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Home » Open University Courses » MS221 Exploring Mathematics » MS221 Course Review

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This page is a course review under the impression of day 1 after the course's exam. It reflects my personal opinion only, and in no way does it imply official views of the OU.

Author

Herbert Glarner

Published

2008-Oct-16

External Links

• The Open University (OU) in Wikipedia.
• The Open University Description of MS221 (without syllabus)

Course Review

In spite of the exam and the preparation towards it, I must say, that this course is well-structured and that it brings across the course material quite well. There were not many occasions forcing me to use other sources to have something explained in another way (and the two or three times I needed such, Wikipedia did the job). All in all, for me, it did it's job. I can definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to get a solid foundation in mathematics.

On the downside is the fact, that the 4 TMAs each do reflect just the actual block. This has the potential, that by the time you learn block D, you've forgotten much of block A (and worse, of block B). This comes in at very high revision costs towards the end of the exam, exactly then, when it is likely that absolutely new material is presented to the student.

What I personally would change, if I was to do the course again: I'd constantly revise with respect to the exam. I'd strongly recommend to new students to revise, revise, revise, and at least monthly doing the relevant exam questions of all the past papers they can get a hold of (the exam paper follows the course layout where the order of questions is concerned). After you submitted TMA04, revise against the clock!

That's it from my side, at day 1 after the exam, and naturally still under the impression of that event.

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Sidenotes

Fig. 1: MS221 Books and Papers Did it already occur to you, that this course weighs almost 1000 A4 pages?

The details for you sceptics out there: Course Books 756 p, Computer books 129 p, and the manual 88 p; depending on your organization additionally many papers like original TMAs, corrected TMAs, past exam papers with solutions, and other notes.

All in all, you're well advised to reserve a space of 40 cm for your course *grin*

By the way. When it eventually comes to the exam, the OU allows MS221 students to bring their annotated handbook to the exam. Now, you can waste all margins in the whole book with worked examples and the like, and if that works for you, then it's fine.

However, I for one was quite sure to not be able to find that important annotation anymore within an 88 pages handbook, at least not within reasonable time . Hence I propose an a little different different annotations strategy.