Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Although this is only one of the short courses it’s one of my key ones as I’m using it as a trial to see if I can remember any of my A-level chemistry from years ago. Moreover, it’s a kind of bridging course with mostly chemistry but bits of biology too.

It’s my very first course with one of the famous Open University “kits”, in this case a little kit to build models of molecules. It looks like it’ll be a lot of fun so I’ve hidden it from the kids. Aside from that there’s the usual check list and course text plus a couple of audio CDs which supposedly no longer included with this course.

The plan is that I put this to the one side and don’t look at it ’til I’ve the astronomy exam out of the way but I suspect that I’ll have a peek at it before then. For sure I need to get the three remaining TMAs out of the way first though as two are due in a few weeks time and the other way too close to the astronomy exam to even think about not doing it now.

Somehow or other I seem to have almost completed reading through the course books for S103 and have just started into the final one for now which is on fossils and geology generally. Surprisingly I’m finding it very interesting and it has me thinking about going for the final run of the fossils short course over Christmas.

One of the quite noticeable features of the Open University is that they use your information to promote courses in much the same way as Amazon use your previous purchases to promote books to you.

Thus, once you’re entering the sign-up period for your next course you can expect a little email noting a few courses that you might be interested in. Typically if you’re following broadly the normal path towards a degree these will make some kind of sense. Thus whilst I was doing the French sequence in the French Diploma, I’d get an email basically letting me know that it was time to sign up for the next course in the sequence. However, if you’re not following a standard sequence, the suggestions can be just ask wacky as those from Amazon frequently are.

Since we’re in somewhat more difficult financial times than usual, they’re pulling out the stops to promote courses even more than normal at the moment. Thus even small courses like Plants and People (S173) which would normally only get a brief mention as part of a general promotion of short courses was pushed quite heavily during the SXR270 summer school and has just had another push from the course manager yesterday. Oddly, the summer school for next year hasn’t, yet, had any sales pitch although perhaps they’re assuming that we’ll do that anyway.

What they haven’t done, yet, is the more sophisticated joined-up marketing that some places get up to. Thus, although presumably S173 would help with the plants residential (SXR375) there hasn’t been any cross-marketing of the two of them.

In the relatively slow summer months the chats on the Open University forums tend to wander well off the topic now and again and sometimes come around to what people are thinking of doing over the coming winter months.

Chats like that can go just about anywhere as people chip in with their own plans with the current “in” topics being multiple degrees and ebook readers.

Surprisingly it can be rather easy to pick up a second degree depending on what your course choices have been. For example, if you do a purely biological degree it’s usually a matter of two more years to pick up a chemistry degree because many of the biology courses are also chemistry courses thus in my own case it looks like about one more year will be enough to do the trick. Similarly the physics people often consider adding just a couple of courses and picking up a maths degree which works because they need to do quite a lot of maths courses to be able to do the physics courses.

As for the ebook readers, well a combination of them being considered a “good thing” and Amazon dropping the price to £109 has led to quite a number of orders being placed. Now, if only they’d waited for a few months and seen the colour version on the horizon. Still, that’s next years Christmas present sorted 🙂

The results are in a couple of days early as these things usually are.

A year ago I’d have laughed at anyone who’d have said I’d be going down the biology route to my science degree but it turned out that the human biology course was both fascinating and much more doable than I’d ever expected it to be. Fascinating in terms of all aspects of the course really as pretty much all of it was new to me. That newness was something I’d have expected to make the course somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for me to do but in practice, whilst it was certainly hard going at the start, the fascination drove me on.

For a variety of reasons I’m embarking on my first “proper” biology course next February and, going by the extracts of the course texts that I’ve seen already, it looks like it will be a similar mix of fascinating and difficult. I’ll see how that mix pans out by Christmas next year when the results are in.

I finally got around to making a start on the ECA this morning and, surprisingly, have all three of the short questions finished.

I say surprisingly because when I first looked at them as I was travelling home from the course they looked more like long questions than short ones. I’ll not say a whole lot about them as the second two groups haven’t seen them yet but they’re basically variants of questions that have already been asked during the three themes of the course which I guess is as you’d expect. I only needed to look up one thing in the theme briefing notes which, hopefully, goes to show that I was paying attention during the week.

Next up is the write-up of the experiment. In principle that’s fairly easy but they’ve individual word counts for each section of the write-up which makes it harder. Some of those seem very tight too eg the maximum of 10 words for the title.

All being well, I’m hoping to get a complete first draft of everything tomorrow which is pretty good and will take away my excuse for putting off the astronomy assignment.