of the book to read with no overhanging ECA questions from them.

That would leave me able to submit the ECA by the first closing date but since the 28th seemed way too close to the date of the astronomy exam, I decided a couple of months ago to do the second ECA which means that a) I can’t submit it ’til December and b) all those searching for the answers for the October 28th ECA are wasting their time here as I’ve not even glanced at it.

Overall, I’m quite impressed by this course. It offers a very good re-introduction to chemistry for me and insights to the processes involved in the development of medicines that I suspect I’ll not see again ’til I get around to doing Drug design and synthesis (S346).

I’m nearly through the first week of the course now which hasn’t taken quite so long as the 16 hours it suggests. It looks like about two to three hours will be enough to complete although the course hasn’t really quite started in the first unit of the course so that could change.

The first week is basically introducing the course although it doesn’t go overboard as there aren’t massive numbers of different booklets as some courses have these days. Some hand-holding is there too as this is billed as a potential first OU course but it’s not too onerous eg it tells you to read the book organisation section in the course book.

The first bits that you do are mainly introducing archaeology as a subject so there’s a few exercises on that interspersed with readings from the course text (hereinafter known as the doorstop) and listening to the first track from the CD. So it moves on from the “digging things up” aspect to introduce a few terms covering things like experimental archaeology and distinguishing it from history (anything relying on written records). It gives the impression that there’s a bit of fighting going on between the archaeologists and the historians over ownership of some parts of the past. Actual archaeology doesn’t start ’til the last reading of the week where it begins to introduce the development of agriculture or at least it seems to as I’ve not read that bit yet.

Going by the course guide, the course motors on at a fair rate. Work on the first TMA begins after three weeks of reading so I don’t think much is expected from the first one as there will only be about 2 1/2 weeks of reading for it. Thus far the reading is quite heavy going at the moment as it’s a totally new subject for me so there’s lots of new terminology.

I see from the website that I’ve just acquired a tutor. Rumour has it that the tutors are supposed to call in the week before the course officially starts although I don’t think there are any in-person tutorials with this course.