Foreign Perspectives

When you’re starting out on your first degree that’s usually a fairly easy question for most people to answer. They’ve gotten themselves all fired up about a particular subject and are at least intending to follow that through to the end.

It’s different when you’re doing a degree part-time though. Sure, there are people who are all fired up about a particular subject and will follow that through to the end. But there are a lot of others who are fired up about a whole range of courses or are looking upon it as life-long education. For that group, it’s not always obvious what degree they are doing at any one time as it’s quite easy to flick from one to another as you carry along.

Take me for instance. Since the start of last year I’ve done courses in biology (5), physics (3), computer science (2) and history (1) which is fine as I’m broadly aiming to complete a life sciences degree by 2014. However, the pattern for next year is almost certainly going to be completely different. Moreover, when you tot up the points totals it’s currently looking like my “miscellaneous” degree will be completed first and that’s currently a very varied degree indeed with contributions from mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine and history.

Actually, apart from life sciences, I don’t really think of myself as doing a degree at all but rather a whole series of really interesting courses. For a first degree that would probably be a recipe for disaster on the CV but for me the degree is just a side-effect and not an end in itself.

Thanks to the massive amount of work that the final course assessment of the World Archaeology course entailed, I recently rediscovered the benefits of studying in the local library. Quite why it should be so, I don’t know, but I find that I get through a considerably greater amount of work in the library than elsewhere.

It’s not that I use the library resources (ie the books) whilst in the library either. Most of the time I take along the little laptop with the course text and, if I’m working on an assignment, sometimes the baby computer as well. So, how come with exactly the same kit at home or wherever, I don’t get the same amount of work done? I’m not really sure but maybe it’s something to do with the combination of actually sitting up at a desk together with being somewhere that I’ve come to associate with studying. Whatever it is, I get much more done in an hour there than I do in several elsewhere.

The archaeology course is out of the way now and the concentration has moved on to finishing the microbes course, the latest client-side assignment and the biology reading and notes. This morning ended up being very much a biology notes session during which I caught up on the biology notes (a once a month activity as I complete each book). Actually, I’m a bit ahead with the notes so I’ve had a bit of a preview of what’s coming up in biology.

The problem with the biology course is that there’s just so much of it. Moreover, it seems like almost every topic is an overview of the next topic lately. Thus we’ve gone from looking at the diversity of life in the first book, then in more detail on life in the second to highlight the uniformity of life and in the third book it’s picking apart the components of life from cells, through the components within the cells to, so far, how the various membranes work. Real-life useful topic from yesterday was how come bananas go off in the fridge when the microbe activity slows down in the cold: it’s because their cell membranes break down thus letting in the enzymes that cause the over-ripening.

Interestingly, I find that I make more progress with the biology when I read the real book than when I read it on either the reader or computer. That seems to be down to the writing style used which requires more referring to adjacent pages. Moving to reading the actual book has made my 10 pages a day target much more easily attainable.

Just arrived is The Greatest Benefit to Mankind which is one of the texts for the history of medicine course that me and Wendy have pencilled in for this October. At over 700 pages of text it’s something of a chunky book but seems quite readable. I’m hoping to get a reasonable way into that before the end of July when I’ll need to make my decision about the course.

The registration for the Open University October start courses opens in mid-March so it’s time to start thinking in more detail about the courses to be done in the coming year.

Ordinarily, it would be a relatively simple choice for me as I’m plugging away with the Life Sciences degree so next up would be either of the February start courses S320 Infectious disease (or, rather, the new edition of it) or S377 Molecular and cell biology (on its penultimate run). Indeed, one or other of those is currently in my “definite” list for Feb 2012 along with the residential SXR376 Molecular basis of human disease.

However, for work reasons it looks like I should really be doing M255 Object-oriented programming with Java starting in October. Which creates a slight problem as a) it’s on its penultimate run (never good for an IT course) and b) I could do with doing something in the line of Life Sciences so that I hit 360 points by 2014 when that qualification ends. Point a is particularly bad as I want to do something in the object-oriented programming as a knowledge update so it doesn’t seem like a good plan to do a course that’s been replaced the following year: in practical terms the existing M255 is around 8 or 9 years out of date.

