Foreign Perspectives

With university education fees soaring in England, it’s fortunate that a number of alternatives are appearing on the scene.

For a number of years now, major universities (mainly American) have offered a range of free courses through various means. For example, Yale’s Open Yale offering includes a few dozen courses from a range of faculties in the form of videos of the courses along with book lists, exam papers, etc. You could follow the courses completely pretty much as though you were there, albeit without the feedback from the professor and the interaction with the students. That’s typical of first-generation online offerings: you’re pretty much on your own. Also, without any kind of assessment, working through them isn’t going to count for anything on, for example a CV. That does not mean that they’re useless because they can be very useful indeed eg to give you a taster of a subject or to provide more background.

One step up from that is OpenLearn from the Open University. That’s also been running for a number of years but is quite different from the Yale offering. This is from a distance learning university and offers extracts from a wide range of their courses. You can either do these on your own or register to access forums relating to the course segments on offer. Again there are videos, texts, etc. but the downside is that these are course segments rather than complete courses; typically you’ll get a chapter from a short course or a couple of chapters from a longer one. Again, the lack of assessment brings with it the same problems as the first-generation of these courses.

Seriously upping the ante are EdX and Coursera. These offer a range of free short courses, with assessment and even certificates of achievement at the end from a range of major league universities. Sounds perfect, but the certificates don’t count towards a university qualification. That said, these are far from worthless if the comments are anything to go by and it’s likely that there would be some recognition of the work undertaken where it was applicable.

At present, none of the free alternatives discussed here offers a full-scale university education accompanied by the formal recognition of that, but that time can’t be overly far off. The main issue at present is that the courses on offer are almost entirely first year courses with little or no pre-requisites. That’s good in that you can dive straight into, say, a history of the American revolution but it’s bad in that they’re nearly all introductory. Having said that, it’s early days with all of these and with the number of students involved in EdX it seems quite likely that second and third year courses will eventually emerge.

Who knows, perhaps four or five years from now, someone, somewhere will have amassed the equivalent of a full-scale university degree with all the certificates to prove it along the way. Their only problem then might be that it would be a degree with units from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, London, etc. and not enough courses from any one of those to justify them graduating that first student to do it, which wouldn’t seem quite right

Started way back in the early 1970s, the OU science summer schools have been a fixture of life for generations of students. The preparatory materials arrived shortly after Easter with the usual flurry of activity working through the preparatory material, watching the associated videos and organising the transport to and from the school.

Sadly, that’s all finished now. The final science summer schools finished in August and tomorrow the assignments for the schools are due in Milton Keynes.

Although there was quite a bit of work for me to do the assignments for the two summer schools this year, I’m missing it already. For the biology school, I really got a handle on what we’d been doing in Nottingham as I worked through the assignment and was suitably impressed by what we’d done during the week. With the chemistry school, there didn’t seem to even be a minute to sit down and think about what we were doing during the week but I’m really impressed to have made a few drops of the female sugarbeet moth pheromone all by myself (you don’t work in a group in the chemistry school): not a lot you might think but it would take a whole lot of moths a long time to make even that much.

Next up for me is going to be S347 Metals & Life which starts a week after the psychology exam in October.

This morning’s lab session was aimed at tidying up the lab for the session starting tomorrow along with final work on the presentations. I’d gotten up at 6.30am to work on mine which produced a slide of the overall process: the first time I’d been able to see what I was actually doing as the last couple of days we were just following one step after another with no clear view of where we were going.

The IR analysis last night were consistent with the reagents, solvents and even the product I was aiming for. There wasn’t enough time to complete the NMR but the alkene was the Z isomer alright so, hopefully, when I get a chance to work through the various couplings, integrations and GC they’ll also be consistent with that.

Presentations began around 11am and ran for a little over an hour (we were broken up into four groups). Thankfully nothing like the intensity of the biology one from last week but then that’s as expected as we were doing individual rather than group presentations. That said, some of the questions were quite searching and the people who’d done S346 were on much firmer ground than the rest of us.

Finally, there was the usual closing down session before lunch and the departures.

For me it was off on the bus (remarkably useful in York), to the train station for the Pennine Express to Manchester. With the early start I was exhausted and welcomed the two hour journey as a bit of a wind-down before the flight to Belfast.

I’d have loved to be looking forward to another chemistry residential next year but sadly this year is the final one for such things with the OU. That’s sad all round but particularly so for chemistry as the virtual experiments are so vastly different from the real thing in chemistry. With virtual experiments, you don’t get the feel for how long some processes take, how awkward some chemicals are to work with nor indeed do you have to work out how to get the sticky mess cleaned up.

Somehow we’ve reached the final day in the lab. This is when a lot of people realise that we should have been a bit more organised earlier in the week and be much further on than we are right now.

As we’ve moved through the steps in the preparation, the quantities and yields have dropped somewhat. The 100% return from the phosphonium salt was the best, and by the third second stage of the main line of the experiment I’m down to 27%. Not disastrously bad by itself but since the final stage of the experiment in the afternoon has a much, much lower yield I eventually found myself with just enough product to put through the IR and GC and put everything left into the NMR with fingers crossed that it was enough.

In practice a number of people didn’t manage to complete the final stage and some others ended up with nothing so having enough to test was a plus point. As one of my fellow students pointed out, it would have taken the moths a serious amount of time to produce even that amount.

The evening session was to allow us to prepare our presentations but after a long couple of days the numbers dropped quite quickly and I ended up with only a draft of the first slide and the IR analysis of the second so it’ll be an early start to get the presentation done in the morning. To give me a bit more time with that, I packed the case tonight.

Everyone was much more organised today and acquired the various items quite early on so there were quite so many delays in trying to track down stuff for each stage of the experiment. Just as well, since as the morning progressed those on option A or B were once more working on the same methods albeit with the option A people slightly ahead of the game as the overall process was quicker.

My set-up started to look more like a “proper” chemistry experiment as the clear liquids and white solids were replaced with a range of different coloured ones culminated in a thick black oily gunge in my case. No more of the four hour breaks today and instead it was fairly constant activity.

No tutorials tonight as it was the SXR344 pub crawl around assorted York bars with the last stragglers returning well after 1am.