Features of the study materials

The aim of this learning package is to challenge you to relate its contents to your own experience and workplace. As a result, this course challenges you with relevant and ILO-focused information about written communication that is designed to improve your professional writing skills in that workplace. The course aims to encourage you to reflect on your current work-related writing practices and to help you make decisions about how you will approach them from now on.

At the beginning of each module, we present you with some specific learning objectives, detailing what we expect you to get out of the module. They are not all-encompassing; you will also have your own objectives. Once you have completed the module, we encourage you to revisit the objectives to reflect on whether or not you have achieved them.

Throughout each module, you will find two different kinds of tasks. The first, called activities, aim to get you to stop and think about the topics you have been reading about, to give personal responses to the material, to test your knowledge and to analyse case material. When you come to an activity, you will be provided with a specific activity template in which you can type your responses. You should not send your responses to these activities to your tutor (send only completed assignments to your tutor). For each of these activities you will be able to compare your answers with those that we have provided as model answers.

It is most important to complete these activities as you come to them and then to compare your responses with the suggested responses immediately (but not before!). These are not necessarily the only correct responses; they simply model a possible answer. They are, however, a part of the teaching in these modules and should not be skipped. It is also important to actually complete the exercises (that is, type in your answers). It is always a temptation to do them in your head and believe the task presents no challenge for you. Many of the activities in this course look deceptively easy until you actually try to do them.

Without a commitment to completing the activities, you are unlikely to improve your writing skills through this course. Professional growth will take place chiefly through your careful consideration of the activities and transfer of the learning to your workplace writing tasks.

The second type is tasks related to assignments. These are called assignment preparation tasks. These, too, need to be done when you first come to them in the learning materials and are possibly even more tempting to leave undone. These tasks help you make progress towards completing your assignment. The tasks are cumulative and result in your assignment being ready to submit by the time you finish each module. You will need to open a folder on your desktop in which you can collect all assignment-related files as you progress through each module.

Usually after an assignment preparation task, you will see a page that invites you to contact your tutor with any issues or questions that you wish to raise at that moment. These are simple reminders to contact your tutor as you wish. One of the keys to success in this course is to develop and maintain a momentum. Your tutor can be very helpful in encouraging you to maintain your moment or for suggesting strategies to work effectively through the course materials.