On the life sciences front, S205 The molecular world is something I’d like to do and is something that would help S377 no end. However, it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll be doing S377 in February which means that I may as well do S205 later. I’d also like to get back into the psychology with DSE212 in October which would mean I could possibly finish the psychology degree in 2015 more or less alongside the life sciences one although it would mean two residentials in 2012. And then there’s A218 Medicine and society in Europe which counts towards life sciences and which is one of those seriously interesting courses that I’d like to do at some point. Finally, there’s SDK228 The science of the mind: investigating mental health which counts as life sciences but, oddly, not as psychology.

I don’t know what to do!

I’ve nearly talked myself out of M255 as it seems too dated. S205 seems to be out for now as I wouldn’t be far enough along with it prior to starting S377. DSE212 is sort-of out as I think the workload in combination with S377 would be a bit much and there’s the two residentials to consider too. SDK228 looks a bit too social-sciencey for me. Which leaves A218. For now anyway.

In the days of First Class (the OU forum system, now all but defunct) there were forums for the various subjects and for the varied interests of the OU students as well. However, one forum stood head and shoulders above all others as the place to go to ask about just about any course you could imagine: the 120 pointers forum.

Although it was intended only for those doing the Open University courses at the full-time rate of 120 points per year, that group had collectively done so many courses that it was the place to ask about a very wide variety of courses. The only problem was in peeking in, it was a very addictive forum. Course suggestions came from all over the OU spectrum ranging from arts to sciences. Interestingly, you quite often saw people doing a very peculiar mix of subjects indeed and it was the place to look for those courses which were unexpectedly interesting to a wide range of people but which you’d not normally have heard about. Courses like the hard to place A251 World Archaeology (is it classics or history?), AA318 20th century art (apparently totally fascinating), along with missives from those heading off for doctorates and doing a totally mad number of courses as well.

Then there were the study tips which I’d been hoping to pinch and insert here but, sadly, FC is closing and that thread has been deleted a few months ago. The last big thing was the choice of “ideal” ebook reader (Sony or iPad) but there were many other things besides.

In time, it may be resurrected in the new-look forums but many more of them are closed these days so no chance of popping into one and asking what a course is really like before you sign up for it. In the meantime though there’s the beginnings of the 120 pointer facebook group which is slowly collecting the FC participants.

Despite ups and downs during the course, the answer is definitely a “yes”.

There’s certainly an awful lot of reading to be done for it. To say that the course text is 800 pages long is misleading as you “only” read about half of it but you also read a lot of material outside the text so count on basically reading that volume of paper. Note too that it’s about A4 size, two up and with a small font: together that means that it’s got a word count similar to that of about four normal OU texts and you’re reading all that over around 5 months. Moreover, it’s source material and not in the, generally, easy-read style of the OU texts ie it will take you longer to read than the corresponding amount of reading from an OU text.

The course has a rather boring start with topics around just what archaeology actually is but after you struggle though that (the first two weeks or so) it’s into the beginnings of agriculture. Next up is the formation of cities, then empires and finally a rag-bag of topics including rock-art, slavery and the dispersal of the Pacific peoples.

You’ve a TMA on each of the first three topics with the ECA offering a choice albeit both choices requiring you to use examples from three of the four blocks. Worth noting is that you’ve an assignment every four weeks. With a course start date of early November that means an assignment at the end of November, December and January with the ECA/EMA due mid-March. Although it’s a 30 pointer, the course runs at 60 point speed and more like 90 points at times given the volume of reading to be done.

Overall, it’s a course that doesn’t hang around. There’s just enough time to get a flavour of one of the topics before you move on. Or rather, it seems like you only get a flavour of each: during the ECA/EMA you’ll find out that you’ve actually got quite a good grasp of the subject.

It’s a course that I’ll genuinely miss doing. Hopefully I’ll find that the medieval to modern history and empires courses will have a similar feel to them.