S283 Planetary Science and the Search for life was written around two medium sized textbooks, which the OU regarded as being one of the unique selling points of studying it. Well, it was and it wasn’t. Students generally like physical books, and if these were written specifically for S283, then I can see that point, but unfortunately, they weren’t. These were textbooks which were generally available to the public, and as such had a wider audience in mind. They were aimed at a wide range of students undertaking Planetary Science and Astrobiology at University level. While they made good reference books, they made poor teaching material. Being densely packed with detail, they were a tough read, so treating them like a pedagogic narrative (and unfortunately that’s what was expected from students undertaking this module) was difficult.
It was very much a case of ‘read chapter 1, now read chapter 2, now read chapter 3, now read chapter 4 and now do the TMA', which attempted to assess what was learnt from the reading. There were several things wrong with this approach, and none of them were executed particularly well. The confusing TMAs were quite time consuming but contributed nothing whatsoever to the final grade. There was a soft threshold of 40% which was required to be allowed to sit the exam, but other than that there was little going for them. In many cases, the recommended word limits for some of the questions did not appear to match the complexity of the expected answer. It was obvious (from my particular tutor at least) that they were struggling to justify their marking using the guidance they were given when looking at the feedback they were writing on the returned assignments.
There were a few activities scattered throughout the module, presumably in an attempt to make the teaching a little less dry, but apart from the two 'spidergram' exercises (which come up in one form or another in the TMAs and the final exam) and evaluating a scientific paper on the moon Europa, they ranged from ‘mostly relevant' to ‘unnecessary slot filler’. Some were very badly written and appeared to have been lashed up in a hurry as a response to criticism about the monotony and lack of variation of the teaching delivery.
Dry boring textbooks could have really come to life if supported and supplemented by some good quality tutorials, but unfortunately there was little joy here either, both in the number and the quality. I attended all of them, and there were ten hour long tutorials covering the two books, one for each of the four TMAs and two for the final exam. Two or three of these were very good, but the others ranged somewhere between barely adequate to dire. One of the main issues being that the tutors covered what they were personally interested in, not what was actually in the module. Topics ranged from their own PhD thesis, science fiction films, derivations of mathematical equations, and occasionally their favourite (or easiest to comprehend) part of the module material. The Staff Tutors were much better than the Associate Lecturers and the difference in quality between them really was like the difference between night and day.
The module covered a lot of ground, too much in fact, and definitely too much for a 30-credit level 2 module. It could very easily be converted without too much modification into a 60-credit module, or two 30-credit ones. S283 is quite old by OU standards (it was called a ‘course’ when it was first presented in 2003), so at the time of writing (2026) would have been 23 years old. This puts it older than many of the students taking it. It had obviously been amended and updated throughout its history, which might explain why it was so densely packed and attempted to cover so much. I assume that when it was originally written, astrobiology was a regarded more as a pseudoscience, and exoplanets were an atypical curiosity which had more in common with science fiction than mainstream planetary science as it is today. I find it difficult to believe that there would have been three quite hefty chapters devoted to exoplanets in the first presentation of S283, and this evolution was a major problem for the module. Over the years more had been added, but little evidence that anything had been removed, which meant the module was getting increasingly bigger, like a snowball rolling down a hill. It didn't help that the module was not particularly well structured and there was a lot of repeated and confusing material. Some chapters were better written than others and the more difficult ones to follow appeared to have been cobbled together with newer material crowbarred into the older content. If ever a module could do with a thorough edit and a rewrite, then S283 was it.
Although the module description made it clear from the start that S283 was very much an interdisciplinary module, the first book on the Solar System did seem somewhat biased towards geology and Earth-centric geology in particular. I sometimes thought I was on a earth science course with occasional references to Solar System bodies, not the other way around. The second book on Astrobiology contained disparate chapters ranging from the planet Mars to SETI, The first chapter on the origin of life was very poorly written and explained the concept of chirality extremely badly. As somebody with a biochemistry degree, I could see this instantly. Although there wasn't much physics in the module there was some GCSE level maths in it, but it never really went above plugging values into equations, converting between units, and rounding to an appropriate number of significant figures.
The forums were pretty much standard fare for an OU module, with a mixture of useful and not so useful contributions. Somebody on one of the forums referring to an earlier presentation said that the textbooks were ‘impenetrable’, and while I have some sympathy with this comment, it seemed a little harsh. I prefer to use the term ‘unnecessarily comprehensive’. They made very good reference books and doorstops. The module chair was atypical in the sense that he was very much from the visibly ‘hands on’ variety and interacted quite regularly with the great unwashed. Many of them are totally unknown to the students taking their modules and like to keep it that way.
The exam at the end was a big ask to complete in 3 to 4 hours or so, and looking at a number of recent past papers, was far from formulaic. Revision was a nightmare because there was simply too much material to cover, and none of it particularly more easy to digest encountering it the second time around. Throughout the entire process, I felt like I was wading through treacle.
There is no doubt that Planetary Science and astrobiology are very interesting subjects, and if taught properly can be very enjoyable and rewarding to study, but S283 in its current form fell seriously short in achieving this. For this reason, I can't really recommend it to anybody unless they are at the 'geek' and 'nerd' end of the spectrum of potential enrolees. It's a compulsory module for the Astronomy and Planetary Science route of the Natural Science degree and also for the Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science, but optional for everything else. I'll be interested to see what the replacement module S287 Planetary Science scheduled for October 2027 is like, because it is difficult to envisage it being any worse.