Free courses
Produced by The Open University, a world leader in open and distance learning, all OpenLearn courses are free to study. We offer nearly 1000 free courses across 9 different subject areas. Our courses are available to start right away.
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History & The Arts
Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
This free course introduces Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), with the aim of understanding how she writes about time, memory, and ideas about identity. It also considers why Woolf’s fiction is often considered difficult. Selected extracts from her essays on writing help to clarify some of these perceived difficulties, ...
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History & The Arts
Forth Road Bridge
Scotland's Forth Road Bridge may not be the most beautiful bridge over the Firth of Forth, but it is an incredible feat of engineering and is integral to the economy of the entire area. However, rust is threatening to destroy the cables that suspend the road. This free course uses video to explore the issues associated with the potential demise ...
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History & The Arts
Visions of protest: graffiti
This free course, Visions of protest: graffiti, introduces students to contrasting understandings of graffiti. It draws on a wide range of graffiti examples, including mystery zebras in Hackney, fish graffiti in Morecambe, 'tags' in a Milton Keynes underpass, a McDonald's advert and exhibits at a highly established art gallery, the Tate Modern....
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level 1: introductory icon
History & The Arts
Discovering music through listening
This free course, Discovering music through listening, will introduce you to the musical elements used by musicians to create a piece of music: pulse, tempo, metre, harmony, structure, texture, timbre and dynamics. You'll learn how to identify the different musical elements by taking a particular approach to listening to the music, known as ...
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History & The Arts
What do historians do?
What do historians do? In this free course you will explore some of the ways that historians work to develop our understanding of the past. You will learn about three aspects of the historian’s craft through three topic areas: landscapes, infant health and criminal justice. Through the activities in the course, you will experience a wide range ...
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History & The Arts
Herodotus and the invention of history
With the information explosion online, how can you tell fake news from the real thing, or be more sensitive to how information can be weaponised? In the fifth-century BCE, a Greek by the name of Herodotus faced a similar challenge when he set out to examine why his people, the Greeks, and the Persians went to war with each other. Chief among his...
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History & The Arts
Artists and authorship: the case of Raphael
Individual artists have been the traditional focus of art history, but how do we evaluate the figure of the artist? This free course, Artists and authorship: the case of Raphael, takes the life of Raphael as a case study. You will examine sixteenth-century sources to explore the creation of artistic authorship in the early modern era. The ...
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History & The Arts
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
This free course, John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, concentrates on Acts 1 and 2 of John Webster's Renaissance tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. It focuses on the representation of marriage for love and the social conflicts to which it gives rise. The course is designed to hone your skills of textual analysis.
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History & The Arts
Listening for form in popular music
This free course, Listening for form in popular music, explores form, or how music is organised in time. It looks at three strategies for communicating form – through the use of specialist terms (such as ‘chorus’ and ‘bridge’), alphabetic designations (for example AABA), and visual diagrams. It also considers how the form of a song works with ...
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History & The Arts
Why not ‘World Religions’?
The idea that there are five or six ‘major’ or ‘world’ religions is so common that it seems natural to us today. What makes something a ‘World Religion’? Why do we group some religions in this way? You’ll explore these questions in this free course. You’ll also look at the potential issues with classifying religions like this and why scholars ...
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Education & Development
Teaching the First World War
This free course, Teaching the First World War, is designed for history teachers and their pupils. It provides a wide range of visual, textual and oral sources to enrich the teaching of the First World War. It covers familiar and less familiar aspects of the history of the First World War, ranging from the debate on the origins of the war and ...
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History & The Arts
Making sense of art history
You can prepare for this free course, Making sense of art history, by looking around you. It's likely that wherever you are you'll be able to see some images. It's also likely that many of these will be intended to have some sort of effect on you. In the course itself you will be exploring the power of images via a study of contemporary art ...