Open University
Save 10% on Open University Online Professional Development Courses
The IPP has negotiated with the Open University for members and employees to receive 10% off the flexible online Continuing Professional Development course fees.
The Open University Centre for Professional Learning and Development (CPD) has a range of flexible online courses, especially designed for people who wish to extend or update their skills. The CPD courses can give new skills, knowledge and ideas, which can be applied in the workplace. Most take around 30 hours to complete and can be studied at a time and pace to suit each individual without the need to take days off work. The discounted course fee is £445 (usually £495) for IPP members.
Each course draws on the breadth of the Open University's expertise in the work-based professional development and offers:
- Relevance to your work
Each course is designed to help you respond to the actual challenges you face in your day-to-day work.
- Immediate applicability
The strong link between a course learning and your work practice means that you can immediately use newly acquired skills and knowledge.
- Online flexibility
The courses are 'chunked' into convenient 1-2 hour elements to enable you to spread your skills development, to keep pace with your work patterns and take in total around 20-30 hours, starting and finishing when it suits you (within a course presentation patterns).
- Online convenience
You can learn online, at work or wherever it is convenient.
- Guidance and feedback
An expert learning adviser will provide you with continuing guidance and feedback.
- Action orientation
By the end of a course you will have built your own Personal Development or Action Plan.
- An Award of Certificate
Each course can enhance your CV with an OU Certificate of successful completion.
For a complete lists of all the courses visit http://www.open.ac.uk/cpd/index.php?q=node/49
Some of the courses which may be of specific interest to IPP members are:
Effective decision making skills
As managers we make decisions every day. Many of these are simple and routine, but take up a great deal of our time. Others are more complex, involve taking strategic actions - launching a new product into a new market, investing funds, opening a new business unit. This sort of decisions can carry risks - especially in a climate that is experiencing turbulent changes and great unpredictability. On this course the students explore how they can reduce the time spent on routine decision making, and how to focus this time on considering more challenging strategic decisions to be faced.
Effective Leadership Skills
Developing your leadership capabilities can be challenging. There are so many different views about leadership: some theories are popular for a while, and then others seem to take their place. It is hard to know which to put into practice. This course helps you take a critical, but constructive approach to these different ideas and then to identify what is of most value to you in the different ideas about leadership. It will enable you to take a well-founded approach to developing your own practices and skills in leadership.
Managing a Professional Practice
This short web-based CPD course is designed to support those who own and run small- to medium-sized professional service businesses. It will help to address some of the difficulties typically encountered with managing both staff and customers whilst juggling the demands of maintaining professionalism in practice.
Innovation for Business Results
Would you like to get a good idea of the chances of success and failure of a proposed innovation? Would you like to know how to emulate competitors' success or parry their innovations? This course will looks at the different types and sources of innovation and how different organisations have grappled with the challenge of producing better products and services through innovation. This will help you to analyse where and how your organisation can innovate.
Coaching at work is unquestionably one of the most powerful staff development tools. It is work-based, practical and involves learning at work rather than being separate from the job. Coaching is carried out informally in almost every workplace. This course will enable participants to develop more effective coaching skills in their own work setting. Focused on the role of a manager and/or a specialist in coaching staff at all levels, it is suitable for those wanting to develop their own coaching skills and for those who want to encourage coaching skills in the wider workforce.
How well do you communicate? Interpersonal communication at work
Whatever line of work you are in, regardless of your role and responsibilities or a product or a 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 producing that product or offering that 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.
This course explores the increasingly common phenomena of Virtual Teams - teams that rarely, if ever, meet face-to-face and interact and communicate with each other via ICT. Working together while being miles apart offers both the organisation and the individuals involved many benefits; effective Virtual Teams can combine the skills and competencies of the best available staff in an organisation. Such teams must be brought together, team members must be motivated, trained and facilitated and the life-cycle of the team, from forming to adjourning, must be managed. This course explores these topics from the perspectives of being a virtual team member, a virtual team leader and a virtual team manager.
Conflicts are inevitable - differences, disagreements, disputes or discord between colleagues, with customers or with suppliers happen every day. If badly handled or left unmanaged, they can be costly - reducing organisational performance, decreasing motivation, tying up people's time, or increasing absenteeism. This course will help you recognise the causes and sources of conflict and give you the skills to help you deal with the situation. Whether you are in the front line with customers, coping with suppliers, human resources or colleagues, this course will develop your knowledge and skills base so that you can resolve the conflict more effectively.
The evolving information professional
This course is for information professionals - librarians, archivists, information and knowledge managers, publishers - 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.
