Ask Plymouth: A virtual open evening

[MUSIC PLAYING] SAM SOFTLY: The really fundamental thing about Plymouth is that our online degrees are designed from the bottom up as online degrees. Something that I have had experience with in my past is when a university takes an on-campus course and just puts it online, so they just upload the slides. And in my experience, that really doesn't work.

What we did was effectively the opposite of that, which is that rather than looking at our course and putting it online, we looked at how to teach online and then designed our course to fit around that. So I think that that really is the key exciting thing about studying a course online with Plymouth. But I would also like to mention that there are amazing networking opportunities.

You might think that if you're doing an online degree, that'll just be you sat in your room and working away alone. But you'll have contact with everybody else in your course, and they'll all also be professionals working in the industry, and you'll have great opportunities to meet with them. And there is an option to graduate in-person where you would actually come to the University of Plymouth and you would graduate on Plymouth Hoe. And yeah, there's not a lot of online universities that would offer that kind of in-person graduation.

- I think you will develop your analytical and research skills a lot, especially doing a dissertation with an expert supervisor. And you'll learn how to go really deeply into your given topic. And you will also, of course, learn to communicate and express different perspectives. This, I think, can take people to the next level.

- The Start to Dental Science course is one of a sort of suite of courses that we have. I was quite interested in your comments earlier about how having a program made online from the start, how important that is because I really would like to echo that. Certainly during COVID we tried to sort of transmute some of our existing courses to online, and it doesn't work so well. However, this program has been planned online from the outset. And so it does cover subject areas that we do cover in our other courses, but the way in which it's constructed is really dedicated to ensuring that people get the most of it through studying online.

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- We have a very dynamic problem-based focus and approach to learning. You'll be asked to consider, you know, certain situations like you have a military crisis or a trade dispute and how you would act. And the assessment as well is we have some standard academic assessments, of course, no exams, but essays, but also reports, policy briefs, presentations, that kind of thing as well.

Essentially we try and cover the two main dimensions of international relations, so security and development and economic cooperation and so on. And international relations is essentially the application of political science, public policy, sociology, economics to a point to the problem of how different states and different cultures relate to one another. And I think everyone can see how relevant that is.

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TIMOTHY O'BRIEN: The way in which it approaches restorative dentistry is it starts off with the basics, with all the fundamental stuff that you really need to know that actually a lot of practitioners take for granted. So it starts them on a journey by talking about the relevant anatomy and the pathogenesis, the normal physiology of the dental tissues and things like that so they're really up to scratch and their level of the basic sciences is really improved.

It also goes into things about the materials involved, which, for many of us, have changed an awful lot since we first graduated. And it then builds on that by going into the various disciplines in a lot more detail. So for example, it might go into things like caries, tooth surface loss, the management of it, and issues like that. Then another module deals with things like periodontology, endodontics.

Then we have another module on prosthodontics, so both fixed and removable prosthodontics. And then a little bit like Patrick's course, we then have the dissertation, and that's really what is the difference between an MSc course and a sort of certificate or diploma because that really shows people how to formulate questions, search for the relevant literature, which is such an important skill to appraise it, and also then to apply it in their own practice

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Well, the preparation for the course is all important. People sometimes underestimate the amount of work because if you're going to get the most from learning a subject, you have to put in a lot of work. And so it is important to put time aside to take it seriously almost like part of your job basically. So I think I've just echoed that sentiment.

- Always worth looking at the media. Take a given issue, say, for example, the climate change conference in Egypt, and you could look because every country has some-- almost every country in some English language media. Look how it's being described in India, in France on France24 or whatever, in China. China Daily is a English language, government-backed newspaper. And have a look at these different perspectives, and that will give you an insight into the world we live in and what's shaping it.

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