WDT_1Introduction and guidanceIntroduction and guidanceThis free badged course, Working in diverse teams, will help you consider your experience of working in teams and the different roles you play in them. It will increase your confidence in marketing this key skill to employers as well as improve your ability to perform well in teams you are currently part of.The course lasts eight weeks, with approximately three 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.As part of this course, you will undertake a number of interactive quizzes, of which Weeks 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.You have been provided you with an interactive toolkit in which you can collect all your thoughts together in one place. You will be directed at specific points to use the toolkit, however you can use the toolkit and the templates within it as you complete activities throughout the course, which will provide a resouce that you can draw on in the future to help shape your career. Using the toolkit is optional: if you would rather note your responses down in a different way, that is fine.After completing this course you will be able to:understand why employers value working in teams as a key employability skillidentify different team roles and your preferred team role, and articulate your experience of working in teams to employers with more confidenceidentify different stages of team development and understand why this helps team performanceunderstand the benefits of increased team diversity and some of the issues this brings to team performanceconsider how a virtual team differs from other teams and the challenges of working in virtual teams.Moving around the courseIn the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you can find a link to the following week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Course content’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the week links at the top of every page 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 in your browser. You can do this by holding down the ‘CTRL’ key (or CMD on a Mac) and left clicking the mouse button; or right click and ‘open in new tab’.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.Get careers guidanceThis course has been included in the National Careers Service to help you develop new skills.What is a badged course?While studying Working in diverse teams you have the option to work towards gaining a digital badge.Badged courses are a key part of The Open University’s mission to promote the educational well-being of the community. The courses also provide another way of helping you to progress from informal to formal learning.To complete a course you need to be able to find about 24 hours of study time, over a period of about eight weeks. However, it is possible to study them at any time, and at a pace to suit you.Badged courses are all available on The Open University’s OpenLearn website and do not cost anything to study. They differ from Open University courses because you do not receive support from a tutor. But you do get useful feedback from the interactive quizzes.What is a badge?Digital badges are a new way of demonstrating online that you have gained a skill. Schools, colleges and universities are working with employers and other organisations to develop open badges that help learners gain recognition for their skills, and support employers to identify the right candidate for a job.Badges demonstrate your work and achievement on the course. You can share your achievement with friends, family and employers, and on social media. Badges are a great motivator, helping you to reach the end of the course. Gaining a badge often boosts confidence in the skills and abilities that underpin successful study. So, completing this course should encourage you to think about taking other courses.How to get a badgeGetting a badge is straightforward! Here’s what you have to do:read each week of the coursescore 50% or more in the two badge quizzes in Week 4 and Week 8.For all the quizzes, you can have three attempts at most of the questions (for true or false type questions you usually get only one attempt). If you get the answer right first time you will get more marks than for a correct answer the second or third time. If one of your answers is incorrect you will often receive helpful feedback and suggestions about how to work out the correct answer.For the badge quizzes, if you’re not successful in getting 50% the first time, after 24 hours you can attempt the whole quiz, and come back as many times as you like.We hope that as many people as possible will gain an Open University badge – so you should see getting a badge as an opportunity to reflect on what you have learned rather than as a test.If you need more guidance on getting a badge and what you can do with it, take a look at the OpenLearn FAQs. When you gain your badge you will receive an email to notify you and you will be able to view and manage all your badges in My OpenLearn within 24 hours of completing the criteria to gain a badge.Get started with Week 1.This course was written by Lynne Johnson. It was first published in February 2019.Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see FAQs), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence . The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course: Course image: Pixabay.com; pexels.Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.Don't miss out:1. Join over 200,000 students, currently studying with The Open University – http://www.open.ac.uk/choose/ou/open-content2. Enjoyed this? Find out more about this topic or browse all our free course materials on OpenLearn – http://www.open.edu/openlearn/3. Outside the UK? We have students in over a hundred countries studying online qualifications – http://www.openuniversity.edu/ – including an MBA at our triple accredited Business School.Discussion2021050703