Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

Two weeks from today, I’ll be sitting down to do the SK320 exam which means that I’m well into phase one of the revision.

It’s a bit of a mountain of a course for a 30 pointer. In addition to the 1400 pages of text, there were numerous videos embedded in the course material, references to some massive tomes (e.g. HEAT weighs in at 3000 pages!) and oodles of tutorials.

At the moment, I’ve completed my run through the first two books and am getting into the third book which I should complete by this weekend. At 300 pages, it’s the shortest of the three books and as it’s on public health rather than the science, it’s not quite so heavy going. So, hopefully, I will have a full set of notes in a few days time and then it’s on to phase 2 of the revision.

Phase 2 will be a mix of going over the notes I’ve prepared, the past papers (only two plus the SEP), the FAQ which looks useful and, not to be forgotten, the research question for the final part of the question paper. That research question is a bit of a puzzler at the moment as I’m not sure if I need to research any more information at this point so it’s difficult to say how long it will take; my theory at the moment is that it shouldn’t take more than a day to look over but I plan to take a first run at it as soon as the main notes are completed.

More anon on the revision as I move onto phase 3 in the final couple of days before the exam.

Three weeks from today, it’ll be down to the final morning of the SK320 revision before the exam in the afternoon.

For a 30 point course, the volume of material is enormous with 1400 A4 pages. That’s roughly equivalent to 2000 normal Open University sized pages and doesn’t, of course, include the 20-odd tutorials with their associated notes. Some of the “read if you have time” references were even larger with HEAT running to around 3000 pages all by itself.

So what’s left to revise? Well, loads seeing as it’s been taking longer than expected to get my revision notes into shape.

I’m in the midst of phase one, in which I go through my copy of the learning outcomes and chapter summaries and add diagrams and notes from the text that seem to be missing from the summaries. Given the sheer volume of the original text, this is taking ages to do and I really need to get that done in the next two weeks before I move onto phase 2 of my revision. For S377, this took a while due to the diagrams but it’s mostly text this time around. The group this year has one very visual person who’s been plugging away running up diagrams for many of the major topics which look like they’ll be quite useful in that final week.

Phase two, which I do in the final week is reading through the enhanced summaries produced in phase one. For SK320, there are 30 pages which amounts to roughly ten pages per block – a fairly manageable amount of text to read through and, hopefully, memorise. Also in this phase I’ll be looking over the past papers and specimen exam paper. Since this is a fairly new course, there are only two past papers but in principle I could also look at the past papers of the predecessor course, S320.

One addition to phase two this time around is the part C topic which, this year, is on MERS. We’ve to research this and on the day will be asked to write a report on specific aspects of it. I’ve read over the initial research and given that it’s only a 500-600 word answer that they’re looking for, that’s probably enough to read over. What I’ve not, yet, done is sort out two potential tables or diagrams which they want in the answer.

Finally, there’s also the business of gathering together the things for the exam bag. This time, that’s fairly easy as it’s the same things that I needed for S377 which means the various coloured pencils, rulers, pens, pencils, Lucozade, wine gums and ID. Going by the quite strict timelimits on the parts of the exam, there won’t be time for a whole lot of “wine gum moments” but it’s hard to say at this point as I’ve not really looked at any past papers.

Last, but not least, is a bit of familiarisation with the exam format. As with most biology papers, this is divided into three distinct parts. The first is 10 from a choice of 12 short questions covering the whole course but not in a whole lot of detail. As always, these are a bit hit and miss but, usually, my revision notes get me through this section. The second part is the data handling question which can sometimes be done without knowing a whole lot about the course itself though it can throw you a bit if you know nothing about the topic covered. Finally, there’s the research question which this year is on MERS. I’m not really keen on that type of question as you could do loads of research and find that they asked something that you didn’t cover or you could do a very basic amount and find that it was on exactly what you’d read.

Marks-wise, if you’ve passed the assignments, the overall course mark is entirely dependent on the exam mark. That in turn is broken down with 50% on the short questions and 25% each for the data handling and research questions. The research question has a peculiar marking scheme: 1 mark for a title of up to 10 words, 2 for an abstract of up to 40 words, 2 each for your introduction and conclusion, 2 for each of two diagrams/tables, 2 for the style and 12 for the content. Given that the question they tend to ask you to address usually seems to have four parts, that’s three points per part so it’s not a total disaster if you can’t answer one or two of them. Thus far, I’ve done rather well with the marks on this course and a disctinction seems within striking distance but, of course, that could change dramatically on the day.

