Foreign Perspectives

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.

Having a continental market in the grounds of Belfast city hall is a tradition started a number of years ago to liven up the city.

It’s expanded over the years and the original Christmas market has been joined by a similar production in the Spring and, I think, there’s another one or two variants at different times during the year. I say “I think” because the city hall grounds have developed over the years to the point where they host a considerable number of events of various types almost right throughout the year.

The Spring market is quite similar to the Christmas one, being mainly a varied collection of food stalls from various (not just European) spots around the world. Thus, not only do you get the various French style fast food outlets with their crepes, croque monsieurs, and the like but there’s alsor representation from Germany, Poland and even Lebanon plus I’m sure a number that I didn’t identify.

Mixed in with the food stalls are a number of rather expensive sweet outlets and an eclectic mix of gift stalls selling everything from native American wares through to several that sell handmade woodwork productions.

Anyway, it’s open from Thursday the 15th of May through to 6pm Monday the 19th of May 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.

There’s been a bit of a run of retirement do’s to go to over the last year or two and one a few months ago prompted the thoughts of a reunion of our team from around the 1990s which ended up being held a week ago.

Despite almost everyone having moved on over that time, we ended up with around 40 people turning up. My first thought was that I’d not recognise any of them or that it would be a crowd of doddery old men and women on their way to zimmer frame territory. However, it was nothing like that at all and in fact not only did most people change relatively little over what’s been anything up to 25 years or so but one even managed to look years younger than she did 20-odd years ago!

As usual with these things it was mix of reminiscing over the good old days and pumping people for information about job prospects (the grass always being greener elsewhere, of course). Although set around lunch, most people stayed on ’til into the evening and the last stragglers only heading home around 10pm.

Coincidently, I ran across and even older friend at the family fun day on Saturday and it looks like there’ll be a reunion of our merry band from the 1980s in the not too distant future too.