Flexible online courses to update your professional skills
Current courses are:
- Becoming an effective project manager
- Creative problem solving
- Discover and apply your creative skills
- Ethics at work: professional ethics in the 21st century
- How to design and analyse surveys
- How to use coaching at work
- How well do you communicate? Interpersonal communication at work
- How to be effective on a governing body
- Mentoring at work
- Recruiting the best people
- Respecting religious diversity at work
- Social marketing
- Successful team working
- Sustainability at work: how to go green
- Linguistic phonics: teaching reading
- The evolving information professional
- What you need to know about marketing
- Art and life in ancient Egypt: the Nebamun wall paintings
Becoming an effective project manager
Projects are how organisations - in private and public sectors- make things happen. They deliver the changes that improve services to customers and increase operational effectiveness. Staff of all types participate in projects.
This course is a partnership between the Open University and CrossKnowledge. It blends OU expertise from years of teaching the subject and CrossKnowledge e- learning modules in project management. It covers project roles and responsibilities, how to launch, control and close projects, project teams and project risks. It will help those new to project management to lead and/or contribute to projects more effectively.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Click here for further information and registration on Becoming an effective project manager
Creative problem solving
Would you like to understand what creativity means, the factors that help and hinder creativity? Would you like to improve the creative climate of your organisation? This course looks at how creativity can help you employ the best people, use resources efficiently, stay ahead of the competition and cost savings.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Register for Creative problem solving
Discover and apply your creative skills
This course will help you to develop a more creative attitude at the personal level and have a positive impact on the creativity of those around them. At a conceptual level, you will develop an understanding of some of the ways in which perceptions are influenced by history, culture, beliefs, cognition and life experience. You will apply a range of techniques to a current issue to generate more creative solutions.
Course fee £495
Register for Discover and apply your creative skills
Ethics at work: professional ethics in the 21st century
This online continuing professional development course is about professional ethics – how to put ethical ideas into practice in your profession. As you engage with the various activities it involves, the course will raise your awareness of ethical ideas in your career and your workplace. It will open your mind to new ways of thinking about how to respond to ethical ideas with integrity and imagination.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Click here for further information and registration on Ethics at work
How to design and analyse surveys
This course covers the generic principles and processes of gathering and analysing data, followed by showing how this is then applied to specific contexts such as Travel Planning.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Click here for further information and registration on How to design and analyse surveys
How to use coaching at work
This course is for professionals and managers who are seeking to develop both their own coaching skills and to foster more effective coaching practice across all levels of their organisation’s workforce.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Click here for further information and registration on How to use coaching at work
How well do you communiicate? Interpersonal communication at work
Whatever line of work you are in, regardless of your role and responsibilities or the product or service that you or your organisation provides, communicating with other people will form a major part of your work. As communication is so central to the world of work, it follows that where communication is poor or inadequate, the quality of that work – be it a product or service – will suffer as a result. On the other hand, ensuring ‘good’ and ‘effective’ communication is a fundamental component of providing high quality services and products. Good, effective communication at work therefore is not a luxury or an optional extra but essential for success. This course is for those seeking to improve skills in communicating with work colleagues, customers and service users and external stakeholders.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Register for How well do you communicate
How to be effective on a governing body
The course will be of benefit to those just starting out as a new member on a board. This might include school and college governors, members of health trust boards, and members of voluntary sector management committees and will be of particular benefit to those of you who have little or no experience of governance of an organisation.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Register for How to be effective on a governing body
Mentoring at work
This course is for those who use mentoring to help their staff learn and develop at work, it provides tools, structure, ideas, resources, activities and support to improve mentoring effectiveness. It builds on and uses their own competence to facilitate learning in others.
