Introduction

Introduction and guidance

Digital skills: succeeding in a digital world is a free course which lasts 8 weeks, with approximately 3 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.

The course will develop your confidence and skills for life online, whether study, work or everyday life. It explores a range of digital skills and practices, including digital identity, digital well-being, staying safe and legal, finding and using information and online tools, and dealing with information overload. The importance of developing a critical approach to life online is emphasised throughout, whether consuming or creating information. You'll be encouraged to reflect on your own situation and to apply what you learn to real-life scenarios, using a digital skills plan to keep a record of progress.

You’ll start with an overview of your own 'digital life'. You'll identify and reflect on your current use of online technologies and think about your level of digital confidence. All these aspects will be explained so don’t worry if they seem unfamiliar at the moment. There are case study examples to help with this and you’ll get plenty of opportunities to practise your new understanding and skills.

Part of this practice will be the weekly interactive quizzes, of which Weeks 4 and 8 will provide you with an opportunity to earn a badge to demonstrate your new skills.

After completing this course you will be able to:

• understand and be confident in your online identity
• choose and use the appropriate online tool for the task in hand
• use technology confidently and critically to achieve your study, work and life goals
• reflect proactively on your level of digital confidence, and identify steps for further development.

Moving around the course

The easiest way to navigate around the course is through the ‘My course progress’ page. You can get back there at any time by clicking on ‘Back to course’ in the menu bar.

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.

Completing the course

Gaining recognition for successful completion of this course is straightforward! Here’s what you have to do:

• read each week of the course
• complete the quizzes at the end of each week
• complete the end-of-course survey

For all the quizzes, you can have three attempts at most of the questions (for true or false type questions you usually only get one attempt). There will be feedback on any questions answered incorrectly.

Before you start

We would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to answer a few questions in this start-of-course survey to enable us to understand who is interested in this course. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass your details on to others.

Get started with Week 1.