Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

With the Open University changing the rules re their qualifications and dropping modules at a worrying rate, I find that my original plan of finishing off the life sciences degree this year then completing a chemistry degree aren’t really workable anymore.

The life sciences degree is fine as I’m on the final module (infectious disease) for that.

The chemistry option is a different matter as I’ve used most of the “chemistry” modules up in the life sciences degree and really only have ecology and an environmental module plus the final of the three proper chemistry modules available for that, none of which really fire me up. I was also planning on sweeping up all the remaining short modules that I’ve done over the years and which don’t fit in the new style qualifications.

However, it struck me the other day that I can pick up a non-honours degree instead which would let me use up all the short modules and basically bank all my modules for now, with the option of adding honours anytime up to 2019 if suitable modules turn up. To do that all I need is an additional 40 points which would be swept up by the planetary science module that I’ve been meaning to do and the final chemistry module which I wasn’t particularly intending to do.

The plus point of this is that it doesn’t affect the timetable for my possible masters as those modules run November to June and May to October so with the masters (if I go for it) starting in September/October there’d only be a month or so of an overlap with the chemistry module.

The first half of the Drug Design course was covering a lot of relatively familiar ground so I managed to get through that relatively quickly. It’s more of a slog at present as it’s going through endless chemistry methods with little apparent connection between them (much the same problem as with S377).

There’s one iCMA on the molecular modelling software which doesn’t count for the final mark and which is basically just there to give you a run through the features of the software. So far, each of the four TMAs seems quite light in terms of time required which is down to them being “fractional TMAs” ie overall they’re probably equivalent to three. The EMA is supposed to be more or less like just another TMA and isn’t released until three weeks before the course end date which is a bit of a nuisance as I’ll be in the midst of the infectious disease course by then.

Still, so far, so good.

If you read the comments before you sign up for S377, it sounds like an impossible course to do and one that just about everyone will fail.

Real stats tell a different story. Yes, it is slightly harder than most OU courses but only slightly going by the stats which show a drop out rate about 5% higher than average and a pass rate about 5% lower.

Mind you, you do need to be quite determined not to drop out as nothing makes much sense as you go through and it’s only at revision time that it all comes together. So, in my case the expected resit turned out not to be required by a very safe margin and I ended up with just shy of a distinction!

That’s caused a minor issue as it now appears that I may be able to improve my overall degree classification if I get the finger out with the final two modules.

It doesn’t seem that long since I started S377 back in February but now the final exam is just over a week from now.

It’s a course that’s really heavy going for quite long stretches as it delves down so low in biology that often you can’t see the wood for the trees. So, instead of looking at reproduction as prophase and whatnot, you look down below that to see what molecules are making the chromatin separate out and reform in the various stages. Rather than look at the cell membrane, you look at how proteins get assembled within it, cross it and generally move around. Rather than just considering DNA as a unit, you’re looking at how it reproduces itself and fixes any errors in that process.

So, MUCH more detailed than you find elsewhere in biology. Consequently, you don’t really get a handle on what’s happening until towards the end of the course and the revising is really helping my understanding of what I went through over the last nine months or so. Whether that extra understanding will help in the exam is, of course, a totally different matter.

Anyway, that takes me up to the final course of the life science degree which is SK320 Infectious Disease starting in February with the chemistry counterpart kicking off towards the end of October. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to sweep up the chemistry courses within the biology degree as there doesn’t seem to be enough chemistry courses to make up a chemistry degree as per my original plan (basically I’ve used them up in the biology degree and only have environmental ones that aren’t really that interesting to me). Assuming that I can do that, I’ll be restarting the psychology degree next October.

Looking at before I signed up for it, it looked like book 1 was chemistry and book 2 was biology. That’s what it is on paper but in reality “book 2” is the main book and the chemistry is slotted in as needed along the way with the final chunky section a medical science one that seems to be tying all the other bits together in a fashion.

As with all the modern science courses there’s a lot of it online, mostly for economic reasons rather than educational ones. They could put that final section of the course on a DVD (or at least make it easily downloadable) but they don’t. You can download it but you need to go through the online study guide and online modules to download each of the videos and texts contained within them. That makes it a bit of a nuisance to work through unless you either read ahead and download everything in advance or have Internet and DVD access available everywhere you study.

It fits in really well with S377 really well, so much so that when I’m reading the book for one I sometimes forget which of the two I’m reading.

One downside of it that I’ve just discovered is that it seems I won’t be able to count it in any degree unless I can slot it into one by 2016 as the new-style OU degrees don’t acknowledge courses that aren’t 30 or 60 points. So, rather than lose the points, I’m having to change the courses I was meaning to do over the next couple of years with the running order for my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree looks like being S346 Drug design this October, A326 Empire: 1492-1975 the following October and finishing with AA318 Art of the 20th Century in October 2015.