Course fee: £495
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Click here for further information and registration on Mentoring at work
Recruiting the best people
This course is principally for managers, and professional staff who are required to be involved in recruiting staff because of their professional expertise. It may be of particular interest to those who do not have access to in-company training on recruitment and selection such as those working in SMEs or in smaller voluntary sector organisations.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Register for Recruiting the best people
Respecting religious diversity at work
The course offers an introduction to the issues surrounding the impact of religious diversity in both the workforce and the community that your organisation operates in. Setting your learning in your own work context, you will be encouraged to reflect on applying key issues as well as evaluating and gathering resources for future use. This course is suitable for all professionals who have to engage with religious diversity in the workplace and those with a general interest in the area.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Register for Respecting religious diversity at work
Social marketing
For professionals working in health promotion, environmental, transport and non-profit organisations, this course helps them apply marketing knowledge, concepts, and techniques to influence public behaviour and advance social goals.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Click here for further information and registration on Social marketing
Successful team working
Successful organisations rely on successful teams. That is to say, successful organisations rely on collections of individual staff members who can recognise the difference between being a team members and merely being a member of a group and who can work together successfully.
Most staff members are, in fact, members of several different teams - working with different people - on different things - at different times and under different constraints; in one team they might be the leader, in another, a team member. This course is aimed at developing their skills and abilities to become effective and successful team players.
Course fee: £495
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Sustainability at work: how to go green
Sustainability at Work aims to introduce the broad aspects of sustainability encompassed by UK government policy. As you work through the materials you will consider the environmental, social and financial aspects of sustainability and how they relate to the operations of your organisation.
The course also aims to enable participants to analyse the actions of their own organisation in the context of sustainability factors and to produce a structured analysis that will identify those factors most important to the organisation and then develop measures to monitor and improve performance.
Course Fee £445
Register for Sustainability at work: how to go green
Linguistic phonetics - teaching reading
Do you want to teach phonics in your classroom? Does time out of the classroom attending courses cause problems for your school? Through this online course, based on the face-to-face instructional programmed developed by Sounds~Write, an independent literacy training provider, you can learn how to teach reading and spelling using a linguistic phonics approach. Learn all key elements for reading and spelling through conceptual understanding, factual knowledge and the three essential skills: blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation. The course provides practitioners with a consistent approach to phonics which can be used for whole class, small group or one to one teaching.
Course fee: £495
Register for Teaching reading: linguistic phonics
The evolving information professional
This course is for information professionals – librarians, archivists, information and knowledge managers – looking to keep up to date with modern technologies, sources of information, and today’s users. It is for those in the profession who wish to stay relevant in this fast-changing world of information, find out how other information services are facing the challenge, and consider ways of proving their worth in the Google age. Amongst all the issues that the course covers, you will be given the opportunity to reflect on the possible consequences for your service of a new generation of ‘Homo zappien’ users, try out games developed for library users and archivists and consider the implications of the 7 Ps for the marketing of your service.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £495
Register for The evolving information professional
What you need to know about marketing
In any organisation many staff become involved in marketing issues with colleagues from other areas of expertise within the organisation, in day to day discussions, within working groups or teams, and sometimes with external partners. Non-marketing staff need to understand the basic concepts of marketing in order to contribute to these discussions. This short course is intended for managers in organisations where there is a degree of separation between functions and will explain marketing concepts and de-mystify marketing jargon in order to help them understand and contribute to marketing activities.
Course fee £495
Register for What you need to know about marketing
Art and life in ancient Egypt: the Nebamun wall paintings
Why did Nebamun, a grain accountant commission an elaborate set of wall-paintings in Egypt in 1350 BC? These tomb-chapel paintings are amongst the most remarkable and vivid to survive from ancient Egyptian culture. This stimulating course, produced in collaboration with the British Museum, explores the tomb-chapel paintings of Nebamun, allowing you to study the individual paintings in great detail and analyse them from an art historical perspective. The course explores what we can learn from these works of art about the social life of the period, and the problems they pose for modern viewers.
Go to the taster section to view a sample of the course material, do an activity and see a sample of the work-based activity.
Course fee: £295
Register for Art and life in ancient Egypt: the Nebamum wall paintings