Conclusion

In this course you have looked at doping as an example of exploring a topic and ways in which arguments might be developed. The skills that you have covered in this course are useful for university-level study.

The main learning points for the course are:

• A contemporary issue like doping often benefits from a little social context and background history into how things have evolved to the present day.
• The framing of arguments about an issue is important, and simple framing can ignore the complexities and nuance of factors influencing an issue.
• Use of comparison and contrast between contexts, evidence or different groups involved in a contemporary issue can be useful in showing subtle differences between them.
• Pulling together a discussion towards a conclusion is an important skill and in the doping in sport example this was illustrated by being distilled down to three points (outlined in Section 11).

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course E315 Contemporary sport and exercise issues [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .