Foreign Perspectives

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.

I still remember the day over 30 years back when I first went into the Bookshop at Queen’s with my Dad and we came out with a pile of books for my courses that we could barely carry between us.

Back in those days it was the only proper bookshop in Belfast and it carried books on every subject that you could imagine. Not just on the topics taught at Queen’s either as it had a range of normal books that was far wider than you’d have seen in any other bookshop around at the time. So, over the years I called in now and again despite the difficulties in parking nearby and I don’t think I ever left without purchasing something that I’d been looking for nor without buying something that I hadn’t been looking for but saw by chance.

It was always the kind of bookshop that browsing around meant that you came across something of interest. That’s something that you don’t get online as you tend to be shepherded into books similar to those you’ve already bought – with the Bookshop at Queen’s you could come across something totally different to anything you’d bought before yet totally fascinating despite that. Thus, for example, I have the brilliant little book Learning the Law which, despite it being a subject that I’ll probably never learn, is quite fascinating and there are many equally engrossing books in my bookcase just like that.

But today I made what will almost certainly be my last couple of purchases as the bookshop will be closing its doors permanently on Saturday. Sadly, they’d already packed up the masses of academic books and it was a couple of typically diverse purchases that I ended up choosing: The Celts and Collins Easy Learning Greek. Would I ever have bought them on Amazon? Well, no, because they’d a) not have turned up on any searches that I’d have been likely to use and b) as they’re outside my normal reading, they’d not have turned up on my suggestions either.

What finished it off seemed to be a combination of factors. That difficulty in parking is a lot worse now than it was 30 years ago for a start and with a major chain bookshop beside the city carparks I’d say that the casual browser largely relocated. Internet purchases are rife these days, of course, but thanks to the demise of the Net Book Agreement there’s also extensive discount which is probably more of an issue. Strangely, the prices of books or, rather, of academic books are much the same now as they were 30 years back which is in itself something of a problem as the mark-up percentage means that they’re less profitable than they used to be. The availability of lecture notes online is probably not a major factor as even 30 years back the lecturers handed out copies of notes for many courses for what was the relatively small fee of £5 or so. What could be a big issue is that students just don’t have as much free cash as they did 30 years ago: not only did we not have student fees back then but we received a grant of around £1000 or so each year (more if you lived in a flat) thus buying books means borrowing from the Bank of Mum & Dad.

It’s sad to see the bookshop go but I do hope that when times are better that it will be possible for it to rise again.

With the upcoming change to OU financing in England, there are debates going on in pretty much every OU forum about the implications these days.

Most of that debate centres around the Transitional Arrangement (TA) period from 2012 through to 2017 that applies to existing students in England (the changes don’t apply to OU students elsewhere in the UK nor to those overseas nor to postgraduate students).

The basic idea is that existing students will continue to pay the current fees up until 2017. However, the OU students are a very diverse bunch and there are loads of exceptions to the norm.

What happens if you’re studying towards two or more degrees at once? In other universities that would be very unusual but in the OU it’s quite common. Thus, many physics students will be working towards a maths degree, many biology students towards a chemistry degree, etc. At present, the ruling seems to be that you will only be able to study towards one degree at a time but in a number of cases that will mean that students would need to switch degrees during the year. In my own case for example, whilst I am currently only doing life sciences courses, in October I will be doing a chemistry course that runs to June and starting a psychology course in February. Thus from February to June I will be studying for both chemistry and psychology degrees and indeed on my current plans I will be doing one course from each degree right through to 2016 or 2017.

What happens if you graduate in 2012 and want to do a second degree? No problem apparently, so long as you begin the second degree prior to August 2012 and even then a single 10 point course in the second degree is enough to qualify you for the transitional arrangements. If you’re intending to start uni in 2013 or 2014, you could take advantage of this by enrolling in a 10 point course in early 2012, with a minimum of one 10 point course per year until you start your main course.

Since you can finish a degree in 2012 and then carry on, it’s bringing the issue of credit transfer to the fore for those who have an existing degree from elsewhere. Using that, a considerable number of people can graduate a year or two earlier than they were planning on and  I’ll be looking into that in more detail myself reasonably soon with a view to possibly completing a chemistry degree in 2014 alongside the biology one as it would appear that doing one course a year in advance of my current plans would make that possible. What it also means is sitting down and planning in some detail the course options between now and 2017 as it’s gotten very complicated.

One thing that it will also do is to make the postgraduate degrees more attractive. Financing for them is also being reviewed but it’s expected that the course fees won’t increase as much so it’s quite likely that they will be cheaper to do under the new arrangements than the undergraduate degrees will be. That doesn’t affect me directly as my plan had me starting the masters sometime between 2014 and 2017 anyway but it has meant that I’ve started looking at options for it much earlier than I would ordinarily have done.