So, having gained some distance from the internal discussions and at least seeing that an effort is being made, I thought I'd give it a try with an update. The first three weeks are now over. I thought I could do distance learning, but at the moment I have one or two doubts. I wrote the paper on integrative health and my views. It was not graded, but still had to be submitted by the deadline. I received nice feedback, even though it degenerated into a bit of stress in the end. But that was more due to the fact that somehow all the mentees and friends I told at some point that I could read something were shouting here at the same time, and I'm also taking on more and more tasks at work now.

Unfortunately, my latex doesn't like Harvard yet, but for one page I've managed to get it ger ade. On Thursdays, the next week's content is always released. Sometimes this is annoying, because you don't always know what surprise Thursday will bring. But the last 14 days have been predictable. On the one hand, there was the lecture on Foucault "The birth of the clinic". There were some slides and the main medium, which was to read the book from cover to cover in either English or French. Anyone who has already dealt with him knows that he has to be read very reflectively and cannot be rushed through under any circumstances. Foucault is very profound and at the same time convoluted. It took me a little longer than the week. 

The following week, the focus was on Turner with "The Body and Society". Again, there were some slides and the whole book had to be read. Unfortunately, I'm not quite through it yet. Foucault was already 212 pages and Turner is now 248 pages. Yesterday the next exam and the first graded one were released. Until 03.10. we have to write our own contribution to the discussion in the length of a DIN A4 page (it would be nice if something like margins, line spacing or so were clear here to know how much is a DIN A4 page). We are supposed to choose an area from the Healthcomplex (directly or indirectly) and discuss it against the background of the two books with regard to Power and Normalization. I don't know about the other groups, but we are very clueless, because the assignment is slightly cryptic and at the same time straight forward, which is a contradiction in terms. It was also not clear to us where exactly we should post. It was also annoying that everyone in the group actually posted this question under the assignment and the lecturer deleted it every time because we were supposed to discuss it under the assignment, with the result that in the end we emailed each other first to make sure we now knew where what had to go. The lecturer answers quickly, but right now he's a little blind to operations. 

 And now I suspect that you are thinking almost the same question that has been flying at me again and again over the last few days from my former fellow students at APOLLON: "How are you supposed to evaluate a group discussion, please?" Roughly, all I can say is that the opening post is graded and then so are the responses you give to each other's posts. Everyone has to give at least one answer to the others' contributions. So for me, that means three more in addition to my own contribution. These must also refer to the literature and concepts conveyed therein and be appropriately corroborated with evidence. Chaos is inevitable in Canvas. Because we all post under the same post and then under the posts of the others, it looks very confusing and nested. Believe me, anyone who gets upset about the forum on the APOLLON OC or any of the Moodle stuff has never had to discuss anything on Canvas.

But right now it's just stressing me out, because by Wednesday 23:59 I not only have to have given at least one well-founded answer to the others' contributions to the discussion, but I also have to have posted mine with enough time buffer for the others to be able to answer. So I have set myself Sunday evening for that. Let's see, I hope I can manage that. It's only one page, but it's still tricky if you want to do it properly, especially since I'm going to do an indirect aspect of the health complex against the background of sanctions (full sanctions) and the loss of insurance coverage and power through sanctions of the basic needs of people in the SGB II benefit circle. Part of the task is always to relate it to the personal field of work. Let's see how that turns out. But it's also stressful because the abstracts and posters for the APOLLON Symposium have to be submitted by 1 October. And reducing a 70-page LaTeX thesis to 3 word pages is the fine art of shortening. I'd also like to do an illustration/graphic myself, but I'll have to see if my tablet can do it (since mine doesn't have a pen function). 

That's a bit of what's going on. Oh wait, there's the last part. I have to say, I've already done a whole distance learning course. I have a lot of problems with the heavy regimentation. Since you have to pass all the parts to pass the course and there are fixed deadlines and you don't get the assignments far in advance, but rather at the start of the processing time, you don't have the chance to just leave everything for a few days. At the moment, I'm having a hard time with this, as I'm taking care of a colleague's inbox (e-file) for the first time as a holiday replacement. We work similar hours, but I work 4 days and she works 5, which is noticeable. The e-file was also down for 1.5 days because a memory component was damaged. And such a backup of Germany-wide data takes a while to restore. At the moment, we also have to do some rework, because there is a time window of 12 minutes, and it is not yet clear whether the documents have been sent out, routed correctly or are in Nirvana. So today we were asked to think about what we were working on at the time of the crash and to check it. Well, with X cases a day, you know that of course ;).

So now I will continue. So it remains exciting, but in terms of volume, even the full-time studies at APOLLON with group projects etc. didn't feel as work-intensive as my current part-time studies. But it is also a university degree and no longer a Bachelor's degree, but a Master's degree.