Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

It’s billed as the science of the senses and that’s what’s behind it all though the emphasis on the various senses changes as you move through the course.

Each of the study guides starts with a pointer to what you’ll need to know to understand each section of the course. For instance, for vision you need to know the physics behind how light works as well as bits of biology to understand how the receptors in the eye work and some psychology to understand how the image on your retina is interpreted as a scene. For taste and smell you need quite a bit of chemistry to understand what all the chemicals that they discuss are. Overall, it’s mainly biology and psychology that you need but at times there’s quite a bit of physics and chemistry so, depending on your scientific background, you’ll find that the difficulty in following the course varies quite a bit along the way.

One consistent hassle is that the assignments are far from clear in what they’re asking for. I basically muddled along never being able to predict what my results would be with anything like the accuracy that I usually can. That’s not just me either as a number of comments on the course mention that aspect of the course. I’m not sure why that should be but perhaps it’s an aspect of it being an inter-disciplinary course and maybe they should be more explicit about saying that “the question is on biology” or something like that although even that would be quite difficult as a number of the questions run across more than one discipline.

It’s quite a large course though you wouldn’t necessarily think that from the volume of books that it’s made up from. Where the problem arises from is that there’s a fair chunk of stuff on the DVD and the reader is very, very variable in readability as it’s written by lots of different authors. The study guide points out a number of chapters in it that are particularly difficult. It’s not really that clear why the reader is there as most of the time it covers much the same ground as you’d have already read in the course text, sometimes in more detail but sometimes not. As became clear in my revision, it’s not particularly well integrated with the rest of the course.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the course. It was in a little more detail than I’d covered in previous biology courses but I didn’t feel that it added an awful lot to that existing knowledge so it didn’t come across as fascinating as I’d expected it would be. For instance, prerequisite courses had already covered vision in almost the same amount of detail and proprioception which was new to me wasn’t really covered in a great deal of detail. On the whole, I wouldn’t really recommend it if you’ve done human biology courses before as there’s not an awful lot of truly new material.

Finishing the Signals & Perception (SD329) course a few weeks felt very much like throwing out the anchor to stop as the exam on the 15th marked the final day of my over-study period that started last October. The original plan had been that it would be a fairly full year but things rapidly got out of hand as the 12 months progressed which made it something of a hard slog. A very interesting slog mind you but hard going none-the-less.

So I now find myself all of a sudden just doing a single 20 point course. Well, to be fair, I have some pre-reading for the upcoming molecular & cell biology course (S377) to do over the next couple of months but even so it’s a radical change of pace from what was pretty much a whole year of more than 120 simultaneous points throughout with 180 points for fairly significant periods of time. The rapid change of pace meant that I ended up doing 3 weeks worth of the 20 pointer in four days so I had to stop work on it for a while as another week at that pace would have seen me up to the second assignment which is just too far ahead.

What it’s also let me do is to start catching up on things that I just didn’t have any time to do over the last year or so. It’ll take me another month or two to get back to “normal” but at least I’m heading in the right direction now. One of those “normal” things is, of course, the writing of the blog was has been rather neglected over the last year and I’ll be aiming to get back to my daily entries gradually.

Signals & Perception was a really interesting course but, for me, it wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been as I ended up having to slot it in between a whole lot of other stuff which made it feel like a number of separate courses as it was very much a stop-go experience for me courtesy of me ending up with a little too many separate courses during the year.

It wasn’t meant to be that way but starting a new job in April was something that I’d not allowed for and in particular I’d not allowed for it roughly equating to another 60 point course. Net effect was that April to October was a bit of a nightmare time-wise for everything (not counting real life either!). Thankfully, the exam yesterday marks the end of that period and I notionally have a week off before the next course starts and it’s only a 20 pointer too.

Although an overly busy time, it’s been a really interesting roller-coaster of a year. Last October saw me starting S205, the main chemistry course, with a short autism course (SK124) kicking in a month later. SD329 weighed in in February and was going fine ’til the job offer came through in March. Early June disappeared in preparation for the S205 exam and the second half of June went with the pre-course assignments for the biology (SXR376) and chemistry (SXR344) summer schools which took place in the first couple of weeks of July. Coming back from them, it was straight into the assignment for SD329 before spending most of August on the assignments for the summer schools. In September it was catch-up with SD329 and then the final assignment for it before diving into revision for the exam. Not a recommended approach but, passes permitting, it means that I’m over the hump of the degree and have only two 30 point courses and a 10 pointer to complete it by 2014.

