Introduction and guidance
Succeed with maths – Part 1 is a free badged course which lasts 8 weeks, with approximately 3 hours' study time each week. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete another week’s study.
You'll start with the most familiar territory of how numbers are put together and look at addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. In the following weeks you'll move on to look at fractions, percentages and negative numbers. You’ll use plenty of real-life examples to help with this and have plenty of opportunities to practise your new understanding and skills.
Part of this practice will be the weekly interactive quizzes, of which Weeks 4 and 8 will provide you an opportunity to earn a badge to demonstrate your new skills. You can read more on how to study the course and about badges in the next sections.
After completing this course you will be able to:
- use maths in a variety of everyday situations
- understand how to use percentages, fractions and negative numbers in some everyday situations
- begin to develop different problem-solving skills
- use a calculator effectively.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you will find a link to the next week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.
It's also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page, including links to the quizzes, to open it in new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you've come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
Viewing maths and equations
As you view the different text styles and symbols used to display maths throughout the course, you may notice that some of the text appears clickable or linked to something else. This is part of the equation processing software used by The Open University. You can ignore these clicks or links as they won't provide you with any useful information, but if you do click by accident you can just come back to where you were by using the back button.
If you enjoy this course and want to practise more of your skills for maths, or if you find that you are already familiar with most of the material in the course, you might like to take a look at Succeed with maths – Part 2 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.