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Money & Business
Understanding your customers
This free course, Understanding your customers, is a short introduction to understanding customers. The course underlines the relevance of understanding customers as individuals, members of society and members of organisations. It clarifies some key marketing concepts and terminology and highlights some differences between consumer and business-to-business marketing. The course is suitable for a variety of learners, including small business owners and those working in small businesses with limited access to specialists, as well as marketing professionals and those thinking about pursuing a course of study to become a marketing professional. This free course is an adapted extract from the Open University course B206 Understanding customers355. Transcript36
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Level
Science, Maths & Technology
Scales in space and time
Scale – dealing with the miniscule to the massive, over milliseconds to millennia – is central to all the sciences. In this free course, Scales in space and time, you’ll go to the absolute limits of what can be measured – all through a study of an oak tree! By studying it you will be introduced to concepts in physics, chemistry, biology and life-sciences, and Earth and environmental sciences. Across these multiple disciplines you will meet time scales that include ages, durations and rates, and size scales including distances in three dimensions, which underpin areas and volumes.
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Science, Maths & Technology
Discovering chemistry
Chemistry lies at the centre of our modern life, playing a part in areas as diverse as the development of new drugs and materials, analysing our environment through to more mundane activities such as washing your clothes and making your tea. But to truly understand the role chemistry plays you need to have a sound grasp of a number of fundamental principles. This free course, Discovering chemistry, introduces you to some of these concepts, beginning with the idea that everything that you can see is made of building blocks called atoms. This leads on to a look at the chemical elements and how they are arranged in the Periodic Table, enabling chemists to rationalise patterns in their chemical and physical behaviour. Next you will consider chemical reactions, specifically how atoms combine with other atoms to form molecules, and how molecules combine with other atoms or molecules to form bigger molecules. You will meet simple (tried and tested) theories to explain the bonding in molecules and at how their shapes may be explained, and indeed predicted. And in a wider sense you’ll be looking at why reactions happen at all and how fast they go. This is also a beginner’s level course in the language of the chemist; you’ll learn about symbols, formulas and how chemical equations which represent reactions are constructed. Finally you will see how chemists ----- atoms and molecules, essential for making up solutions of a known concentration in order to carry out a reaction, or performing a chemical analysis.
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Level
Society, Politics & Law
Critical criminology and the social sciences
This free course, Critical criminology and the social sciences, will provide you with an insight into some of the main disciplines within the social sciences, focusing in particular on critical criminology. It will begin by outlining some of the defining characteristics of the social science disciplines of psychology, law, sociology and critical criminology. Using the global financial crisis of 2007-8 as a case study, the course will then provide you with an insight into how academics working in some of these different disciplinary backgrounds make sense of a similar topic in different ways. The course will conclude by considering the place of critical criminology within the social sciences.
TV, Radio & Events
Hospital
Hospital tells the riveting story of the NHS in unprecedented times.
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History & The Arts
National Novel Writing Month
You know how they say everyone's got a novel in them, just waiting to be written? Well now's your chance! Join writers all over the world as they write 50k words in a month as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), here are our top tips and tricks to get a head start.
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Education & Development
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Health, Sports & Psychology
Are you driven to distraction?
Can you drive safely and work effectively at the same time? If you ever need to make your vehicle a mobile office, by having hands free phone conversations, how confident are you that neither your work, nor your driving suffers?
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