Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

One of the things that’s quite handy about the Open University is the library.

Since the OU is a distance learning university, the library, for most people, is fully online. It’s got subscriptions to hundreds of journals, mainly aimed at the various courses that they run and, usually, they’re downloadable as PDFs. What you can’t, usually, do is to download a complete issue of one of the journals unless you do it article by article but then, most of the time, you wouldn’t want to do that.

However, it also has a whole lot of books and many of these are available as PDF downloads. Although the OU online library doesn’t generally stock the OU course books it does hold those that are co-published. So, for example, you can download all the course books for the main chemistry course, S205, and for the oceanography course, S330, because those were co-published with the Royal Society of Chemistry and the equivalent earth sciences society.

In addition to those there are heaps of books that are referred to in various courses. Of those, for me, the interesting ones are those referred to by the Metals and Life (S347) course as several of them are quite closely related to the medicinal chemistry masters that I’m thinking of doing.

What’s key is, of course, to do the downloading whilst still a student. One former student is now realising that looking a bit further ahead would have saved a small fortune in books.

They won’t be restarting until 2016 but at least there is now light at the end of the tunnel.

At present they’re planning three:

1. MSc Contemporary Psychological Studies;
2. MSc in Forensic Psychological Studies; and
3. MSc in Criminological Studies.

Which isn’t a bad start and and complements some of their psychology undergraduate degrees though the social psychology and counselling undergraduate degrees don’t currently have a corresponding masters.

No details on pricing as yet but presumably they will be around the £4800 mark of the science masters.

A major downside is that they are not currently planning on having the degrees accedited. Although for BPS recognition as GBC, you only need to have done one accredited degree, for a range of psychology professions you would need to have an accredited masters as well so it would be best to check the requirements of the profession that you ultimately intend to use the degree for before signing up.

The other downside, for the OU, is that in their absence a range of other institutions have produced distance learning courses to address the gap in provision. So, for example, you can do the accredited MSc in Health Psychology from the University of Ulster for around £4000 (ie probably cheaper than the OU).

This is around the mid-point of the infectious disease (SK320) course so it seems a good time to do a review of the course so far.

It’s one of the new-style online courses so there are no books with it, or rather there are are no formally printed and bound books. What you get is a DVD about a month ahead of the course start which contains PDFs of all the texts from the course, which you can download in PDF, ePub and Word formats when the course officially starts in February. The videos embedded in the ePub files are also recorded on the DVD but as separate FLV and MP4 files.

When it gets going, there are quite a number of online tutorials (none face to face) with getting on for one a week initially. All reasonably short at one hour and easy enough to follow. Recordings of these are made available as MP4 with the presentations usually as PDFs but sometimes as Powerpoint files as well. You can order a printed copy of the course materials which runs to around 1400 A4 pages and costs about £110 for colour.

Block 1 starts off very easy but quickly gets into a range of different diseases with block 2 looking at how the immune system deals with them and block 3 considering public health aspects. There seems to be a massive amount of different processes to learn but I’ve not started the revision yet.

Assessment is via four TMAs, 2 iCMAs and an exam. As is usual these days, you just need to pass the assignments and your grade is solely dependent on the exam. The first TMA is a totally trivial one that most people could expect to get close to 100% with, the next two are structured like the exam with the final one being a research based topic. As usual, the iCMAs seem to be very detailed and you need to refer to the texts to answer the questions; they count for 12% and 10% respectively.

It’s quite an interesting course to follow along, so far anyway, but sometimes gets into long stretches of pathways as S377 did.

At one stage I was running nearly 6 weeks ahead of the course so it’s an easy one to get ahead with but equally it’s easy to drop behind with as the units are very variable in length so it’s difficult to judge just how much reading you have to do.

This is a peculiar little course in many ways being a mix of history and maths, but interesting throughout.

It’s based around the TV series The Story of Maths that the BBC put out a few years ago along with the accompanying book. Both these are tied together with the course guide that’s entirely online these days. Well, it calls itself a course guide but in reality it is the maths portion of the course as it goes through the detail of the various mathematical techniques from counting in ancient Egypt to the developments in the late 20th century. The explanations begin quite detailed but as it approaches the end of the 20th century, the detail drops away in line with the increasing complexity and so it’s more of a story of arithmetic rather than a complete story of maths.

The TV series itself becomes a little peculiar towards the end too. It starts off by visiting the various spots where the mathematical techniques were developed so they’re off to Egypt and Babylon in the early segments but carrying that approach on through to late 20th century maths means that it ends up going to visit the childhood homes of various mathematicians and has one very strange segment where the presenter tries to track down a particularly reclusive Russian mathematician. Some of the maths is touched on but you’d need either the course guide or the book to follow it and the series is more to set the historical background.

The assessment of the maths is via two online multiple choice assignments which have questions ranging from Egyptian counting through to questions covering parts of more recent mathematics. Although there are a few multiple choice historical questions in the online quizzes, the main assessment of the history is via two short essays written at the end of the course.

The book seems to be mainly there as support for the historical side of things and in particular for the essays at the end of the course so I’ve not used that yet as it’s been the maths that I’ve been working on mainly.

Quite a nice little course that neatly integrates the maths and the history so it’s a shame that this is another one of the Open University courses that’s dying this year.

Finishing the Life Sciences degree means that I’ve a number of quite different options at this point. To add flexibility to my future plans, first off I’m going to top-up my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree to the point where I can claim it and thereby avoid losing the points should I not get to fully complete it by 2019. I have several options for doing this which basically involve doing one course in October 2014 and another in 2015. At the moment, I’m planning on October E102 Introduction to childhood studies and child psychology, the new 60 pointer that would restart my psychology degree that’s been on hold since I got going with the life sciences. For the 2015 slot, there’s really only S345 Chemical change and environmental applications as it fills the 20 point hole that stops me from claiming the degree.

As a side-line, I’m also planning on gradually increasing the number of courses within the miscellaneous degree with November S283 Planetary science and the search for life,  the second 30 pointer for my Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science, being the top of my short list, though I have several 10 and 15 pointers in my sights too, notably S155 Scientific Investigations (on its final run this year) and D171 Counselling. Further down the road is A326 Empires: 1492-1975, the 60 point follow-on from the World Archaeology course that I did a few years back and A200 Medieval to modern history with the Creative Arts degree from the OU’s sister university, the Open College of the Arts remaining in my thoughts.

That done, the following year I’d really like to get going on the masters where I’m looking at:

• Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at Queen’s, one year full-time or two part-time;
• Structural Molecular Biology at Birkbeck, two or three years distance learning;
• Molecular Biology at Staffordshire, two years distance learning but with two summer schools; or
• Medicinal Chemistry with the OU, three or four years distance learning

The “only” problem with the masters is that I’ve not, yet, worked out how to fit it in with real-life.