Way back in 2009, I finally got going on the first course for my psychology degree (ED209) and was intending to plug away with that over the following four or five years, working through DSE212, DD303 and DD307 along with a couple of other courses to make up the 360 point total. However, one of those “other courses” was SK277 (human biology) and that really got me fired up about biology so I ended up working through the rest of the biology degree which I’ve just about finished.

In the meantime, they totally reorganised the psychology programme and are mid-way through introducing a whole new range of courses that’ll ultimately mean that they’re offering three or four different psychology degrees in place of the one general one that existed when I started. Net effect of being mid-way through and me having done some of the old-style courses is that there’s a confusing choice of modules at the moment.

The new ones seem to have dropped the popular residentials but there’s one remaining on its final run this coming year. That therefore seems to me to be the best spot to start so I’ve signed up with DSE212 and the associated residential DXR222.

After that, it gets quite confusing and I’m not really sure what I need to do to complete the degree. In theory, I could do the old-style degree but that needs to be completed before the end of 2017 which in turn means that I would need to do up to four 60 point modules over two years which seems a bit much at the moment. If I don’t do that, I would need to complete under the new-style regulations which is the same number of modules but without the need to complete by 2017.

What modules though? On the new-style degree there’d be E102 and DE100 but that assumes that I can’t count any of my existing modules and some of those fall into the psychology camp. I don’t know what I need to do there at this point. At level 3 there’s the compulsory DE300 plus a choice of three or four others coming up depending on whether you want a general psychology degree, a forensic psychology degree or a counselling degree.

At the moment, the only thing I’m fairly sure about is that I’d need to do DE300, would probably need to do DE100 and would probably do EK313. So, another call to the SMT people is called for I think.

With the science courses that I’ve been doing over the last few years, the books generally turn up about a month before the course officially starts and the associated website opens a few days before the course opens. Psychology is clearly a little different and the books have arrived nearly two months before the course starts with the website opening a month before the start.

In the box are:

• Exploring Psychological Research Methods, the 400 page book that I think you dip into throughout the course;
• Mapping Psychology, two volumes totalling 600 pages; and
• Challenging Psychological Issues at 200 pages which finishes off the course;
• a DVD video which has a number of relatively short programmes on it divided into five sections (these will play in a normal DVD player);
• a DVDROM which has a couple of animated sequences (although it’s easier in Windows, you can watch the videos by browsing to the folder on Linux and Mac or, of course, via VirtualBox); and
• SPSS (this is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows and you can use the OU license key for any of them).

Total page count at around 1200 pages is way below that of the equivalent science courses which generally weigh in with around 2000 pages plus associated DVDs (the extreme case being S205 with its seven DVDs). So, in principle, less work to do though I imagine that it won’t work out like that.

On the website will be the assessments, SPSS guide, audio clips and “much more”. Quite why they couldn’t have popped the guide and audio onto the DVD I don’t know as there seems to be the space for it.

One thing that I have noticed already is that I have already covered some of the ground in other courses. Thus one of the DVDROM animations is on perception which I did in some detail in SD329 a couple of years back and some of the topics touched on in the book were covered by the social psychology course that I did with coursera last year. That pre-knowledge should make some sections easier to work through.

With the SK320 exam looming in October, I’m planning on making a start on DSE212 now so that I can take a break from it when the revision work steps up.

Not so long ago, you used to be just click on the “register now” button to sign up for any course with the Open University.

That led to some people doing crazy things like registering for level 3 courses when they’d no background in the subject and where the courses in question explicitly stated that you needed to have quite a lot of background. You might think that all such people would fail but they didn’t as a number of them had acquired the relevant background in an unofficial way.

However, now the pre-requisites are being enforced in a growing range of subjects. First to complain were the mathematicians who found that they were required to have specific modules as a pre-requisite to do later ones. Quite a number of those actually did have the knowledge required but they’d acquired it outside the OU and sometimes in a way that wasn’t documented. No complaints, yet, from the languages people where you definitely need to have a level 1 level of knowledge before doing level 2 but perhaps they’re not enforcing the pre-requisites there yet as it’s quite common in languages to acquire fluency in an undocumented way.

It’s coming up in the last of the residentials too. In the case of psychology, the original timetable of DSE212 of February to October meant that DXR222, the associated residential, fell in the middle of that. Now though that you can complete DSE212 in the October to June slot it’s possible to do that before doing DXR222 yet they enforce a registeration of DSE212 first, even though you could drop out of it after registration. Net effect for me was a worrying couple of days waiting whilst they processed the DSE212 registration before I could register for the residential when in the past I could have registered for both at the same time.

Oh well. At least my remaining modules don’t seem to have officially listed pre-requisites. Or, perhaps, I should say “not yet”.