Writing reports and assignments can be a daunting prospect. Learn how to interpret questions and how to plan, structure and write your assignment or report. This free course, Essay and report writing skills, is designed to help you develop the skills you need to write effectively for academic purposes.

Learning how to learn: a process we all engage in throughout our lives, but no single method of learning guarantees success. This free course, Learning how to learn, aims to make the process of learning much more explicit by inviting you to apply various ideas and activities to your own study as a way of increasing your awareness of your own ...

Are you a carer? Or do you work with a carer, or know someone who one? This free course, Physical activity for health and wellbeing in the caring role, is designed to give an insight into the demands, both physically and mentally, of the caring role and look at how taking part in physical activity can offer benefits to the health and wellbeing ...

This free course, Developing good academic practice, is intended to help you develop good academic practices in your studies and when producing assignments and completing assessments. Although designed as a course to work through, the content can also be used to dip in and out of, if you feel you need to improve your skills in a particular area.

Do fractions and decimals make you apprehensive about maths? Do you lack confidence in dealing with numbers? If so, then this free course, Numbers, units and arithmetic, is for you. The course will explain the basics of working with positive and negative numbers and how to multiply and divide with fractions and decimals.

This free course, What do genes do?,  explores how information contained in DNA is used, explaining the flow of information from DNA to RNA to protein. Also introduced are the concepts of transcription (as occurs between DNA and RNA) and translation.

Spice, and other synthetic drugs, are spreading through UK prisons at a rate that the authorities are struggling to respond to. The OU's David Scott explains why.