I had the last of the 'Topic 7 - Components of the Universe' tutorials last Sunday with a tutor who is normally one of the better ones. They were OK on this occasion but not quite up to their usually high standard. It was a 'deep dive' variant, so tutors are expected to go beyond the course material without overdoing it and it's a very difficult balancing act. This tutorial filled the gaps and clarified a few things left by the previous two on this subject, so it that respect it was very good.
I had a 'skills tutorial' on Tuesday, supposedly on 'advanced maths'. It wasn't very good, but it wasn't aimed at me really. There were only four people attending. I was one, and the tutor was another, making just two others. These tutorials are really poorly advertised. A tutor on a previous tutorial said that when originally planned this series was originally going to be called 'taking it further' but for some reason morphed into 'skills' probably for political or funding reasons. The pedagogy is lost on me really.
Wednesday was the day when registrations for next October opened. The cost of a 30-credit module has gone up to £1946 and a 60-credit module is now £3892. Modules can be taken 'standalone' or linked to a qualification. The obvious one for me would be S10 Certificate in astronomy and planetary science which requires both S284 Astronomy and S283 Planetary Science and the search for life. I can do this in two years and the order in which they are taken isn't important.
An alternative qualification for me to consider would have been S20 Certificate in Physics which requires the new 60-credit module S227 Core Physics and SXPS288 Remote experiments in physics and space. This would also take me two years, but the order I take them would be more important because some of the experimental work is based on S227, so doing SXPS288 first would be a bit illogical. I'm not sure I would have wanted to do S227 in its first year of presentation anyway due to the possible teething problems.
If I'm looking in the long term for a higher qualification, then I will need to do at some point MST124 Essential Mathematics 1. It's only just beyond A level in terms of difficulty, but as it's about 45 years since I did A level Pure Maths, I've forgotten a lot of it. It's a prerequisite to other higher-level modules, so it's unavoidable really if I want to go further, but that's something to think about for the semi-distant future.