Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Whilst I’m getting into the swing of the human biology course, the cardiovascular diseases one is something else together.

In principle, the human biology course as a level 2, 30 point course should clearly be harder than the cardiovascular diseases courses which weighs in at level 1 and only 15 points. However, at the moment the reverse is very much the case although it’s early days for both courses.

With the human biology course, we’ve moved through a very easy going introductory chapter, onto a much more serious one on the structure of cells, through a long list of aspects of nutrition to finish with a very thorough going through (literally!) of the digestive system. I can’t say that I remember all of that as yet though all being well, after I’ve ran up my notes for it things will be somewhat clearer.

The cardiovascular course kicked off with quite a terminology loaded introductory chapter before going straight into the detail of how the cardiovascular system works. If nothing else, when I come across the same topic in the third book of the human biology course, it’ll seem really simple in comparison! Still, at least the next couple of chapters look like a much easier ride and the assignment questions look reasonably doable (there’s no exam for this).

The reason for the apparent discrepancy in the actual and apparent level of these courses is largely down to how the OU assign levels to courses. In practice, it’s the assignments and exam (if any) that are taken to establish the level of the course rather than the course content. Thus, the assignments in the cardiology course are easier than those in the human biology course. On the other hand, the apparent level of each course from the students point of view is very different: if it were me, I’d have put the cardiology course at level three and if the assignments matched the complexity of the first couple of chapters that’s where it would be.

Personally, I’d have preferred it to have been set at level three although that would have meant I’d not have done the course for a few years. As it is, I suspect that the dropout rate will be very high for the cardiology. As per usual, I’ll be too stubborn to drop out but will be mainly looking on it as pre-revision for the cardiology section of the human biology course.

If it weren’t for the OU appearing to be about to drop all their science summer schools and consequently their named science degrees, the choices for 2010 would be very easy. First I’d be doing Biological Psychology in February and then in October I’d be starting Exploring Psychology (the psychology course that I should have done first).

However, I really had my heart set on picking up a physics degree at some point and therefore I need to do something about that as it seems sure to disappear from the list of options within the next couple of years. The particular problem with the named science degrees is that they require three summer schools to be included within them and said summer schools are currently all sitting with expiry dates no later than 2012.

Thus, for the physics, I need to do both Observing the Universe (SXR208) and Physics by Experiment (SXR207) plus one other. The one other can come from quite a massive range of options although given the 2012 expiry dates that are on most of the courses that choice is much more limited than it would be normally. Of those that are around, I would normally be inclined to do the residential associated with the main chemistry course but there doesn’t seem to be the time to do that. Thus I’m currently looking at the geology option which is also on my “must do sometime” list and has the advantage that it seems possible to slot it into the schedule.

In terms of when to do the courses the ideal sequence seems to be Astronomy (S282) in February 2010, Geology (S276) in November 2010, Using mathematics February 2011, with the astronomy and geology residentials in the summer of 2011. Then it’s on to the physical world in October 2011 with its residential in the summer of 2012. Finally, it’s back to the psychology sequence in October 2012 and the final chunk of the physics degree after that. Not ideal, but at least it appears possible.

The annoying part about all this is that it’s twisting round what started out as a reasonably sensible study sequence to one that’s purely aimed at meeting requirements as soon as possible just in case the option to meet them disappears. Moreover, it’s not even sure that the list of courses I’d need to complete the physics degree will remain so to some extent it might be a pointless exercise in terms of trying to pick up that degree although it will take me through a very interesting list of courses regardless.

Thanks to the Child Development exam last week and the revision for it over the previous month, I only got around to signing up for Understanding cardiovascular diseases (SK121) a matter of days ago but this morning the website was already up for me.

That meant that I could download loads of course related stuff and in particular the full text of the course book which in turn meant that I could formally start the course this morning. So far, it’s not too bad though there’s a serious amount of medical terminology in the first chapter. I’m going to ignore most of that for the moment on the basis that they’re bound to come back to it in more detail later on in the course.

