The module S283 Planetary Science and the Search for life was written around two medium sized textbooks, which the School of Physical Sciences 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 understand that preference, but unfortunately they weren’t. These textbooks were available to the general public, and as such had a wider audience than S283 in mind. They appeared to be aimed at 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.
The teaching on the module was very much a case of 'read this chapter, now read the next chapter, now read the next chapter, now read the next chapter, and now do the TMA'. This was supposed to assess what was learnt from the extensive reading. There were several things wrong with this approach, but the monotony of it all was the main one.
The confusing TMAs were 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 they had little purpose. The feedback from my tutor marking these things was supposed to be helpful, but in my particular case, it was far from helpful or motivating. 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, which were classified as either 'key' or 'optional' activities. 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 '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.
The uninspiring and sometimes confusing 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 quantity 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 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) it would have been 23 years old. This puts it older than quite a few 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 written better than others and the more difficult to follow ones appeared to have been cobbled together with newer material crowbarred into the older content. If ever a module needed a thorough edit and a rewrite, then S283 did and cried out for 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 an earth science course with occasional references to rocky 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 molecule 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, but the pdf files of these texts were much easier to manage and allowed for quick searching by keyword.
The module chair of S283 was atypical in the sense that he was very much of the visibly ‘hands on’ variety and interacted quite regularly with the great unwashed. Many module chairs are totally unknown to the students taking their modules and I'm sure they most like to keep it that way. He appeared to have a lot of say in how S283 was organised and run. The fact that one person had such an influence on the module could be seen as a positive (in terms of coherency) but also as a negative (since bad practices cannot easily be remedied).
The online exam at the end was a big ask to complete in three to four hours or so, and looking at a number of recent past papers, it was far from formulaic or predictable. Revision was a nightmare because there was simply too much material to cover, and none of it particularly easier to digest by encountering it the second time around. Throughout the entire draining revision 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.
I really wanted to like S283 Planetary Science and the Search for life. The module description promised so much but wasn't able to deliver. It definitely had a lot of things going for it; a really interesting subject, an enthusiastic chair, a matured curriculum, eminent academics on the team, and motivated students. So what went wrong and why didn't I like it? It was a good subject spoilt by a poor module, but opinions will vary of course.