Foreign Perspectives

The Open University is generally quite far ahead of the game when it comes to producing software to go along with its courses. Snag is, that those courses generally run for around 10 years and that’s a very long time indeed in software. The net effect of that is that it’s not quite so easy to just plonk in the DVDs and CDs that come with your course. However, it is possible, so here’s how….

Method one: for Linux and Mac

Almost all older OU software assumes that you have a Windows computer and generally speaking a Windows XP computer. However, you don’t need to have one.

1. Browse the CD/DVD and check if there is a setup.exe file or an index.html file.

2. If it’s an index.html file then you can probably just open it and carry on. If it’s a setup file, then you should install Wine (either from www.winehq.org, or from the Linux repositories); there’s no charge for the software.

3. Once you’ve installed Wine, double-click on the setup.exe file (for Linux, you will need to set the file permissions to allow execution).

If that doesn’t work, see method two.

Method two: for Linux, Mac and Windows 64 bit

This usually applies to older OU software and affects Windows 64bit systems in some cases too.

1. Install VirtualBox (from www.virtualbox.org or the Linux repositories); there’s no charge for the software.

2. Register at www.DreamSpark.com and then download Windows 2003 (you could download Windows 2008, but that’s too modern for some OU software). This gets you two files: en_win_srv_2003_r2_standard_with_sp2_cd1_X13-04790.iso and one with “cd2” in place of “cd1”.

3. Start VirtualBox and set it up for Windows. This will bring up a screen titled “Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager”. Click on “New” (top left icon on my screen), click on next and it should ask you for a machine name: it’s best to name it something like Windows2003. Also select the operating system (ie Microsoft Windows) and version (Windows 2003). Click next and it asked for the base memory size. For Windows 2003, 1mb is more than enough. Note: the size set here can’t be more than half of the memory in your computer. Next takes you to the question about the hard disk. This is the hard disk of your new VirtualBox/Windows machine, not your own computer! The default size of 20gb is more than enough for OU stuff – don’t worry too much about that size as it only expands to 20gb as you use it. Couple more nexts and you should get back to the original VirtualBox screen as at step one, with “Windows2003 powered off” or “Windows2008 powered off” listed.

4. Install Windows… Select Windows2003 then click on “Settings”. Click on Storage and you’ll see a CD icon saying “empty” beside it. Over to the right of that there is a CD icon underneath the heading “attributes”, click on that then “choose virtual CD/DVD drive” and browse to the first “.iso” file as per step one. Click on OK and you’re back to the first VirtualBox screen. Double click on your Windows2003 and it will start to install the software. For Windows2003 then you’ll need to select the second .iso file when prompted to insert the second CD. You’ve the various Windows settings to go through along the way but they’re just things like the time, date, and keyboard.

5. In parallel with step 4, you can copy the various course CDs/DVDs onto your computer as .iso files. On Linux, Brasero works well, for Mac you can use Burn (http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html) but in both cases there are loads of alternatives.

6. Once all that’s done (and it’s not nearly so complicated in practice as it might sound!), you just double-click on Windows2003 to start up the windows machine. You’ll need to attach the .iso files as required, which you do by clicking Devices, CD/DVD Devices, Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file when you’re running Windows.

The course books for S205 arrived on Thursday which is usually pretty much a non-event for me as I generally work from the PDF copies of them.

However, the seven DVDs that came with the books gave some pause for thought. Books for courses aren’t so bad in that the course team producing them can see how much of a page-count they’re expecting their students to work through. DVDs are a completely different matter and sometimes course teams seem to ignore the amount of material that is contained on DVDs. After all, for them, it’s easy to plonk on a bit more. Anyway, for S205 they’ve pretty much admitted to doing just that as they’ve included a whole range of videos and animations from previous courses essentially for our interest. Whether the time will be available to actually watch them all is quite another matter of course.

The website opened this morning and has what seems like another DVD full of stuff for download. Certainly it was getting on for an hour to go through the sheer number of files for download. I’ve made a start on installing what’s quite a wide range of software that comes with this course. As with S204, it needs Windows so I’ve fired up VirtualBox for that yet again.

Handily enough, they have pulled out the summaries for the books which is what I normally do as step one of revision for a course. They’ve not only included a specimen exam paper but a second real one with answers: a nice touch and something that other courses should do.

Most worrying is the October 27th date for the first assignment, just two weeks after the S204 exam. I’ve had a look at it this morning and it doesn’t seem too bad and seems to only need a couple of diagrams (they always eat up the time) so hopefully it won’t take too long to do.

