- Current section: Introduction
- Learning outcomes
- 1 Introduction
- 2 You and your learning
- 3 Exploring learning
- 3.1 Introduction
- 3.2 Getting feedback from other people
- 3.3 Your learning – what does ‘theory’ offer?
- 3.3.1 Why it might be useful
- 3.3.2 What problems might you have with this?
- 3.3.3 How might it be possible to integrate theory and personal understanding?
- 3.3.4 The importance of other people in our immediate social and learning environments
- 3.3.5 Communities of practice
- 3.3.6 A ‘health warning’ about groups
- 3.3.7 Entwistle’s theory – students’ approaches to learning
- 3.4 Preparing to move on – connecting theory with skills
- 3.5 Conclusion
- References
- 4 Where next?
- 5 Reflecting backwards, reflecting forwards
- Acknowledgements
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Learning to change
This unit is for people who are thinking about making changes in...
This unit is for people who are thinking about making changes in their lives, such as returning to study or taking a different direction at work. It will help you build on what you already know; consider the choices open to you; use your skills and qualities to achieve change; and make plans for the future.
The aims of section 1 are to:
- provide you with a clear idea of what the unit is about and how it is structured
- help you understand the importance of the word ‘skills’
- start you thinking about your own learning.
- understand that valuable and important learning goes on all the time
- appreciate that learning can involve thinking, doing and feeling
- develop a clearer idea of what you have learned and what qualities, knowledge and skills you already have
- better understand the importance of everyday.
- use feedback to add information about your qualities, knowledge and skills from another perspective
- use academic approaches to learning to increase your understanding of your qualities, knowledge and skills
- reflect on the academic skills you have used.
- explain how the wider social and political context may affect your learning
- choose at least one goal that you would like to work towards and explain why you have chosen that goal
- identify what you can do to help you achieve your goal
- draw up a plan for achieving your goal
- explain how you have used any ideas presented in the unit to identify your goals.
- Duration: 100 hours
- Published on: Friday 15th July 2011
- Level: Introductory
- Posted under: Education
Contents
Learning to change
Introduction

Being unsure of what you want to do in life (or what you want to study) is not unusual. How to deal with the changes that we want in our lives can be more challenging. You may be unsure about what subject you are interested in or whether you can cope with study at university level. You may be unsure about what path in life to pursue.
This unit takes your life as its starting point. It helps you to think about what you can do already. It then uses this to build up your confidence in your abilities. It uses a mixture of personal reflection, case studies (including three real-life case studies) and ideas about how we learn. This combination equips you to move your life forward.
This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Learning to change (Y165) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to explore other courses we offer in this subject area [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
Archive content
This is an extract from an Open University course which is no longer available to new students. If you found this interesting you could explore more free Education course units or view the range of currently available OU Education courses.
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- Creative-Commons: The Open University is proud to release this free course under a Creative Commons licence. However, any third-party materials featured within it are used with permission and are not ours to give away. These materials are not subject to the Creative Commons licence. See terms and conditions. Full details can be found in the Acknowledgements section.
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