Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

As expected, the various posts on the Child Development (ED209) course from last year are once more rising in popularity as the next contingent of students reach the same point (ie blind panic) as me and my co-students were a year ago.

The odd thing about that is that over the course of that year there don’t seem to have been any more ED209 bloggers whereas last year three of us appeared on the scene where none had been before.

Anyway, the net effect of that is that the two ED209 revision blogs (ie mine and Tim’s) started picking up hits on the revision topics as from about a month ago and the number of those hits has been rising each week. Presumably the same thing will happen next year with the addition of Tim’s DD303 notes and my own SK277 notes.

At the end of next week I’m off to the biology residential in Nottingham so should be sort-of busy doing stuff in preparation for that and probably in preparation for the things that I’ll not be doing whilst I’m there or rather not here.

However, the unexpectedly easy astronomy assignment has left me somewhat at a loose end. Not entirely mind you as there are a heap of administration type things that there just wasn’t the time to move on with over the last month or so with all the end of school year things to be done. Still, it does mean a slight lull in activity on the OU front.

There’s a fair amount of reading that doesn’t have to be done before the residential but I’ll be aiming to at least skim over it over the next week or so.

At the moment it looks like the hardest pre-course task will be getting everything packed into one carry-on bag under 10kg. Well, under 9kg as they always come back with more stuff from a course than you arrived with. So far, I’ve a white coat, baby computer, calculator and massive lab book that need to be taken which is getting on for half of the baggage allowance!

With massive cuts all around us it’s interesting that the BBC has picked up on a study by the Sutton Trust to the effect that were current student charges (ie for non-OU people) raised from the current £3k to £7k there’d be potentially an 80% drop in students studying.

That would be fine were those universities the only kids on the block but the existence of the OU raises an interesting option. Right now, you can study full-time at the OU for around £1200 to £2000 for most courses and even for law it’s only £4000-odd. Thus even now it’s cheaper than normal universities (for comparable or better quality education too).

Now, although the OU is the biggest university in the UK with around 200,000 students, there are more like 2 million students in the UK at the moment. Somehow, I just can’t see the OU being able to cope with what could potentially be close to ten times the number of students. Oh, over a period of years I’m sure it could manage but not in one fell swoop.

For other universities, “too many” students wouldn’t be a problem as they could simply turn down students once “enough” had been reached. However, the OU lets students sign up for courses online up to a month or two before courses start with, apparently, no student limits being applied. Existing students can even sign up right up to the course start date.

I suspect that it might be prudent to sign up for courses a little earlier than normal this year as any increase in student fees seems likely to result in a swing towards the OU which is going to have to put out the “no vacancies” sign at some point.

For a change, I had quite a decent revision plan worked out for this exam. That’s largely thanks to the advice sent out by the course team a month or two before the exam which enabled quite well targeted revision. That in turn made for a more comfortable exam than it would have been otherwise.

Of course, that’s not to say that the revision was perfect as several of the short questions showed up limitations in this revision strategy in that I’d not covered their topics in sufficient detail to answer them nearly as well as I’d have liked to. Still, overall I think I did quite well on the exam and amazingly well considering that a year ago I’d not done any biology at all.

The problem with an exam is that there’s quite a long period working up to it both in terms of the course time and the more intense revision period just prior to the exam. That leaves me at least all hyped up and it was two full days after the exam before I’d gotten back to normal and back into working on the courses that are still running on for me.

Which has me wondering how long it’ll take me to wind down from the S204 + S320 combo exam in October next year. Still, at least after their exams I’ll have several months of a break.

As it turned out, the last minute revision wasn’t really required with the exception of a brief look at the diagram of the digestion system.

Unexpectedly, the digestion question was pretty much  a repeat of the July 2006 question “Write an essay that describes the process of digestion involved in consuming a cheese and tomato sandwich.” replacing “cheese” with “egg” and adding “absorption”. The endocrine, circulation and stress essays were unexpectedly general and looked easy enough to do.

The data handling was loosely based on a stress experiment although you didn’t need to know anything about stress to do it. Unexpectedly again there was a graph to be drawn which represented 1/3rd of the marks for that question. I think it’s fairly safe to say that most people will get over 20 out of the possible 30 marks for it so in theory even 10 out of 30 for the essay plus a couple of short answer questions would be enough for a pass.

The short questions were all over the place as expected. First off was a hard core chemistry question was seemed not to have been a good start for most people. Nobody seemed to have gotten the circle of Willis one in my group and there was another one which I suspect my mark will be close to zero. Other than those two the rest were quite a reasonable mix and largely answerable from my “27 page” summary although not entirely as it turned out (no mention of the circle of Willis for instance, no mention of the chemistry angle either). There was at least one repeat from previous years (advice to a pregnant friend re smoking to have a smaller size baby and easier birth) and one or two others looked kind of familiar so it’s definitely worthwhile looking at past papers for this one.

Strategy-wise I took a brief look at the essay questions first before taking a run through all of the short questions and scribbling out a few keywords that struck me. That worked out really well as I managed to answer a few more of the short questions than I had originally expected to be able to answer as a couple of things came to me whilst I was doing the essay and data handling question. It also gave me a lot of time to do the short question as the essay only took 45 minutes or so and the data handling was about the same.

Quite oddly I felt very comfortable with this exam which is certainly a major change from being all stressed out (as was everyone) with last years Child Development course. Marks-wise I have a pessimistic estimate of 60 but didn’t have enough time to do my optimistic estimate this time (the last few of the short questions took lots of thinking time).