What is i-Science?

This is an overdue entry. I keep getting asked what’s i-Science? Often by people in Leicester, so this is a brief explanation. The simplest way to describe it is as Leicester’s Combined Science degree, but it really isn’t.

Like many universities once the science courses went modular at Leicester the university worked out that they could offer a Combined Science course with very little extra effort. The problem is that such courses are rubbish. The thing about a Physics course or a Chemistry course is that it builds from year to year on what you have already learned. If you have people just taking a block from here or there, they lack this continuity and the whole thing is a bit of a half-baked mish-mash. There’s also the other issue that the Combined Science students had no home department. They were always someone else’s problem, so Combined Science was a poor degree and Leicester cancelled it.

I-Science is an attempt at doing a Combined Science degree properly. Seven departments have got together to offer courses specifically for the degree and it’s all rather exciting. The biggest change in thinking about i-Science was that it was decided that the modules would all be taught by Problem-Based Learning. This is a big thing in Medicine and I think Law. It’s also catching on in Engineering. What it means is you have a problem and you work out what you need to know to tackle it and then learn the skills and facts. So rather than dealing with abstract notions and then working out how to apply them straight away you can see the point of what you’re learning and you have examples to work on straight away. This works particularly well for us because of the way the modules are set up.

Like Combined Science, i-Science has modules. However they’re all compulsory. They’re also ‘short and fat’ which means you only do one module at a time. So for the first five weeks of the degree you’ll do ‘Prophets and Powers’. Prophets and Powers is not the archaeology module. Rather than doing a bit of Physics or a bit of Biology all the modules are interdisciplinary. So the overall problem for Prophets and Powers is can you build a new Stonehenge model authentically at a new site?

First of all they have to work out which Stonehenge they’re building (Stratigraphy and Carbon dating). Then they may want to work out how to source and work the rock (the Rock Cycle and physical properties of rock). There are also problems like how to build the site (Newton’s laws, analogy and evidence in Archaeology) or how to astronomically align the site (Astronomy, trig, stats more use archaeological evidence). So they’re getting the skills, but they’re also aware of the demands of meeting the requirements of a variety of disciplines. It’s not just a matter of knowing if what a Physicist says is true, it’s also a matter of whether or not it’s relevant.

We’re not going to produce top-notch Physicists, Chemists or Biologists. There simply isn’t the time to teach a student everything a Physics student would know on Physics. But we might produce people who can talk sense in specialist fields like Astrobiology. I’d argue a background in basic biology might be more useful in astrobiology than knowing about how to plot hysteresis loops.

The only major complaint I’ve had so far is that the course was named by committee. It became i-Science because they couldn’t decide between interdisciplinary or integrated. I complained frequently that the compromise made it sound like we were training opticians. It’s now BSc Interdisciplinary Science, which isn’t what I would have wanted, I prefered integrated, but it’s better than i-Science. —–