S284 Astronomy Boot camp

Now that the MST124 exam is over, I can concentrate on the S284 Astronomy Bootcamp. The MST124 results are expected on or around 27 October and I will publish them and details about how the exam went here, and a review of the module here.

The S284 Astronomy Boot camp officially starts today and carries on for the next for two weeks. As you can probably guess, I've already made a start. There are four main components of the Boot camp materials: An online guide, with assessment exercises & quizzes, a dedicated forum, online tutorials, and reference materials to assist with self-directed study/revision. Four areas are covered: time-management, study skills, maths and physics. The Adobe Connect tutorials for this module start next week. There's one on Saturday morning, one Tuesday lunchtime and another Thursday evening. Students are only expected to attend one of these as they all cover more or less the same ground. Curiously, they are not recorded so have to be attended live. Another curious thing - they have been described by the module team as 'drop-in clinics'. As always, I'll engage with all that Boot camp has to offer, but I'm also aware of 'burn out' because I have just finished a module a few days ago and I need a bit of a break.

Topic 5 appears to be missing and I'm not-so-reliably informed that it is either called Electricity and Magnetism or Minerals and Rocks but nobody really knows for certain. It may have something to do with the predecessor module S282 Astronomy which shared some pre-module engagement resources with S283 Planetary Science and the Search for Life.

S284 module website opens

The S284 module website opened on Tuesday. I downloaded as much as I could, mostly videos presented by the module staff. The pre-recorded tutorials are a really good idea, and more modules should use them. Unlike S283 Planetary Science, there are a lot of media clips and animations used for teaching purposes. It feels like the big brother of SM123 Physics and Space and has a similar structure in some respects. Comparing the two, which is inevitable really, S284 Astronomy is more like an applied physics module whereas S283 Planetary Science was more like an applied chemistry module.

I had a look at the introductory assignment TMA00, which seems quite involved for what it is. It isn't compulsory and attracts no marks as such, but the feedback from the bod who looks at it should be useful. Hopefully. There are five questions in total, some of them very straightforward, others involving a varied multi-part response. Question 1 involves reading a part of the module material, summarising it and timing how long it took to do it. Question 2 is about typesetting a mathematical equation using symbols not found on a standard computer keyboard. Question 3 wants a hand drawn Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, a photograph obtained from a website, and a screenshot of the output from some astronomy software. Question 4 involves creating and filling a table with data. Question 5 involves plotting a graph using Excel. I can't help thinking there's an 'employability' and 'transferable skills' angle to all this, and it probably ticks a box somewhere for that reason, like a lot of the newer modules from the OU.

S284 Astronomy assignments

The S284 Astronomy module website opens in three days time on Tuesday 8th but this assessment information was revealed to all enrolled punters several weeks ago. The TMAs are interesting. There are six of them worth 8% each and a non-scoring TMA00 with a firm cut-off date, which is very odd as the zeroth TMA of a module is usually formative and optional. Looking at the cut-off dates, there is an average of one TMA per month throughout the module. The two module exams (not listed here) take the form of timed Moodle quizzes. The first in January, in week 14, of one hour duration (12%), and a more important one at the end of June, in week 32, which is a more traditional three hours long (40%). This module has been designed to be as accessible as possible while still maintaining academic standards. I believe that the replacement for the S283 Planetary Science module will also be modelled on this format, which is no bad thing.

S284 Extended Summaries Booklet

Some study materials despatch information for S284 Astronomy appeared on my student homepage a few days ago. I guessed something was coming soon, but that confirmed it. S284 is delivered online without textbooks, but the one concession is a printed 'Extended Summaries Booklet' which summarises the entire module content. I imagine it's going to be very useful for the exam(s) and revision. It arrived on Monday. Unusually, the OU used the Royal Mail and not Yodel, which almost certainly explains why it actually arrived.

My previous blog entries have moved

I've archived my previous blog entries and they can be found at the link below:

S283-25J (Planetary Science) & MST124-26B (Essential Mathematics 1) 

The maths revision activities, reflections on the exam, and the exam results for MST124 will also appear in this archive and will be updated periodically until the module concludes. This will be on or around the release of the module results on 27th October.

This blog will be used to document the next stage of my OU journey, which is S284 Astronomy starting in September 2026.