I was a bit brain-dead last night but managed to have a first proper look at what’s coming up in the Metals & Life (S347) course. First glance, it appeared like a lot of reading but it’s about 60 pages over three weeks, not the one week that I’d thought initially. Also, it seems to be run like a biology course which dives into some chemistry along the way so, hopefully, not too bad. I’m not overly keen on having the exam at the end of April though as that’ll be a couple of months into S377 which has a bit of a reputation of being very difficult.

Not to be forgotten is some preparatory reading for S377 which needs done between now and Christmas. That’s around 250 pages from S204 which we didn’t need to cover during S204 itself but which is required reading for S377.

I thought that the SD329 exam wasn’t too bad. With interdisciplinary courses, there’s what appears to be a totally frightening amount of information of differing types to go over and starting the revision is scary. Once I got well into it, things seemed to come together though and I ended up with 5 or 6 quite good answers out of the 8 short questions and only one pretty poor one. For the longer questions I think I’ve two fairly good ones and one reasonable out of the three. More than enough to pass I think but the overall result could be anywhere from 50 to 70 as I was dreadful at estimating my assignment marks during the course.

It’s been a bit hectic over the past few weeks as I reach the finishing line with SD329.

The final TMA didn’t turn out to be so bad in the end although I don’t think that having a TMA completion date less than two weeks before the exam was a particularly good idea.

I started the revision a few weeks ago but with the TMA needing done too,  there wasn’t much more than the revision preparation actually done over the time. I started the revision properly during the week and, so far, it doesn’t seem too bad on the first proper run through.

The course itself was as fascinating as billed. It’s an interdisciplinary course and the mix of biology, chemistry, physics and psychology changed quite markedly between the various components of the course. For instance, with vision there was quite a lot of physics, with proprioception the emphasis was more psychological, taste & small were mainly chemical and overall there was a lot of biology.

Our final tutorial is later this morning which also seems rather late for an exam tutorial as there’s now little  more than a week before the exam but with the due date of the final TMA being earlier in the week, I guess the final tutorial couldn’t have been much earlier.

With university education fees soaring in England, it’s fortunate that a number of alternatives are appearing on the scene.

For a number of years now, major universities (mainly American) have offered a range of free courses through various means. For example, Yale’s Open Yale offering includes a few dozen courses from a range of faculties in the form of videos of the courses along with book lists, exam papers, etc. You could follow the courses completely pretty much as though you were there, albeit without the feedback from the professor and the interaction with the students. That’s typical of first-generation online offerings: you’re pretty much on your own. Also, without any kind of assessment, working through them isn’t going to count for anything on, for example a CV. That does not mean that they’re useless because they can be very useful indeed eg to give you a taster of a subject or to provide more background.

One step up from that is OpenLearn from the Open University. That’s also been running for a number of years but is quite different from the Yale offering. This is from a distance learning university and offers extracts from a wide range of their courses. You can either do these on your own or register to access forums relating to the course segments on offer. Again there are videos, texts, etc. but the downside is that these are course segments rather than complete courses; typically you’ll get a chapter from a short course or a couple of chapters from a longer one. Again, the lack of assessment brings with it the same problems as the first-generation of these courses.

Seriously upping the ante are EdX and Coursera. These offer a range of free short courses, with assessment and even certificates of achievement at the end from a range of major league universities. Sounds perfect, but the certificates don’t count towards a university qualification. That said, these are far from worthless if the comments are anything to go by and it’s likely that there would be some recognition of the work undertaken where it was applicable.

At present, none of the free alternatives discussed here offers a full-scale university education accompanied by the formal recognition of that, but that time can’t be overly far off. The main issue at present is that the courses on offer are almost entirely first year courses with little or no pre-requisites. That’s good in that you can dive straight into, say, a history of the American revolution but it’s bad in that they’re nearly all introductory. Having said that, it’s early days with all of these and with the number of students involved in EdX it seems quite likely that second and third year courses will eventually emerge.

Who knows, perhaps four or five years from now, someone, somewhere will have amassed the equivalent of a full-scale university degree with all the certificates to prove it along the way. Their only problem then might be that it would be a degree with units from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, London, etc. and not enough courses from any one of those to justify them graduating that first student to do it, which wouldn’t seem quite right