Where do I start?

In this section you will hear carers from very different backgrounds and circumstances talking about their motivations for study.

Your own starting point for study will depend on many things: your personal circumstances, previous educational qualifications, the length of time away from formal education or training, and opportunities for accessing the courses that interest you. To get you started we have provided links to free online courses at a range of levels. Some are very short (just 5 minutes) and others are longer. You can look at them whenever you want to, start and stop them as you wish, just dip in and out. There are no quizzes or tests and no assessments. All you will need is a way of accessing the internet. You could even use your phone, a tablet or an e-reader.

These courses are all from The Open University’s OpenLearn website. Many include free extracts from Open University course materials at different levels so they will give you a taste of what a more formal Open University course would be like.

We have grouped a selection of courses into three thematic areas:

• health-related conditions
• something for me: making my caring experience count
• something completely different.

When you’ve had a look through, you can capture your ideas in Activity 4.1.