Introduction and guidance
This free badged course, Digital thinking tools for better decision making, lasts 24 hours and contains eight ‘sessions’ of study. You can work through the course at your own pace. If you have time for more than one session, there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course.
This is a course about thinking, not computers, but occasionally you will be using the programming language Python as a sort of ‘big calculator’ to underpin your critical thinking with some simple sums. The other software you use will mostly just involve using your web browser.
You will be able to test your understanding of the course through the end-of-session interactive quizzes. The quizzes at the end of Sessions 4 and 8 will provide you with 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 should be able to:
- describe how digital thinking tools extend our natural capabilities
- use digital thinking tools to find information
- use digital thinking tools to analyse information
- use digital thinking tools to reason about information
- discuss the future of digital thinking tools in relation to artificial intelligence.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. 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 a 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.
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 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.