Foreign Perspectives

Signals & Perception was a really interesting course but, for me, it wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been as I ended up having to slot it in between a whole lot of other stuff which made it feel like a number of separate courses as it was very much a stop-go experience for me courtesy of me ending up with a little too many separate courses during the year.

It wasn’t meant to be that way but starting a new job in April was something that I’d not allowed for and in particular I’d not allowed for it roughly equating to another 60 point course. Net effect was that April to October was a bit of a nightmare time-wise for everything (not counting real life either!). Thankfully, the exam yesterday marks the end of that period and I notionally have a week off before the next course starts and it’s only a 20 pointer too.

Although an overly busy time, it’s been a really interesting roller-coaster of a year. Last October saw me starting S205, the main chemistry course, with a short autism course (SK124) kicking in a month later. SD329 weighed in in February and was going fine ’til the job offer came through in March. Early June disappeared in preparation for the S205 exam and the second half of June went with the pre-course assignments for the biology (SXR376) and chemistry (SXR344) summer schools which took place in the first couple of weeks of July. Coming back from them, it was straight into the assignment for SD329 before spending most of August on the assignments for the summer schools. In September it was catch-up with SD329 and then the final assignment for it before diving into revision for the exam. Not a recommended approach but, passes permitting, it means that I’m over the hump of the degree and have only two 30 point courses and a 10 pointer to complete it by 2014.

I was a bit brain-dead last night but managed to have a first proper look at what’s coming up in the Metals & Life (S347) course. First glance, it appeared like a lot of reading but it’s about 60 pages over three weeks, not the one week that I’d thought initially. Also, it seems to be run like a biology course which dives into some chemistry along the way so, hopefully, not too bad. I’m not overly keen on having the exam at the end of April though as that’ll be a couple of months into S377 which has a bit of a reputation of being very difficult.

Not to be forgotten is some preparatory reading for S377 which needs done between now and Christmas. That’s around 250 pages from S204 which we didn’t need to cover during S204 itself but which is required reading for S377.

I thought that the SD329 exam wasn’t too bad. With interdisciplinary courses, there’s what appears to be a totally frightening amount of information of differing types to go over and starting the revision is scary. Once I got well into it, things seemed to come together though and I ended up with 5 or 6 quite good answers out of the 8 short questions and only one pretty poor one. For the longer questions I think I’ve two fairly good ones and one reasonable out of the three. More than enough to pass I think but the overall result could be anywhere from 50 to 70 as I was dreadful at estimating my assignment marks during the course.

It’s been a bit hectic over the past few weeks as I reach the finishing line with SD329.

The final TMA didn’t turn out to be so bad in the end although I don’t think that having a TMA completion date less than two weeks before the exam was a particularly good idea.

I started the revision a few weeks ago but with the TMA needing done too,  there wasn’t much more than the revision preparation actually done over the time. I started the revision properly during the week and, so far, it doesn’t seem too bad on the first proper run through.

The course itself was as fascinating as billed. It’s an interdisciplinary course and the mix of biology, chemistry, physics and psychology changed quite markedly between the various components of the course. For instance, with vision there was quite a lot of physics, with proprioception the emphasis was more psychological, taste & small were mainly chemical and overall there was a lot of biology.

Our final tutorial is later this morning which also seems rather late for an exam tutorial as there’s now little  more than a week before the exam but with the due date of the final TMA being earlier in the week, I guess the final tutorial couldn’t have been much earlier.

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.