Work skills
Enhance your work skills without committing to full-time study.
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Education & Development
Leadership and followership
This free course, Leadership and followership, will help you to explore what makes a good leader, recognise common leadership challenges, and identify the skills you need to develop if you want to enhance your own leadership experience.
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Money & Business
Effective communication in the workplace
This free course, Effective communication in the workplace, explores the importance of communication as a skill in the workplace. It aims to increase your understanding of communication skills and to help you to consider how your communication could be perceived by others. You'll cover areas such as verbal and non-verbal communication, written ...
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Money & Business
Exploring career mentoring and coaching
This free course, Exploring career mentoring and coaching, will explain what mentors and career coaches do and how a colleague or expert who can ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and help an individual to find the best solutions for themselves, can make a significant difference in a wide range of situations and contexts.
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Education & Development
How to say no at work without guilt or conflict
Setting boundaries at work can be challenging, but knowing how to say no effectively is an essential skill. Whether you're protecting your time, managing workload, or maintaining a healthy work-life balance, the way you communicate your refusal can make all the difference. Here’s how to do it with clarity and professionalism.
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Education & Development
Bringing up problems at work (without making things worse)
Talking about problems at work can feel risky but it doesn’t have to be. This article explores how to raise issues constructively, using a simple framework that focuses on clarity, solutions and professionalism.
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Education & Development
Shared documents and constructive collaboration
Giving feedback on shared documents can be tricky, especially when you’re trying to balance clarity with kindness. In this article, we explore how to collaborate constructively, choose the right tone, and avoid the common pitfalls of remote teamwork.
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Education & Development
Supporting children’s learning in primary education today
This free course explores different aspects of learning and teaching in primary education. It gives opportunities to engage with different types of activities that are designed to develop an understanding of learning and teaching in primary education.
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Money & Business
Developing business ideas for drone technologies
Are you a drone pilot looking to explore the opportunity of expanding your offering in the agricultural, forestry and rural sectors? Are you a student interested in knowing how drones can impact positively on agricultural sustainability? Maybe you know very little about drones but would like to experiment with them in rural settings. In this ...
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Education & Development
Principles and practices of peace education
Principles and practices of peace education explores how peace might be built in everyday classroom practice. It can be used as individual study or as a basis for CPD with a larger group. It introduces layers of peace education for children and young people, including inner-peace and wellbeing; interpersonal peace through positive relationships ...
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Society, Politics & Law
Carrying out research for policy and advocacy work
How can you effectively influence decision makers to change laws, regulations or policies? How can your idea to improve an issue or problem be adopted by those in power? If you are involved in law reform or policy work, then this free course, Carrying out research for policy and advocacy work, is for you. Whether you are employed as a policy ...
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Health, Sports & Psychology
Promoting the effective management of children’s pain – part 2
This is the second of two OpenLearn courses focusing on the effective management of children’s pain. The focus of the first course was on why pain matters and how a pain management framework can be used to deliver the effective management of children’s pain. This second free course further develops how to improve children’s pain management in ...
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Digital & Computing
Diagramming for development 2: exploring interrelationships
Diagramming for development 2: exploring interrelationships, is a free course that introduces you to the diagramming techniques of Influence diagrams, Multiple Cause Diagrams and Cognitive Maps. Using a case study project based in Africa, this unit illustrates the powerful use of systems diagramming for international development management. This...
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