The first “hello” comments are on the chat forum and already several people have owned up to finished off S204 at the moment which I suppose is what one would expect as there’s a lot of commonality between biology and chemistry.

Anyway, ’tis back to S204 now as I want to complete the first pass through all the material by the end of the week. Boy is the revision time for it going fast!

The biggest problem with S204 isn’t the difficulty of the course but rather the sheer volume of material within it. For a start there’s the 1925 pages of course texts and 250-odd pages of study guide. Add to that there’s a whole heap of stuff on the two DVDs ranging from videos, through a massive living organism database to several computer based activities. Even my revision notes are currently sitting at 80 pages worth!

A consequence of this is that selecting what you’ll revise is essential. To that end the course team identify a number of sections of one of the books that won’t be examined which knocks over 100 pages off and is more helpful than that might appear as they’re among the most complex of chapters. Additionally they identify core and advanced chapters in the second half of the course: you select two from animals, microbes and plants to specialise in. That’s not nearly so useful as whilst the “advanced” chapters amount to around another 100 pages or so, they only count for 12% of the exam marks ie it’s probably not worth bothering about any of the advanced chapters at all if you’re pushed for time. Finally, they identify the five chapters from which the essay question will be taken (thus you only need to revise one or perhaps two of those). That however still leaves a massive amount of course to revise.

My current strategy is to go through my notes, leafing through the corresponding books in parallel. Whilst doing that I’m adding in any key diagrams that I come across and going through the essay chapters in much more detail to beef up my notes on those. That’s taking a surprising amount of time and looks like it could require three days or perhaps four per book so I’m going to need to speed that up a bit as there ain’t that many days left before the exam.

Finally, there’s all the exam tips things that accumulate and particularly so as we didn’t get the final in-person tutorial so the tutor has really piled them up for us as compensation for missing that. They look like they won’t require so much brain power so I should be able to slot them in over the next three weeks alongside looking at the past papers.

Whereas with the astronomy the other year many of the experiments were optional, in the biology course the two experiments need to be written up as part of two seperate assignments.

Thus, a week is alloted to each one. Or, rather since this is S204, they are crammed in on top of everything else. The summer period is particularly bad for this course with three major asignments due over around four weeks, plus the one for the related summer school. Hence, of course, just about everyone is faling behind with the course and a number are dropping out, even at this late date.

I’m nearly a week late with the experiment courtesy in part of a last minute hitch which has hit several other people too. If there had been time to do some prior research it would have been obvious that varying the pH wasn’t going to be viable but time is something that is just not available on this course, thus another delay is added at the worst time.

The final assignment is pretty much a mini exam in format. Well, I say mini but I’m sure that it will take rather longer than the three hours of the exam itself, having glanced at it yesterday. Typically for this course, there seems to have been no thought put into considering the workload of the students at this point.

Revision for the exam needs to start soon too as even the basic notes that I have run to over 80 pages now.

The summer turned out to be surprisingly busy, albeit mostly not with the holiday things that we were expecting to fill it with.

At the off was my summer school in the first week of July. The write-up for that took an awful lot longer than expected which in turn knocked a number of things back. I finally managed to get that off last week which means that right now I’m in the midst of doing .the assignment for the main biology course, a week late, and then it’ll be straight on to the final assignment for that course.

The little guys decided against the football camp in the end, although more by default than anything else in that we couldn’t track down the contact details of the one that they liked last year and they weren’t that fired up about the alternative that we had available.

We’d expected that once we got Mum in to the residential home that the work involved with that would reduce. Well, the direct running around looking for a place has gone down alright but the amount of admin associated with it has gone up somewhat. The social services people seem to be of the view that we are working on that full-time and expect responses to their demands no later than the end of the week which, in almost all cases, has proved to be an impossibility. Quite how they expect some things to be done when the people I need to contact are on holiday is beyond me.

The headmaster, Mr Hutchinson, of the school died after an accident in his home over the summer which has made the start to the school year somewhat subdued as he was always racing around the playground. Racing around everywhere in fact as he never seemed to sit down. You’re probably thinking that it meant that he had no time for anyone but actually he always found a few minutes to chat with any child, parent or teacher who came up to him; I’ll miss our little chats. The school kicked off with two half-days so this is the first full-day that the kids are in with both of them coming out at the same time rather than having John finishing an hour earlier than James this year which is much handier.

Wendy was busy with assignments during the summer and is getting going on the final assignment for the current course which is just as well as the materials for the next one arrived yesterday. It’s a medical history course and there looks to be an awful lot of reading to be done over the year.