1.3 Online study skills

For the remainder of this week, you are going to get a taste of the sort of skills you would require as an online learner at university which in turn can help you to support other online learners.

If you study at a university level, you will be required to do research independently and present your findings, usually in the form of essays or presentations.

The internet can be a vast and wonderful resource for finding information about a subject and if you are studying formally with a university, you may have access to an array of electronic journals that the institution is subscribed to.

The internet can also be a terrible place to try and find information. Anyone can set up a website or write a blog and there is no guarantee that what they’ve published is true.

In the next section, you will watch Dr Annika Mombauer, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at The Open University, and Vincent Trott, a PhD student, carrying out a task which may help you when searching for information on the internet. You will then attempt some research of your own.

The following section is adapted from The Open University course World War 1: trauma and memory (available soon).