Description from the Open University website S155
This online course provides an innovative introduction to designing experiments and interpreting results. These are key scientific skills that you will learn by devising and performing experiments at home. You will not be alone in your task. Collaboration is important in science and you will work with a small group that, for part of the course, discusses experimental design, collects data and compares results. The experiments and study materials draw on examples from the breadth of science. S155 is an online course within which you will use a variety of communication methods, including scheduled online forums.
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I did S155 at the same time as the heavyweight S207 Physics course. It is fairly lightweight, though with group activities you can’t necessarily work through it at your own pace.
Students are split into small groups of around 10 and most experiments are discussed in sub forums for these groups. This worked very well and the tutor did a good job guiding the group. Tutorials were held online and not so useful – usually just repeating what we already discussed on the forum.
The experiments were never very involved and there was little analysis. It would be better to have fewer more complex experiments with more discussion and analysis of results. Our method of carrying out experiments was not tested either i.e. no write ups were ever asked for let alone assessed. The final EMA was mainly testing the rather poorly written online course book. I shouldn’t complain since it most probably allowed me to get a higher score but I would rather have done a more useful activity for assessment.
In summary, a disappointing course, which is a first time for me with the OU. I was looking forward to doing it and though I think it proved that experimental work can be done via distance learning it could have been done a lot better.
I am currently doing the S155 course and have found it very disappointing. To pass, you have to contribute to discussions on forums regarding the design of experiments. The problem is that naturally these discussions end up being dominated by one or two individuals with lots of free time, and if you’re not part of this dominant group, it can become very disheartening very quickly. An additional problem is that gathering together the materials for apparatus for the experiments is down to the students, which can also be problematic. All in all, this is the worst OU module I’ve ever done, and I happen to love the OU.
I think S155 needs to be scrapped by the OU and redesigned – with less emphasis on ‘team work’ required for passing the module. I also think the module would be better if it was a 30 credit level 1 module, with some statistical theory added to complement the experimental work to make the module more rounded.
I have done up my own view on S155 in this blog post The Story of S155 Scientific Investigations…