Foreign Perspectives

In theory it’s easy to calculate the amount of time that you need to set aside to do an OU course. On the face of it the only complication is that you need to do one course to let you estimate the scaling factor to apply to their estimates. Thus they quote 16 hours a week for a 60 point course and 8 for a 30 point course; my normal scaling factor is 1/2 so that generally makes it more like 6 hours for a 16 pointer and around 3 for a 30 pointer.

You might think that they’d quote around 3 hours a week for a 15 pointer but they’re run over a shorter time so generally it’s around 8 hours that they quote and sometimes as much as 11. Likewise, not all 30 point courses run over 9 months these days: those run over 5 months quote 11 hours a week rather than 8.

What’s also noticeable is that for the more intense courses (i.e. those run over shorter periods) the scale factor to apply is different. Thus for A251 I found that it took more than my predicted 5 hours a week throughout and a whole lot more in the final week to do the ECA. Also, you’ll find that courses largely presented online can seem to take more time in that you have to be online quite often to do them and can’t do your own thing as is the case for most OU courses.

In times gone by the way to gauge the intensity of a course was simply to ask those who’d done it. With a bit of luck you’d find someone who’d done both a course you’d already done and one you were thinking of doing. Thus I know that S283 that I haven’t done yet will be quite a bit easier than S282 which I have done. Unfortunately, with the demise of FirstClass, this is becoming much more of a hit and miss affair and the option of searching for blogs describing courses doesn’t turn up a whole lot (although if you’re doing science, check out Julian’s blog which has blow by blow descriptions of all the courses he’s done).

As it stands right now, there’s very little to go on out there and it can be conflicting too. For instance S205 is described both as extremely difficult and as little beyond A-level. Having read through some of it, it does seem to be at the easier end of the scale but that might be down to me comparing it to S204. You certainly need to read the course descriptions more closely these days, have a look at the course materials in your regional centre, ask the students in your tutor group and try FirstClass too.

I have finally gotten around to completing this which “just” leaves the writing up to be done.

Home experiments used to be all the rage in the Open University science courses but they seem not to be so popular these days or at least not on such a widespread basis. That’s not to say they’re not around in significant numbers on some courses though: last years Astronomy (S282) course came with loads of them. For the biology course there are two experimental weeks although in reality it’s more like a couple of experimental days if the first one is anything to go by.

The problem of course is all the health and safety considerations that come to bear on these things nowadays. What’s particularly odd about the biology experiment is that step one is to acquire a chemical that is one of three components that are very popular with bomb makers: something that has caused some difficulty in purchasing said item for a number of students.

The potato experiment comes in three segments. In the first segment we’d to try a pilot experiment with our liquidised potato and hydrogen peroxide to select a suitable concentration of liquidised potato to use in the later experiments. All by itself that part took over an hour for me and I ended up having to repeat it as the catalase in the potato went off mid-way through the second experiment.

The second experiment takes even longer. Despite having got into the swing of it, that one ended up taking several hours which is where the problem in my first attempt lay as the catalase goes off in around three hours so having the mid-point falling at close to that time was asking for trouble. The objective of that one is to find the period when the catalase is working at its peak rate which almost always is going to fall in the first minute so it makes for a very boring 9 minutes for each of the five replicates that you’ve to run.

In the final experiment you get down to the meat of the experiment which is to show that the reaction rate is dependent on the concentration of the catalase which takes another couple of hours.

Add up all the experiment times and you’re looking at around six hours to complete this. And then you have to do some statistical work and write up the experiment.

As in last years SXR270 glucose assay, the problem with this experiment is that you need to do so many replicates that it gets to be very mechanical and boring which doesn’t seem right given that what you’re working on comes with some really interesting theory behind it.

We meet the potatoes again in August when we’ve to devise our own experiment. The devising of it is what needs most thought unless you have a commercial laboratory handy. Thus, things like examining the effect of different temperatures are complicated unless you choose 0C and whatever the room temperature is but even then it’s not so simple as the liquidised potato needs to be kept in the fridge ie you only really vary the temperature of the water you’re diluting it with. Comparing how it works in the light and dark would be nice to do but doesn’t seem practical and neither does varying the colour of the light. Varying the pH would also be nice to do and certainly possible but how would you measure the pH without laboratory equipment? You could even compare different ages of potato but that’s complicated in that you’d need to use the same variety of potato and you don’t know its age (unless you’ve grown it yourself…hmmm).

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.