Foreign Perspectives

The tutorials for S346 seem to be getting longer and longer as the course progresses.

Thanks to what seems to have been an overly difficult second assignment, the tutorial last week started off with going over a number of concepts that should have been quite familiar to those on the course. Well, they would have been quite familiar but one of the previous courses finished almost two years ago and the other one was, for me, just as long ago. All, thanks, of course, to the Open University withdrawing courses rather quickly and people having to do their courses in often quite peculiar sequences.

Anyway, that meant that a tutorial that should have lasted about an hour had over an hour of “revision” followed by another hour and a half covering what it was intended to cover. The students attending became more and more quiet as the session went on and whether any of those watching live took any of the final chunk in seems debateable. Even watching the recording was a test of endurance and I needed to break it up into several sessions.

I suspect that’s meant that a much larger number than usual are asking for more time to complete the third assignment. Still, at least there’s only one more after this before the final one for the course.

Oh, and there’s what seems likely to be yet another marathon session this evening!

Once I achieve the points for an open degree (all being well, late next year), it opens up the possibility of carrying on allocating interesting courses to it as I go along.

Sadly, the 10 pointer is a dying breed in the Open University these days but there are some interesting ones still around. Of those TM190, The Story of Maths, has been on my list for years but as I thought I was going to lose my 10 pointers I hadn’t thought about it for a while. Now that they’ll be safe within the open degree, I hope to do it on its final run this May.

I’m still not decided about the course for October though it’ll likely be either S276 Geology (on its final run) or S283 Planetary Science & the Search for Life (which would complete my Certificate in Astronomy & Planetary Science). I quite like S283 but S276 becomes a 60 pointer as from the following year which is more than I really want to do.

I’m planning on going to the postgrad open day at Queen’s later in the month which might throw everything up in the air again.

With the Open University changing the rules re their qualifications and dropping modules at a worrying rate, I find that my original plan of finishing off the life sciences degree this year then completing a chemistry degree aren’t really workable anymore.

The life sciences degree is fine as I’m on the final module (infectious disease) for that.

The chemistry option is a different matter as I’ve used most of the “chemistry” modules up in the life sciences degree and really only have ecology and an environmental module plus the final of the three proper chemistry modules available for that, none of which really fire me up. I was also planning on sweeping up all the remaining short modules that I’ve done over the years and which don’t fit in the new style qualifications.

However, it struck me the other day that I can pick up a non-honours degree instead which would let me use up all the short modules and basically bank all my modules for now, with the option of adding honours anytime up to 2019 if suitable modules turn up. To do that all I need is an additional 40 points which would be swept up by the planetary science module that I’ve been meaning to do and the final chemistry module which I wasn’t particularly intending to do.

The plus point of this is that it doesn’t affect the timetable for my possible masters as those modules run November to June and May to October so with the masters (if I go for it) starting in September/October there’d only be a month or so of an overlap with the chemistry module.

The first half of the Drug Design course was covering a lot of relatively familiar ground so I managed to get through that relatively quickly. It’s more of a slog at present as it’s going through endless chemistry methods with little apparent connection between them (much the same problem as with S377).

There’s one iCMA on the molecular modelling software which doesn’t count for the final mark and which is basically just there to give you a run through the features of the software. So far, each of the four TMAs seems quite light in terms of time required which is down to them being “fractional TMAs” ie overall they’re probably equivalent to three. The EMA is supposed to be more or less like just another TMA and isn’t released until three weeks before the course end date which is a bit of a nuisance as I’ll be in the midst of the infectious disease course by then.

Still, so far, so good.

If you read the comments before you sign up for S377, it sounds like an impossible course to do and one that just about everyone will fail.

Real stats tell a different story. Yes, it is slightly harder than most OU courses but only slightly going by the stats which show a drop out rate about 5% higher than average and a pass rate about 5% lower.

Mind you, you do need to be quite determined not to drop out as nothing makes much sense as you go through and it’s only at revision time that it all comes together. So, in my case the expected resit turned out not to be required by a very safe margin and I ended up with just shy of a distinction!

That’s caused a minor issue as it now appears that I may be able to improve my overall degree classification if I get the finger out with the final two modules.