This course will help you to become familiar with the requirements and demands of postgraduate study and to develop the skills and confidence to pursue your learning further.

In this free course, An introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER), you will look at some institutional OER initiatives. These will include MIT's open courseware, Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative and The Open University's OpenLearn. You will get a flavour of how different OER initiatives design and present the content for their ...

This free course, Creative writing and critical reading, explores the importance of reading as part of a creative writer’s development at the postgraduate level. You will gain inspiration and ideas from examining other writers’ methods, as well as enhancing your critical reading skills. Examples will cover the genres of fiction, creative ...

Infographics are becoming an essential tool in data representation and research communication. In this free course, The power of infographics in research dissemination, you will explore when and how infographics can be useful to your work. You will look at some good and bad practice in making and using infographics, and will learn how to ...

In this free course you will focus on how to be a critical reader. Reading critically is an essential skill at university. It means being aware of your own purposes and opinions as you read and being able to recognise the writer's purposes and opinions in their writing.

Diagrams, mind-maps, tables, graphs, time lines, flow charts, sequence diagrams, decision trees: all can be used to organise thought. This free course, Extending and developing your thinking skills, will introduce you to a variety of thinking skills. Asking and answering questions is at the heart of high-quality thinking. Questions naturally ...

This free course provides a postgraduate level introduction to systems thinking in practice, or STiP. Systems thinking in practice itself has a long history and has developed from many different disciplinary traditions and used many different techniques and approaches, but all based on viewing complex situations as systems. The ideas about ...

This free course, An appreciative approach to inquiry, is designed to support groups of practitioners or individuals adopt an appreciative inquiry approach to reflecting, questioning, and developing their collective or individual practices. It is particularly aimed at those working in education at any level and any context to engage in teacher ...

This free course, Becoming an ethical researcher, explores the ethics of planning, carrying out and reporting research which involves human participants. It will sensitise you to issues that a researcher should consider to support ethical and well-justified decision-making. A wide variety of research scenarios will be used to stimulate ...