Online – a different way to study Chinese Herbal Medicine
Student Bruce McCallum reflects on his first year of the MSc/PGDip Chinese Herbal Medicine course the positives and challenges he’s faced with online study….
Last October, having spent considerable time weighing the options, I started studying Chinese Herbal Medicine at the NCA. After an initial weekend at the college in York to start us off, we began the entirely online lectures and clinical days that form the bulk of the course. Not really knowing how this would work in general and for me personally, I started by feeling hopeful but nervous.
Initially the thought of doing all of this online was a bit worrying, but the realisation soon set in that in terms of logistics and cost there were serious advantages to studying remotely. As lovely as York is, it is far from London where I live and the time, effort and expense of travelling and staying up there as often I needed to would have increased the cost of the course massively.
The advantage of online learning is that it’s a short commute to the study and is much easier to open Teams on your computer to join the online class or clinic than it is to catch a train to York every month for clinical days. Another thing I didn’t appreciate before starting the course is that a lot of the herbal medicine books are not lightweight by any stretch and would be impractical to carry with you on a train to college and back, however studying from home means that all your resources are with you and likely to be in the same room you’re studying from. This was useful in Year 1, but in Year 2 where the clinical days more than double (from 9 days to 20) this is just about lifesaving!
Moving on now to the challenges of online study, and a very strange thing it has turned out to be. There are challenges, there is no doubt, but the funny thing is that, writing at the conclusion of Year 1, very few of them register anymore. At first, I found it difficult to connect with the lectures and material but things gradually settled, and by the last session of the year it was absolutely no problem – discussions were had, material was learnt, assignments completed and passed.
Anyone who has experienced the difficulties of a zoom meeting (most people at this point in history) will understand that it is clearly different and takes some getting used to. But after a year of remote learning, I have more than adjusted and now can’t imagine doing this course in any other way, and am looking forward to what year 2 brings.