Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Last year in a fit of enthusiasm I managed to sign up for both my first ever biology course and its sort-of associated residential.

As expected, the human biology course was both heavy going parts and thoroughly interesting right through. Having said that, it’s with some trepidation that I approach the revision for the upcoming exam in June: there’s a LOT of revision to be done in what seems to be an awfully short amount of time.

However, it’s now into the initial stages of the sort-of associated residential. I say sort-of because it’s associated with three separate courses (S204, SK277 and SD226) of which I’ve only done one so far and had intended to be in the midst of another one as I write this though I’ll not be doing it for another year or perhaps two on the current plans. The net effect of that is that I need to go over more of the background material than is ideal but, so far, that seems remarkably doable as has all of the biology so far.

Slightly unusually, the website is open before the paper versions of the documents have arrived which has let me get an initial look at them. There’s not really that much: the usual course-team letter, the introductory booklet and a course guide which also contains the background science required of the course. That last one is so comprehensive that I’d say it would be possible to come to this course without having done any of the three related biology courses though obviously you’d need to work that much harder if you did that.

Assessment-wise, it seems easy enough from this vantage point with the usual attendance requirement, marks on two mid-week presentations and a short (1000 word) write-up after the course which collectively seem very doable at this point. Total time required is supposed to be 10 hours going over the preparatory information, the week itself and about 10 hours doing the write-up following the course.

Because of the mix of associated courses, there’s a corresponding mix of experiments to be done over the week. They’re split into three separate themes: regulation and control (aimed at the human biology people), energy (aimed more generally at animals I think but I’ve not read that yet) and plants and carbon dioxide (obviously aimed at plants). All look to be very interesting at this point and that’s a view that seems to be reflected in all the course comments from previous students.

The only problem is that this course plus the human biology one are too darned interesting! That’s created a real dilemma for me in that I was originally intending to be doing a physics degree and, so far, I’m finding the biology both fascinating (much more so than the physics at this point) and a whole lot more doable than I had ever imagined it would be. That fascinating+doable combo has me thinking that perhaps I should jump ship and do the biology degree now. Snag is that with the withdrawal of the named science degrees by the OU, a choice to do that at this point basically rules out the possibility of doing a physics degree later on (though the courses would potentially remain available).

I’d both the astronomy and human biology assignments back in the same post yesterday.

As it’s the first of the astronomy assignments I’d really no idea what to expect. It’s been a long, long time since I did any kind of physics course so I wasn’t quite sure how best to approach it all. What I did was take on board the comments from the previous biology assignments which certainly seemed to have helped some in that the mark came out at 79% which is a nice start for sure.

Funnily enough, the biology weighed in at 74% though I suppose a slightly lower mark isn’t a great surprise in that it was the last TMA I did after some four weeks solid of doing them so I was a bit worn out with them all.

What was interesting was that the astronomy assignment was much more difficult to do than the biology ones have been. Since I have quite a background in physics/astronomy I was expecting that the astronomy assignments would be fairly easy going in comparison to the biology ones yet, to date, the reverse has been the case. Oddly, I’m finding the biology course much more interesting to do as well.

Since there’s only one biology assignment to be done the assessment calculator is at it’s most interesting in respect of “substitution” scores. It turns out that even if I don’t do that final one I would pick up 56% overall on the assignments which isn’t bad although doing the final assignment should raise that to something in the 70s. As always, I still wonder how “real” the assignment marks are at this point ie will my exam mark reflect the marks I’ve received in the assignments? In recent years, the exam mark has ended up within a few percent of the TMA average (previously there used to be quite a difference) so that’s reassuring though this’ll be the first science exam I’ve done for many years.

In theory my course decisions for the next couple of years should be very easy in that I spent time on working out my overall course schedule a couple of years ago.

Now, to be fair, the OU messed me up by changing the goal posts last year and cutting short all the named science degrees. However, that simply resulted in a change in the sequence of the courses rather than a change in the overall strategy. Now that I’m actually getting going on the courses it’s introduced a few more thoughts.

To begin with my overall plan was to do both a physics and a psychology degree. In practice, I ended up started on the psychology degree last year though once that was underway it turned out that it was sensible to add in a biology course which I’m in the process of finishing off. Then, thanks to the OUs cancellation of named science degrees, I needed to get going on the physics hence I’m in the midst of the astronomy course right now.

Overall, this has the effect that I’m effectively in the midst of a psychology, biology and physics degree or rather courses from all three. The problem is that I’m finding that the biology is both much easier than expected and extremely interesting too. On the other hand, I’m finding that the astronomy isn’t as interesting as I’d expected it to be. Strangely I now find myself wondering if biology rather than physics would be the way to go for me. Thus, I’ve not yet gotten around to signing up for the major physics course starting this October.

Ordinarily, this would be fine but with the withdrawal of all named science degrees kicking in over the next couple of years it means that when I choose either physics or biology I definitely won’t be able to do the other one.

With doing February start courses for so long it’s come as something of a surprise just how close the exam for the human biology course is: June is seeming awfully close right now.

That meant that the tutorial last Saturday started to touch on aspects of the exam. Not that much just yet beyond saying that the general format is a series of compulsory short questions, a data analysis question and a choice of essays (1 from each of the four books). Coming soonish too is a letter from the course team which will say which chapter of the book each of the essay questions will be taken from. In theory that cuts down on the revision time but seeing as the eight short questions go over all four books it’s not much of a reduction in revision time.

Also coming up is the final TMA which I hope to get done over Easter as there’s an astronomy TMA due the same day as the biology one and it’s one of those practicals that always take far longer than expected to do and to write up.

Still, once those are out of the way, it’s the exam that’ll be concentrated on before the relatively clear summer.

I’m almost at the end of something of a marathon of assignments and will be back to just doing the normal course work in about 10 days time.

I’ve been accelerating my path through the degree this year in what seemed to be a really easy way to go about it. All I needed to do was to slot in two short courses a year and I’d be able to trim at least a year off the completion date. What I’d not allowed for was the logjam of assignments that can sometimes happen when you do multiple courses.

This year was originally going to be “just” two 30 point courses at this point but I thought that I’d slot in an interesting little course on cardiovascular diseases and then figured that as a sort-of insurance against my maths being that little bit too far in the past I added in the maths for science course. Unfortunately, the net effect of all that is that I’ve assignments from all four courses due over the next 10 days. Now, I’m not crazy enough to do all four in the one week so I’ve been spacing them out but even so that’s meant almost five weeks solid of assignment work which is kind of tiring to put it mildly.

Still, at least the cardiovascular course is now complete and the maths course will be finished in a couple of weeks. That leaves the only remaining conflicts being around the exam for the biology course, albeit that’s a big conflict!