Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

After much debate I have finally gotten around to signing up for the Human Biology course and the related residential.

The Human Biology course is something of a tangent to everything that I’ve done before. That seems likely to make it fall into the category of “challenging” for me (that’s what everyone seems to call the courses with lots of work these days). To make it that little bit less “challenging” I’ve been reading through the first of the course books for it which seems to be around 25% really hard, 25% really easy and the rest fairly doable. That’s probably about typical for a course that’s aimed at a very wide range of people: everything from nurses through to social science people with everything in between.

For me the really hard parts are the medical bits, the doable are broadly organic chemistry and the really easy are the social science sections. Since it’s aimed at a wide spectrum of people there tends to be quite a lot of hand-holding throughout the book which, hopefully, will make it fall into the category of “doable” as assignments and the exam come up.

At the moment I’m not really sure what to make of the associated residential course. There’s a massive textbook that I’ve to buy for it which implies a lot of pre-course reading that I’ll need to get going on over the coming months.

It’s too early to register for the final couple of courses in the upcoming sequence which definitely includes Exploring Psychology and its residential. I’ll be waiting to see how the Human Biology course goes before signing up for Biological Psychology which would overlap it by about five months. Ordinarily, I’d not have worried about that particular overlap but both courses, although only 30 points each, have a reputation of being “challenging” so I’m putting off the signup up decision until the last moment (early December).

In my short term plans for OU courses the next one up is Human Biology which starts at the start of October and which overlaps my Child Development course by about three weeks. To reduce the work overlap what I’ve done is to buy the first book of the biology course and I’ve been working through that over the last month or two.

However, a bunch of the people doing the Child Development course are going straight on to Biological Psychology which starts in February. As it happens my aim in doing the Human Biology course was to simplify the Biological Psychology and they complement each other quite well. Thus, I’m in the process of getting talked into yet another overlap (February to June in this case).

Interestingly, since the bio psych course doesn’t have an exam it means that it may well not overlap with the next psychology course that starts in October as, usually, I end up running quite a bit ahead of the official course timetable so in principle I might be able to complete it some time in September if not before. That in turn should let me slip in the graduation ceremony for my modern languages degree which would have been this September but I couldn’t manage to fit it in.

What’s even more interesting is that doing the bio psych overlap would knock another year off my psych graduation and still be sticking to my 60 points a year maximum for the degree.

Thanks to the “short” list of courses that I ran up last summer whilst thinking about what I do following the modern languages degree, I find that there’s quite a lot of scope for shortening the period to pick up the first two degrees from the overall sequence.

TWO degrees? Yeah, I know, it seems a little crazy to be thinking of doing two degrees at once but when I ran through the list of possibilities I ended up with the bulk of two separate degrees worth of courses having my little stars beside them. Thus over the next 10 years or so I will be working my way through both a psychology and a physics degree along with a few totally unrelated courses that seem close to forming a history degree.

Anyway, because the two degree programmes aren’t actually designed to be taken at once there’s quite a lot of scope for me to play with the scheduling of the various courses. Moving more than five years out is way too complicated as OU courses come and go but looking at the next three or four years there are still oodles of viable sequences that can be created and a surprising amount of time to be saved.

For instance, my original plan was basically to do the first major physics sequence followed by the first major psychology course sequence and finishing up with the archaeology course. That results in a completion date of December 2014. However, it’s actually possible to complete the same sequence of courses in December 2012 by changing the order slightly and removing what would have been quite long gaps between courses at several points.

Sadly, I don’t think it’ll be possible to shave so much time off in later years though there’s at least one spot where a year can be saved several years from now.

One of the problems that I have in choosing which courses to go for is that a number of those that I’d quite like to do fall into the category of “difficult” for one reason or another.

In some cases that’s not so bad I can, for instance, work up to the astrophysics course by starting with a very doable maths course and working up to astrophysics itself via a series of stepping stone courses. So, in principle, the astrophysics is quite an achievable goal for me. However, some of the other courses don’t have those easy stepping stones and, for example, the human biology course that I’ve pencilled in for next year looks like it will be rather difficult in a number of areas. The snag is that in that particular case human biology is itself the stepping stone that I felt I needed for biological psychology which I’ll be doing in a few years time.

One plus point is that, at the moment, the most difficult courses seem to be 30 pointers rather than the 60 point courses that I’ve been doing the last few years. So, in principle, if I do hit a really rough patch with one then I should be able to devote more time to it.

Still, if I was able to manage level 3 French, I’m sure that I’ll be able to get through a couple of level 2 biology courses.

One of the problems with doing a degree with the OU is that it’s a very long drawn out affair taking anything from six years upwards in most cases. That long period in turns means that there can be quite a turnover in the courses available during the course of one’s degree.

For example, when I was going through my (far too long) list of potential courses for the next couple of years recently I found that there’s quite a lot of them that will have reached the end of their life before I’ll have gotten around to doing them. That’s not really so much of a problem as it might appear to be in that the majority of courses are replaced by updated versions of what went before. For example, whilst I’ve got DSE212 Exploring Psychology in my schedule since it only runs to 2011 I may well be doing whatever its successor is. Where it is an issue is that the psychology courses come with expiry dates so that 10 years after a version of a course ceases, you can’t count it towards a psychology degree eg in my case the Child Development course that I’m currently doing will expire in 2023 because this edition of the course will only run to 2012. Granted, that 10 year plus validity isn’t usually a major problem in that the degree programmes generally run over around six years but it means that you can’t really take a break from the psychology degree as easily as you can for other degree programmes.

What’s a little more disconcerting is that A251 World Archaeology which was only introduced last year and which went straight into my short-list as it sounds brilliant is finishing the year before I’d have been doing it. Why that should be so I don’t know for sure but the extreme range of comments about it (“best course ever” through to “total waste of time”) might have something to do with that. If that’s the case, then any rewrite could be substantially different than the current course. Unfortunately, I’ll probably not know whether or not there’s going to be a successor to it for a couple of years so if I want to do it, I’ll have to rejig my schedule yet again.