Loughborough University Courses

Numeracy Skills for Employability and the Workplace

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In our highly technical world numeracy skills, particularly the ability to interpret data, are becoming increasingly important and are highly sought after by employers.A lack of mathematical confidence and poor numeracy skills are barriers to employment as numeracy tests are increasingly part of the recruitment process, often early on.Many people feel that they just simply “cannot do maths” yet the need to process numbers is a skill that we all need not just for employment but in our everyday lives.Improve or revise your knowledge of mathematicsThis free online course from the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University will help you improve or revise your knowledge of mathematics. You will gain the numeracy skills needed to succeed in both employers’ numeracy tests and the workplace. It is designed to build your confidence.Over three weeks, we will look at where numbers occur in everyday life and what numeracy means in this context.We will look at the rationale behind employers’ numeracy testing and the skills you will need to be successful.In addition to refreshing your understanding of specific numeracy skills (such as percentages, ratios, averages and currency conversions), you will develop essential skills for interpreting numerical data and understanding statistics.Build your mathematical confidenceThe course will develop your skills through a carefully paced, step-by-step introduction to relevant topics with opportunities to check your understanding through quizzes.There will be feedback at every stage.Completing this course will help you build your mathematical confidence and prepare you for both employers’ numeracy testing and using numeracy in the workplace.We hope you will join us.Note: This course includes video content and other visual teaching methods. Some information is displayed in tables and graphs. Blind and visually impaired students may need a helper.This course is open to anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics.Itis suitable if you are:applying for work placements or internshipsapplying for employmentapplying for a course that requires you to pass numeracy skills testsin employment seeking promotion or wishing to upskillanyone who wishes to refresh their knowledge of numeracyanyone who wishes to improve their mathematical confidence for everyday life.If it has been some time since you last used any numeracy skills you may need to spend longer working through the materials.The course is particularly suitable for those who have not had the opportunity to practise quantitative skills since school.

Getting a Grip on Mathematical Symbolism

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##This course is aimed at those who aspire to study science or engineering foundation courses at university level. It draws upon the experience of staff from the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University - a centre that has specialised for many years in mathematics teaching and mathematics support for science and engineering students who find the transition to university mathematics particularly challenging.Through an accessible introduction to graphical and algebraic techniques students will start to think mathematically and develop an informal understanding of vital properties of points, lines and curves before formalising mathematically some of these essential notions. We adopt a user-friendly approach and describe mathematical processes in everyday language. New ideas are developed by example and discovery rather than by formal proof.Further development will introduce the equation of a line and the significance of its slope and vertical intercept.The course will close by reinforcing the importance of mathematics to science and engineering. It will pave the way into the study of calculus by explaining that engineers and scientists need to build upon the ideas introduced in order to describe, analyse and predict the behaviour of physical, biological and technological systems.What will you do ?watch video explanations of key mathematical ideashear from leading scientists and engineers about the importance of mathematics to their workwatch fully worked mathematical examplestry to solve mathematics problems yourselflearn how to plot points and straight line graphs anduse these lines to solve problemstest your progress with quizzestry to apply what you have learnedshare ideas with other learners on the courseprepare yourself well for embarking upon a science or engineering courseProfessor Tony Croft has written two blogs posts which talk about the role this free online course might play in helping to prepare young people for the mathematical demands of university courses in STEM subjects:Trying to make it all add up: preparing young people for the mathematical demands of universityBreaking into science and engineering: strengthening mathematical foundationsThe course is designed for students who have some engineering or science knowledge gained through vocational qualifications or through workplace experience but who perhaps have not studied mathematics formally since leaving school. It will be appropriate for those who lack confidence but who need to establish a bedrock of knowledge in order to further their education.To gain the most from the course it will be necessary toplot some graphs (graph paper will be provided).Please note that this is a foundation, entry-level course and is not intended for those who already possess recent post-GCSE mathematics qualifications.

Innovation and Enterprise

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Introducing something new or innovating is easy in theory but hard in practice.New ideas can be plentiful, but selecting the best ideas and implementing them can be challenging.Managing the innovation process is neither a scientific process nor a black art.In addition to detailed research and planning, its success is influenced by human factors and, of course, luck!In order to make sense of this complex topic, we have created a model for the innovation process and its management. The course will describe the PROCESS; the way the innovation pathway works from creation of new ideas to their selection and implementation.We will study four main areas that influence this process:We will study the PERSON/PEOPLE that are involved in the process.This will include the entrepreneur, the inventor and the innovator, for example.By studying the POSSIBILITY of coming up with new ideas and making them happen, we will take a detailed look at creativity and opportunity spotting.We will focus on the PROTECTION of ideas through intellectual property and how this can help/hinder the innovation process.We will look at the PRACTICE of turning an idea into a new product or service.No previous experience is needed to undertake this course.

Data Tells a Story: Reading Data in the Social Sciences and Humanities

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##How can we answer questions about the world around us?How can we make decisions about what to do?Over the past years, more and more people have turned to data for help.Huge amounts of data are collected every day from millions of sources.This data has a lot to tell us!But data by itself is mute—it can only help us if we learn to make it speak and tell its story.In this short free online course, we will introduce basic ideas about collecting data, and techniques for turning data into information we can use. Along the way, we will hear from researchers at Loughborough University about the ways they use data in their work.Learn to answer questions with dataIn the first week, we will start by considering some questions drawn from arts, political science, geography and sport that we want to answer.We will think about what sort of data we might be able to use to answer these questions, and how we might go about finding this data.Once we have data, we will start to explore it using some visual tools we can either create by hand or using apps online.We will discuss how to understand these visualisations and begin to read what our data has to say.In the second week, we will follow up with ways to summarise and present data.You will learn how to choose the right summary for the type of data you have collected and the question you are trying to answer.We will conclude with an article about how to make meaningful comparisons using data, and an explanation of the critical concept of significance.We will look at the data we have collected and use these techniques to see what it has to say about our starting questions.Throughout the course, we will be collecting, sharing, analysing and discussing our own data and learning what it has to say about some specific questions.Improve your critical thinking skillsAlthough there exist very difficult and mathematically complicated methods of analysing data, the fundamentals of data analysis come from general critical thinking, and can be grasped with the basic examples and techniques we will cover.By the end of this course, you will have learned about how data can help answer questions in a variety of disciplines, and have hands-on experience with data collection and analysis.This course is open to anyone with a primary level education in maths and good critical thinking skills.It is suitable if you are:Starting or considering a course in arts, humanities, social sciences or sportIn a career where data analysis is becoming relevantCurious about applications of data to a wide range of disciplinesInterested in learning about and experimenting with how data can be collected and studied to help answer questions