Foreign Perspectives

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.

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.