Foreign Perspectives

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!