It’s the first full online course that I’ve done so no live tutorials but instead there’s an online forum where “tutorials” will be held, starting the week after next. Not sure how that’ll go though if the first one is anything to go by they’ll take me a lot less time than the suggested time listed in the course guide. I’m expecting that’ll be the case for many aspects of the course since it’s a level 1 course which means there’s lots of “this is how a course works” material. All being well, that’ll let me get considerably ahead of the course schedule as I’d like to have the final assignment completed before my February course starts which means I need to finish almost two months ahead of the formal timetable.

The nature of the course means that it’s attracted a massive number of health professionals on it. Presumably they’ll know a whole bunch of the terminology which is pretty much totally new to me; were the tutorials in person ones I’d have been left in the dust I expect!

If nothing else, this course should give me some practice at doing two courses simultaneously which will be handy to get me through 2010 which looks like being a year of overlapping courses. Having said that, SK121 is covering ground that I’ll also be doing in the Human Biology course albeit with a lot more detail in SK121 presumably. The other overlapping courses seem likely to be quite different thus less scope for semi-revision with them.

Throughout the course everyone seemed to be saying that there was “an awful lot of course” in ED209 but I found that I really didn’t notice that so much until the time came for revision.

Since it’s a research led course you need to try and memorise an enormous number of names of researchers so that you can quote them in the exam. If you were trying to revise the entire course that would equate to several dozen names at least but by that point very few people seemed to even attempt to revise the entire course as it seemed to be an impossible task.

Thus, people selected what they had to revise. In principle that was a fairly easy thing to do in that a guiding principle is that you’re only examined on a topic once. So you could eliminate almost a dozen chapters throughout the three books. However, even that turned out to be problematical as one of the assignment topics turned up on the exam paper thus removing a choice for a lot of people. In fact, this seems to have resulted in almost everyone ignoring the “disturbing behaviour” question and going with the “gender development” one if they were revising book 2.

The structure of the exam paper introduces further complications. There’s one “seen question” that you need to research before the exam and write out during it which is much more difficult than it first appears. The research isn’t so bad but few people these days know how much they could write in an hour and even fewer know how much they could write in an hour under exam conditions. Besides, you basically need to memorise that essay which isn’t that easy either.

Next you need to choose two questions. The questions on offer are a selection of two from each book of the course and you need to answer one question from each book. Thus a lot of people only revised two books and limited themselves somewhat during the exam. Since the third book was the largest and most complex, many people chose from the first two books. This would have been fine but since people were generally limiting the chapters within each book to study and eliminating those chapters already covered by an assignment they had the complication that one of the assignment topics was on the exam paper thus an awful lot of people answered the “gender development” question.

The effect of all this is that getting on for 20% of our merry band didn’t turn up for the exam and around 10% left within the first hour. One glance at the paper was enough for one person and she left after about a minute. Somehow that doesn’t seem right. Yes, people don’t turn up and people leave early in all exams but I’ve never seen it happening in anything like the numbers in ED209.

Overall, the impression is that ED209 is much harder than even the level 3 psychology courses which doesn’t seem right.

One of the advantages of the Open University is that you can do any of the level one courses without any prior knowledge. Surprisingly perhaps there are a whole heap of essentially medical courses within that level one range.

For instance if you’ve a bit of a family history of heart trouble you might consider doing Understanding cardiovascular diseases which covers everything from the treatment of those who’ve had a heart attack, how to go about avoiding one through to the medical aspects of it. To be honest it’s one course that I reckon just about everyone should do: knowing how to avoid getting a heart attack has to be knowledge worth having. If you really get the finger out, you can start that in November.

In a similar vein, there’s Diabetes care which with the drastic rise of type 2 diabetes seems something that a lot of people should know about too (the next course is in May). Alongside these are the cancer, nutrition and obesity courses and there’s also the likes of Infectious Disease if you work up to that through level two courses.

If you get really get carried away with it (which would be easy to do: they’re very interesting courses) you can even pick up a Life Sciences degree.