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Science, Maths & Technology
Succeed with maths – Part 1
If you feel that maths is a mystery that you want to unravel then this free course is for you. It will guide you through how numbers are put together, give you confidence with using percentages, fractions and negative numbers and provide you with problem solving skills for your everyday life and the wider world.
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Science, Maths & Technology
Discovering chemistry
Chemistry lies at the centre of our modern life, playing a part in areas as diverse as the development of new drugs and materials, analysing our environment through to more mundane activities such as washing your clothes and making your tea. But to truly understand the role chemistry plays you need to have a sound grasp of a number of fundamental principles. This free course, Discovering chemistry, introduces you to some of these concepts, beginning with the idea that everything that you can see is made of building blocks called atoms. This leads on to a look at the chemical elements and how they are arranged in the Periodic Table, enabling chemists to rationalise patterns in their chemical and physical behaviour. Next you will consider chemical reactions, specifically how atoms combine with other atoms to form molecules, and how molecules combine with other atoms or molecules to form bigger molecules. You will meet simple (tried and tested) theories to explain the bonding in molecules and at how their shapes may be explained, and indeed predicted. And in a wider sense you’ll be looking at why reactions happen at all and how fast they go. This is also a beginner’s level course in the language of the chemist; you’ll learn about symbols, formulas and how chemical equations which represent reactions are constructed. Finally you will see how chemists ----- atoms and molecules, essential for making up solutions of a known concentration in order to carry out a reaction, or performing a chemical analysis.
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Money & Business
Developing career resilience
This free course, Developing career resilience, will help you to understand the factors that influence career resilience and offer examples and tactics for you to develop your own resilience further.
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History & The Arts
Discovering music: the blues
This free course, Discovering music: the blues, will introduce you to a musical tradition with roots in the nineteenth century but which is still relevant to making music today. You will learn about how the lyrics of blues songs reflect the social environment in which they were created, and about the musical techniques that underpin the structures of blues songs. You do not need to play an instrument, to sing or have any prior musical knowledge to be able to complete this course.
Society, Politics & Law
Forensics: The Real CSI
“Every contact leaves a trace – whether we can find that trace or not, that’s the power of forensics”.
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Science, Maths & Technology
The Weather on all 8 Planets of our Solar System
Ever wondered how the weather differs on Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune? Professor Stephen Lewis investigates...
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Health, Sports & Psychology
Why do women need abortions?
As more states in America seek to make abortion illegal, we look back at our video collection on women's abortion experiences based on Open University research that shows how an unintended and unwanted pregnancy can easily happen, even when women are using contraception.
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History & The Arts
Hadrian: The Roamin' Emperor
Can you piece together strands of evidence to work out what motivated Hadrian to travel so extensively?
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