Foreign Perspectives

Now that I’ve sort-of decided on what courses I’ll be doing over the next couple of years it’s more or less a matter of waiting ’til the registration period opens and signing up.

Of course, it’s not quite as perfect as that given the OU change the courses on offer each year so if you’ve a reasonable list of courses you’d like to do chances are that there will be at least one change in the running order each year. Complicating things even more is that they’re gradually moving from a February to October cycle to an October to June one which means that if you’re planning more than a year or two in advance, you’re going to have to make some changes. This year there’s also the matter of them doing away with the named science degrees so me and many others are rethinking the sequence of courses that they’re doing with a view to hitting their named degree while it’s still available.

Thus far, I’ve been lucky this year in that there’s been no change in The physical world (S207) which starts as planned in October. However, there is the option for me to accelerate my progress with the physics degree my slotting in Using mathematics (MST121) next January. That would mean that I’d be overlapping one of the major courses (S207) with what should be the relatively easy (for me) MST121. That does beg the question: why do MST121 at all if it’s going to be so easy? Well, thanks to the regulations for the physics degree I need to either do that or something like the introductory science course (looks interesting but gives me 30 points more than I need) or a technology course (also interesting). In principle, MST121 seems to be the most useful of the trio of options.

It’s usually not necessary to enrol incredibly early for the OU courses but given the number of people who admit to intending accelerating the progress on their science degrees I suspect it could be prudent to enrol somewhat earlier than usual this year. That will certainly be the case for the summer schools which are in their last run in 2011 though enrolment for them doesn’t open ’til mid-October.