Foreign Perspectives

Up until last week, the “improvements” to student funding had only affected Open University students in England but the changes arrive in Wales with courses starting from September 2014.

Although the “improvements” had resulted in parity with the full-time students in terms of being able to get student loans, what nobody pushing for this parity seems to have realised that few of the part-time students would be eligible for the funding as it was quite frequently their second qualification and moreover the cost of the courses would rocket when this change was introduced. Thus in England modules went from a typical £700 to £2500 and the concept of transitional arrangements came in to ensure that those who’d already started qualifications would be able to continue them on the same financial basis. Thus the jump in costs only applied to new students or those starting new qualifications.

Sadly, the new arrangements are now being applied in Wales so we can look forward to a substantial drop in Welsh OU students similar to the massive drop that’s already been seen in England.

Will Northern Ireland and Scotland follow the trend? Somehow, I can’t see the Scottish politicians doing likewise this year with the vote coming up but who knows about next  year or for Northern Ireland?

When I kicked off my planned degree with the OU back in 2009, the intention was to do a psychology degree. Snag was that with end in sight of the named science degrees, and me finding biology absolutely fascinating, I ended up taking a slight diversion into what’s shortly going to become my Life Sciences degree.

However, I’ve not forgotten about psychology. In fact, I’ve been a student member of the BPS since back in 2009 and have been going to various events over the years. This year is turning into something of a bumper crop of events with the taster of clinical psychology day a few weeks ago, the annual taster of psychology day today and several more events courtesy of the 55 year psychology anniversary that Queen’s are running this year.

My problem is that I find both biology and psychology fascinating and I don’t know what to do when the life sciences degree is completed later this year.

The clinical psychology event clearly shows that getting into professional psychology is almost certainly not an option so long term it would appear that psychology, whilst fascinating, is a dead-end for me. On the other hand, I’ve not had the opportunity to go to a similar event for biology so it could be that it would be a dead-end too. That said, at the moment, it looks like the path to more advanced biology is doable with, seemingly, no insurmountable obstacles to get into the masters and then doctoral programmes. Apparently, getting into a psychological doctoral programme is a major undertaking requiring the masters but also a whole heap of relevant experience (which you can get via volunteering) that would take some years all by itself.

It would appear that the tutors are getting a whole bunch of enquiries about retrosynthetic analysis as the number and length of the tutorials on that is mounting up at a time in the course when you’d expect fewer of them.

So, last week another two hour marathon followed by a (relatively) short 90 minute one on Monday though my own tutor is doing yet another one this Wednesday (at 9pm!!) and there’s another next week on the day that the final TMA is due so I suspect that numbers attending that will be rather small.

Funnily enough, I’m now into a section of the course which feels relatively easy after the slog that the last few months have been. That’s largely down to it being stuff that was covered very well in the residential in 2012 which not so many people doing the course now had the opportunity to go on. It just goes to show that the residentials really were worthwhile and it’s a shame that 2012 was their final year.

On other fronts, I’ve been I’ve been considering what to do over the coming year. At the moment, the best option seems to be to do Empires (A326) which would bring my points total up to around 280 and take me over 60 points at level 3 i.e. I would be able to claim an open degree that would use up all the points from my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree. To make it all unique points, I’d likely add Planetary Science & the Search for Life (S283) in the following year or maybe the next depending on what I do after the Life Science degree.

For 2015/15 I’d really like to get going on the biology masters and I’ve been looking around for options on that front. So far, my favourite is the Molecular Biology degree at Queen’s but I’ve not worked out a way of fitting that in with work yet. Second choice is the Molecular Biology degree at Staffordshire which is distance learning but with two residentials. In third place is the Structural Molecular Biology degree at Birkbeck which is online only and that’s really putting me off it but otherwise it looks quite good.

Things are not looking too good for the Open University at the moment.

The changes in the financing of higher education in England have hit it hard. Gone are many of the possibilities that they had to subsidise courses and with that the numerous named science degrees, the popular science summer schools, the lovely books and the face to face tutorials. Instead we will, from 2015, have only the Natural Sciences degree, the last science summer school ran in 2012, as courses go online the printed books are disappearing and most courses have only online tutorials these days.

Associated with those changes are restrictions on the degrees that mean that the very popular 10 point science courses are on their way out and the various 15 and 20 point courses will be gone by 2017. Some, but far from all, of the 10 and 15 pointers are reappearing as packaged 30 pointers but the freedom of choice is gone as is the sampler aspect of the 10 and 15 point courses.

At the other end, i.e. level 3, courses seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate in some faculties with others finding that some quite difficult 30 point courses are packaged into 60 pointers, again limiting choice somewhat.

An article by one of the OU staff in the recent edition of The Biologist tried to point out all the plus points of doing lab work online but even he started off by saying that you don’t get the distinctive character of working in a lab – from the smells, the experiments that are awful to do, the experiments that don’t work and even the bits that nobody likes to do i.e. the cleaning up. Tellingly he also mentioned the need to educate employers about how much virtual experiments are like the real thing. Sorry, but they aren’t – in real life, people need to be able to do real experiments.

For many people the choice after level 3 was to do a masters with the OU but that’s no longer the case. The very popular psychology masters disappeared several years ago but for many the first thought is to look outside the OU which didn’t seem the first option even quite recently. Mind you, that isn’t entirely the fault of the OU – it’s that there is much more choice around these days.

Add it all up and there seems to have been quite a drop in enrolment of late. Whether that will continue, we don’t know for sure at the moment but the signs seem to point that way.

The problems that I have with chemistry in general is that it takes me ages to do the TMAs and that I generally have no idea at all what kind of mark I’m going to get either.

It’s different for other subjects – in most cases my in-exam estimate of my mark is generally within about 5% of the actual mark. In the extreme cases for chemistry, the actual exam mark has been as much as 15% out (fortunately higher in both cases). But whether the actual result is higher or lower than the estimate, it’s a bit disturbing that there’s so much variation from my predictions.

The course seems to be getting a touch more intense as the finish line is approaching. That seems to be down to a combination of two things mainly: 1) the tutorials are getting longer and closer together and 2) the TMAs are larger than the earlier ones. Also increasing the intensity is that the tutorial relevant to the TMA is only a matter of days before the TMA is due which reduces the amount of time available to do them somewhat.

Overall, the course content is quite similar in concept to that of S377 in that it’s a seemingly endless list of methods that don’t have a whole lot of connection between them but which seem to be coming together as the end of the course approaches. Hopefully, my understanding will also come together as the finish line approaches too.