Foreign Perspectives

Starting a degree at level two causes me the minor problem that I’ll be short 60 points by the time I finish what would have ordinarily been the final course had I started at level one.

In the course of looking at how I might pick up those 60 points I’d already started on 30 of them courtesy of the human biology (SK277) course that I’m doing at the moment. That course opened my eyes to the interest of biology generally and the biology short courses in particular which comprise an interesting collection ranging from the likes of cardiology and diabetes through to obesity and nutrition, mostly in the form of 15 point courses. Scheduling-wise, it was cardiology that fitted best and seeing as something like 30% of all deaths are down to that, it seemed like something worth knowing about.

What I’d not allowed for was that this is very clearly a medical subject and the first couple of chapters of the book were seriously heavy going for me. I reckoned that none of the terminology would ever sink in but thing like atria and ventricles make sense to me now although I’m sure there’s a vast amount of the vocabulary that hasn’t yet sunk in.

Sadly, it looks like quite a number of the students in the group have already dropped out of the course. Out of a possible 25 or so, only five have had any input to the recent activity. Ordinarily, I’d have thought that participation in the online forum where the “tutorials” are conducted would be higher as you don’t get the “real-life” issues that generally stop people turning up at regular tutorials.

As usual, I will, of course, be just too stubborn to drop out but I’ll be researching  short courses a little more thoroughly before signing up in future. Certainly the 15 point ones as they seem, by and large, to be shorter versions of 30 point courses rather than a separate breed of course as the 10 point ones are.