Getting ready for DD101

You don’t have to do anything. The skills you need to study DD101 are an integral part of the course and you will be introduced to these as you progress through the course. However, if you have time there are some things that will help you to get ready for when the course materials arrive before the course starts. Making an early start will probably make things a little easier at the beginning of the course.

Course related reading

The course reading for DD101 is all included in the course materials you will receive but a good general introduction to many of the kinds of issues in DD101 are included in the following book:

Kath Woodward's Social Sciences: The Big Issues (2nd edition), London, Routledge (2009).

Another thing you can usefully do is to read widely about issues and debates around contemporary UK society: the kinds of things discussed in newspapers such as The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Financial Times or another daily newspaper. There are also weekly and monthly publications such as The Economist, The New Statesman, The Spectator and Prospect which often contain discussion of many of the issues relevant to DD101. There are also websites such as the BBC and that of The Open University which contain a constantly updated range of high quality material.

Visit the OpenLearn website

Study skills

If you have already registered for the course we recommend that you have a look at the following sites:

The Skills for OU Study website includes essential advice on issues such as writing assignments, use of English for study, study strategies, note taking and working with others. The website is not designed for you to work through in a sequential way as you would a book . Instead of this, you have a range of topic based toolkits that you can choose from. The order you do this in will depend on which skills you want to focus. We would recommend that you start with the section developing effective study strategies, as this offers very useful information which will help you in the run up to course start.

Connected to Skills for OU Study is the PC4Study website, focused on the use of computers for study. This is a particularly useful and important resource which gives you tips about what to do before course begins; how to log onto student home, how to participate in online forums, how to use computers to support your work and how to use the internet for searches.

If you want a good general introduction study skills we would recommend the following; Northedge, A (2005) The Good Study Guide, Open University World Wide. And if you want to start thinking about how to prepare for the essays on DD101, you might find the following useful:

Peter Redman and Wendy Maples, Good Essay Writing: A Social Sciences Guide, published by Sage with The Open University, 4th edn (2011).

But remember that although early preparation is always a good idea, you will be introduced to the skills you need on the course.