Short Online Course

87 Credentials

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Academic Literacy: An Introduction

Studying at undergraduate level is an exciting and rewarding experience, but if you are new to higher education, or have not studied for some time, you may find it useful to brush up your reading, note-making and essay-writing skills, and to revisit the basic rules of punctuation and grammar. The course will teach you to:
improve your time management and organisational skills;
think critically about following instructions and assignment criteria;
identify and evaluate reliable sources;
use different reading techniques appropriately;
make notes effectively;
present a logical argument in an academic essay, taking account of your reader(s) and purpose(s);
plan and produce accurately referenced assignments.

This interactive course has been designed to provide you with the foundations of academic literacy, regardless of your discipline. Common issues in studying, academic writing and referencing are addressed, and you are provided with the opportunity to practise academic literacy skills through a range of activities.

This course does not teach English as a second language.

If English is not your first language then you will need one of the following qualifications: TOEFL 600, Computer Based TOEFL 250, Internet Based TOEFL 100, Cambridge CPE (grade C or above), or IELTS 7. Alternatively, you will need to explain why you believe your fluency in English is sufficient.

Skills

Study Skills

Advanced Creative Writing

Helping any coach deepen their practice in various ways: enhancing intervention skills, better understanding clients' needs, drawing on evidence, exploring attitudes to work/clients, and expanding client bases and professional standing. This course promises to be an exciting departure from traditional advanced programmes that generally offer intense immersion in one particular model but do little to help the coach develop their own practice in ways that are critical to them. You may be a business, life, sports, health, or financial coach; work in corporate, private or public sectors; with in-house, external, or assigned clients (paying or provided with your services for nothing); with years of experience, or just be beginning. Whatever your situation, your practice will be deepened and developed as a result of attending. The course is particularly suited to students who have completed an initial coaching programme, whether recently or some time ago, and are keen to expand their practice. Over ten weeks, you will be supported as you develop plans, identify key areas, gain peers to work alongside, and be guided and encouraged as you put those plans into practice. There will be opportunities to enhance your intervention skills, better understand clients' needs, draw on evidence rather than hearsay, explore your own attitudes to work and clients, expand client numbers, and build your professional standing.

Skills

Creative Writing

Analysing Classical Music: An Introduction

The purpose of this introductory course is to give you an overview of Medieval art and architecture and to build your confidence when analysing Medieval works of art for yourself. Each week we will look at a different aspect of art, architecture or urbanism from the Middle Ages. We will ask, how was it made? What is the historical context? How did the original audience understand and respond to it? Crucially, we will also consider current scholarly approaches to the Middle Ages, seeking to leave behind the old fashioned view that this period was a ‘dark age’ sandwiched between the classical and the Renaissance eras. Instead we will look at the Middle Ages as a ‘bright age’ of innovation, complexity and sophistication.

Skills

Music

Ancestral Voices: The Earliest English Literature

Have you ever wanted to know more about poetry but didn't know where to start? If so, this lively and accessible course is for you. Together, we will close read a selection of poetry from c.1850 to now, from Britain and Ireland, in relation to its wider contexts, considering formal issues such as word choice, rhyme, metre and metaphor alongside wider discussions of gender, politics, language and history. This course will demystify poetry, equipping you to talk confidently about form and content without the barriers to reading that are often placed upon it. We will discuss the following poets, looking at a selection of their poetry from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerald Manley Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. Some poets (and poems) will be more familiar than others, but the course will enable you to read all of them confidently. The course will offer these poets and their work as a springboard to reading further into the period, and exploring your own interests.

Skills

Literature

Ancient Egypt: An Introduction

Have you ever wanted to know more about poetry but didn't know where to start? If so, this lively and accessible course is for you. Together, we will close read a selection of poems in English from the mid 16th to the late 18th centuries, in relation to their wider contexts and in terms of formal issues such as metaphor, rhyme, metre, rhetorical patterning, and allusion. This course will give you the skills and knowledge to talk confidently about different kinds of poems in different periods, and to participate in some of the serious games that poets play. We will discuss the following poets: Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney; Shakespeare; John Donne; George Herbert and Henry Vaughan; Edmund Spenser and John Milton; Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell; Alexander Pope and William Cowper; and William Blake. The course will offer these poets and their work as a springboard to reading further into different periods, and exploring your own interests.

