Foreign Perspectives

This is the first course where I’ve had an iCMA to do. In principle they’re the same as CMAs but, if the first one is anything to go by, they’re much shorter (only four questions), you have to do them whilst you’re online and you can’t print them out to mull over.

Shorter is certainly good. There are five iCMAs and an EMA for this course which looked like quite a lot of work. In practice it took about 10 minutes to do this one so hopefully the remaining four will be of a similar length and be equally easy to fit in.

Doing them online is a bit of a pain as is the inability to print them off (or at least to do so easily). That ties you to the computer while you’re doing the questions although you don’t have to do them all at once. Not being able to print them off is probably the biggest nuisance though as you’ve no record of what you’ve put in unless you  type them all out separately (which I’ve done).

The format is not fantastic this time around as all four are multi-part questions of various types. For instance, this time around two were “select one or more of”, one was “complete the following sentences” and the final one was “select two options”. One answer seemed decidedly iffy (definitely wrong in fact) but there’s no “unsound question” option on the iCMA.

Anyway, that leaves the road clear for the chemistry TMA which I will be starting on during the week.

I’m doing this one basically to ease myself back into the psychology and a brief leaf through the DVD last week showed up a whole bunch of relatively familiar terminology.

This is one of the new-style online tutoring courses which in principle should be excellent but, so far, they don’t seem to have hit on a totally successful formula for them. The problem is basically that as the tutoring is done in a course-wide group, they need everyone to be moving along at roughly the same speed which for SK124 means that the various assignments are only released three weeks ahead of the due date. Unlike the TT courses, where the course materials were released three weeks in advance, you could actually finish working through all of the course material but that would mean that you’d be doing the assignments weeks or possibly months after you’d covered the relevant material which would make them a little harder.

As it’s a 15 pointer spread over 20 weeks it looks like the course will proceed at a relatively sedate pace. There’s quite a lot of DVD based material but as a rough guide it looks like a chapter a fortnight rather than the usual chapter a week rate for OU courses. The first chapter is largely introductory but as I completed it in a couple of hours it looks like the course won’t eat up a lot of time.

So what is autism anyway? Well, it’s a range of conditions that exhibit in the form of difficulties in communication, varying degrees of inflexibility eg needing things to remain the same and/or repetitive actions, and social isolation. Although there seems to be a big genetic component, there also seems to be an aspect of environmental factors which may trigger it (though nobody knows what they are yet).

The basic problem that Greece seems to have is that it has never really properly adjusted from the days when it could devalue the Dracma every couple of years.

In such an environment, you don’t really need to worry too much about creating a real economy as you can always pull in more tourists by reducing the value of your currency every now and again. Since that hasn’t been an option for ten years, what they did instead was to borrow more and more money to balance the books until they reached the point when they could borrow no more.

The problem now is that they have no economy to generate the money required to repay all those loans and neither can they devalue to reduce the value of the loans. Instead, what’s going to happen is that they will have to have those loans renegotiated to reduce their value directly. Snag is that this just pushes the refinancing out to the organisations which provided the loans who in turn need to be refinanced. The bigger problem is the sheer scale of the loans which, built up over ten years, amount to a significant proportion of Germany’s GDP. Proposals to privatise the debt just relocate the problem.

The current refinancing is essentially just lending more money to allow them to make the debt repayments without fully recognising that the capital needs to be repaid too. That’s, naturally, where the problems are going to mount up.

And, of course, that’s just Greece with Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland not too far behind them.

Despite downing tools with everything except preparation for the biology exam for the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to remain broadly on schedule with the chemistry reading so far.

Unfortunately, there’s quite a lot of stuff to be done on the DVD as well and some of that is required for the first assignment due at the end of next week so I’ll need to get going on that. What has been useful is to have read over the first couple of course books earlier in the year so at least the reading is quite easy to do the second time around.

That bit of easier going is just as well as I’ve still not come down from the stress of the biology exam yet. I’ve never done anything like as much revision for an exam as I did for that one yet still there were questions that I couldn’t do as it was an exam which pretty much required you to know the entire course in quite a bit of detail which isn’t an overly realistic proposition.

This morning saw the final S204 exam as it’s being replaced by S294 from next year plus another course a year or two later.

As usual the two short answer questions were all over the place requiring quite a comprehensive knowledge of the course contents to be able to fully answer 12 from the 18 on offer. Individually each of them seemed relatively easy but this being the section of the exam that required you to show you’d a good overall grasp of the course, you needed pretty detailed knowledge for a fair number of them. So, yes, they were easy but only if you had put an awful lot of time into learning the course content.

The three data handling questions didn’t require a great deal of specific biological knowledge and seemed fairly easy to do. That said, a broad knowledge of the course content obviously helped here.

I suspect that some people may have come unstuck on the essay questions. Some were fairly broad but there seemed to be a lot of detail required for some of them too.

Overall, on my pessimistic estimate I seem to be on a fairly safe pass so not a bad exam in the end.