Key skill assessment unit: Information technology

Introduction

This key skill develops your information technology (IT) skills in your studies, work or other activities over a period of time. To tackle all of this key skill, you will need to plan your work over at least 3–4 months to give yourself enough time to practise and improve your skills, to seek feedback from others, to monitor your progress and evaluate your strategy and present outcomes.

Skills in information technology cover a broad range, from using software unitages to developing a critical understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of IT solutions. Learning how to use a word processor, database or spreadsheet are important but so, too, is thinking about how you can use IT efficiently to support what you are doing and to help you learn more effectively.

Improving your IT skills requires you to plan strategically how you will go about developing your skills, as well as what skills you should focus on. In monitoring your progress, you will need to apply and practise your IT skills to achieve the targets and goals you have set yourself and to reflect on, and possibly modify, your strategy in the light of your own assessment of progress and feedback from others. Evaluating your strategy and presenting results gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your IT skills and assess how successful your strategy was in achieving what you set out to do. This unit is designed to be studied for 1 hour per week over 50 weeks.

This unit is from our archive and it is an adapted extract from Key skill assessment unit: information technology (U073) which is no longer in presentation. If you wish to study formally at The Open University, you may wish to explore the courses we offer in this subject [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .