Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Physics’ Category

Due to a peculiar combination of circumstances, I find myself doing four courses simultaneously at the moment which doesn’t seem like an overly good idea on the face of it.

However, whilst I’m now at the “worst” of it with three assignments due over a two week period about a month from now, it doesn’t seem that bad in practice. That’s down to planning (or “panicking early” as some would say) in that I’m running more than a month ahead with all but one of the course texts and have, in principle, a couple of weeks slack to play with if need be.

What’s taking a surprising amount of time is the cardiology course which, as a level one 15 point course, should be taking the least. The final assignment for that looks like it’ll take getting on for twice the time that the comparable assignments in the two level two 30 point courses will take. That’s not so surprising with hindsight in some ways though: 15 point courses aren’t long 10 pointers but 30 point courses done over half the time which in turn means that I’m effectively doing 100 points worth of courses right now.

Still, one of the four finishes next month and another the month afterwards so I’ll be back to a normal workload for a while.

One of the problems in doing three separate Open University courses at once is that the timetables they run to are completely independent of one another.

Thus I find myself looking at the prospect of doing the End Course Assessment for the cardiology course, the third TMA for the human biology course and the first TMA of the astronomy course all in the same week. Fortunately, that week is the third week of March so at least I have the chance of spacing the assignments out over the next month and a bit. Not quite so much as I’d like to though as part of the cardiology assignment involves submitting an essay plan to the tutor sometime in February and the astronomy assignment requires some practical work to be in hand by then and with our weather that’s very much hit and miss.

What I’m still amazed at is how quickly I’m managing to get through the courses. All being well, I’m on schedule to finish the course text for the human biology course in the next week or so which should let me get going on the notes for that which’ll definitely be required come exam time in June. I finished all of the reading for the cardiology course before Christmas so it “only” has the end of course assessment to be done which looks fairly doable at the moment though I’ve not actually started on it yet so that opinion could change very easily. I’m getting through the astronomy reading quite well though I suspect that I’ll be needing to go over a few things again for the assignment as it’s proving to be a more difficult course than originally expected.

Interestingly, courtesy of the astronomy course I have been assigned a “pathway tutor” as part of the pilot project. What that means is that I will retain that tutor throughout the course of my physics degree with the OU. Previously, one of the consistent comments that they’d received was that all the courses were entirely independent which, whilst nice in some respects, meant that a lot of people felt a little at sea when they’d finished a course and weren’t always that sure what they should do next or for that matter how they should go about designing the perfect sequence of courses for them. In the past that planning assistance has come from the regional centres officially and a number of course forums inofficially. Neither are ideal. The official source involved people who didn’t always have the knowledge of what was entailed in particular subjects whilst the unofficial route produced advice that might have been intended to be helpful but wasn’t always as it couldn’t take into account the particular backgrounds of those enquiring nor did those replying have anything like the full picture of what was coming up in a particular degree programme anyway.

So far, it’s in typical OU style: it’s there if you want to use it but if you’ve your own ideas you’re free to ignore it.

Thanks to the Reader I find that I’m getting much more time to read the text books than I ever had previously. It might be only 10 minutes whilst wandering around a supermarket, 20 minutes waiting for James & John to finish their class, or even just 5 minutes when I’m a little too early for them at school but it’s all been adding up.

Thus I find myself likely to be completing the biology texts by the end of the month which is getting on for four months early and when the course is officially 9 months that’s saying something. Even with the astronomy which I only started on at two weeks ago when I checked the timetable I’m at the point I should be at the end of February!

That’s not to say that I’ll have completed both of those courses because I still have the assignments to do and, of course, the exams to revise for. However, it looks like the summer will be much less busy than I had ever expected it to be this year.

One handy consequence of all this is that I should have quite a lot of time to make decent notes on the topics which I’ve rarely gotten around to in the past. All being well, I’ll be getting going on the biology notes (definitely required!) early in January. I might even consider the astronomy notes after that although so far most of the text has been largely revision from my astronomy readings many years ago.

Well, not quite a week as I really only started it on Wednesday but it’s enough to begin to get a feel for it I think.

The first thing that struck me about it was that it’s a course that uses an awful lot of different resources. As well as the course guide and course book there’s a series of booklets on “activities” (which covers a lot of different stuff), several course forums to look at, the course website and a series of practical activities related to the assignments (which aren’t, yet, on the site).

In fact, over the last few days I’ve been looking at the course guide, observing guide, first course book and the first observing activity. If that’s a typical week it’ll be quite a large course. So far I’ve been doing pretty much all the reading on the little Reader which is just as well since that chunk of books weighs a fair bit. Downside of that is that the PDFs don’t come out so well with so many diagrams so I think I’ll be needing to read some on the computer (very few are available as printed texts).

I’d have liked to have a look at the assignments but they’re not on the course website yet. The specimen exam is though and, at the moment, it looks a pretty scary affair but, hopefully, that’ll change over the course of the next nine months.

So far it seems like the interesting course I expected to, albeit with quite a lot more work to do than expected.

The exam result wasn’t supposed to be in until Friday but the scary message “course result” was there this evening. Somehow, no matter how confident you are, course results are always something of an unknown quantity and therefore scary.

As it turned out, I did even better than I was expecting to and slightly better than I’d been doing in the assignments which is exactly what’s been happening for the last few years.

Also on the OU front, the course texts for the Astronomy course (S282) arrived this morning. Although I’d really like to get going on that I’m going to need to get at least the cardiology course out of the way first I think.