Skills

Archaeology

Animal Behaviour: An Introduction

Beginning with the courts of fifteenth-century Flanders, Burgundy and Italy, furniture design reflected contemporary architectural forms and ornament from the late Gothic period into the classical Renaissance. During the seventeenth century, the magnificence of Baroque art was echoed in the design of luxurious suites of furniture to serve the imperatives of absolute rulers like Louis XIV at the Palace of Versailles, whose fashions were widely imitated at other courts. With the eighteenth century came an interest in creating more intimate spaces such as the private salon, and furniture design responded accordingly. Early in the nineteenth century, the classicism of Napoleonic France and the eclecticism of Regency England gave rise to an explosion of new forms, styles, ornaments and techniques in furniture and interiors. This eclecticism continued throughout the nineteenth century in multiple stylistic revivals, finally ending in new, more modest styles of design aimed at a middle-class audience, as with the widely influential Arts and Crafts Movement. Formal lectures each week provide the course structure during the first half of the class; students have an opportunity to discuss concepts and examples in the less formal second half of class. In addition to background reading, students are asked to develop visual analytical skills through looking at examples of furniture and interiors in museums and historic houses. More technical aspects of furniture-making such as materials and techniques will also be considered, and students will have practice in descriptive writing before a class visit to the galleries of the Ashmolean Museum. The written assignment will ask students to combine visual analysis with historical context.

Skills

Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences

Archaeology in Practice

How do archaeologists recognise and interpret the lives of past peoples and their societies? An introduction to the methods and techniques of archaeological enquiry, from initial site survey and excavation to scientific analysis.

Archaeology is everywhere, from the buildings we walk past to the landscapes we travel through. Beginning with the history of archaeology and its growth from antiquarian hobby, this course will explore the practices and methods of excavation and interpretation. We will look at the diverse techniques and skills archaeologists have developed to tease out the stories of the past from objects and landscapes. We will learn to read archaeology in the earth and from plans and drawings. We will examine the archaeology of burials and begin to explore what artefacts may have meant to our ancestors. At the same time, we will explore questions about what archaeology really means, both in the broader context, and at the individual level.

Skills

Archaeology

Artificial Intelligence Concepts: Practical Applications

artificial intelligence, n. The capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behaviour; the field of study concerned with this. source: Oxford English Dictionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become ingrained in the fabric of our society, often in seamless and pervasive ways that may escape our attention day-to-day. The ability of machines to sense, process information, make decisions and learn from experience is a transformative tool for organisations, from governments to big business. However, these technologies pose challenges, including social and ethical dilemmas. This course focuses on real-world applications of AI to significant problems facing the 21st century, covering critical concepts like AI ethics and fairness, with examples from disaster planning, sustainable development, and human health. By focusing on diverse case studies, it helps develop a critical approach to AI applications, a recognition of practical and ethical challenges, a strategy to keep abreast of developments in AI, and an ability to generalise knowledge to new domains. It is aimed at a general audience, including professionals whose work brings them into contact with AI and those with no prior knowledge of AI. This is part of a series of courses that aim to confer an appreciation of how AI has already transformed our world, explain the fundamental concepts and workings of AI, and equip us with a better understanding of how AI will shape our society so that we can converse fluently in the language of the future. This course does not involve any coding and instead focuses on concepts in Artificial Intelligence for a general audience.

Skills

Computing, Engineering

Artificial Intelligence Concepts: Introduction to Machine Learning

artificial intelligence, n. The capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behaviour; the field of study concerned with this. source: Oxford English Dictionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become ingrained in the fabric of our society, often in seamless and pervasive ways that may escape our attention day-to-day. The ability of machines to sense, process information, make decisions and learn from experience is a transformative tool for organisations, from governments to big business. However, these technologies pose challenges, including social and ethical dilemmas. This Introduction to Machine Learning sheds light on the methods at the heart of the AI revolution, introducing fundamental concepts motivating Machine Learning and differentiating types of Machine Learners. This course studies various approaches covering supervised and unsupervised learning, including clustering, neural networks, and deep learning. It considers the application of Machine Learning to long-standing problems like natural language processing and the challenges and opportunities Machine Learning presents for the global economy. It is aimed at a general audience, including professionals whose work brings them into contact with AI and those with no more than a passing acquaintance with AI. This is part of a series of courses that aim to confer an appreciation of how AI has already transformed our world, explain the fundamental concepts and workings of AI, and equip us with a better understanding of how AI will shape our society so that we can converse fluently in the language of the future. This course makes extensive use of mathematical notation consistent with its level as a first-year undergraduate course (FHEQ level 4) in a mathematically-inclined discipline, such as economics, engineering, or computer science. The course does not involve any coding and instead focuses on concepts in Artificial Intelligence for a general audience.

Skills

Computing

Art Nouveau across Europe

From Paris to Moscow and from Glasgow to Barcelona, this course examines the richness and variety of European Art Nouveau. The years around 1900 were marked by an explosion of creativity as a new generation of artists and designers sought to invent a new style to suit a new century.

The appearance of this style differed hugely from city to city and from artist to artist, but shared a commitment to a varied and often contradictory set of principles. The creators of Art Nouveau looked simultaneously to the past and the future, to art for the people and art for art's sake, to social reform and luxurious decadence, to the national and the international. They sought both to change the world and to escape it. On this course we will explore the complex impulses, anxieties and hopes for the future that shaped the visual arts around 1900.

Skills

History of Art

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