1. The resources available in your comprehensive Module Handbook.

2. CROFT, A. & DAXION, R. (1997) Foundation Maths, 2nd Edition. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-17804-4

3. DUFFY, T. (2000) Microsoft Office 2000 Professional. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-201-61202-X

This module has 40 hours of whole class contact - typically 4 hours per week. (Maximum group size will be 20 students.) In addition, you will also have regular tutorial time with the module tutor during the module. There's a lot of work to get through, so it?s essential that you attend all sessions.

In Weeks 1 to 10, you'll be taking part in maths and IT workshops doing formative exercises. These will help you to develop your maths and IT skills by doing - the best way to learn! You'll be working on your own, with your fellow students and with the tutor on various tasks and activities. Your time will be divided more or less equally between maths and IT.

In the last two weeks of the module, the teaching format changes. In Weeks 11 and 12, formal classes will stop. Instead, you'll have time for independent study to practise your maths examination and IT class test. Your tutor will be available for tutorials to sort out any problems and support your revision.

A vitally important part of the module learning strategies will be your tutorials with the tutor. You will agree with your tutor how long they last and how often you meet. However, as a guide, we expect that your tutorials will be fairly short at the beginning of the module (say 5-10 minutes). Further into the module, your tutorials may well become longer, depending on how much time you have left from your allocated allowance - which is about two hours in total.

There are two parts to the assessment:

(1) a closed-book maths examination
(2) an IT classtest

Here are the details:

1) 1.5 hour closed book maths examination (worth 50% of the total marks - learning outcomes 1, 2)

This will be a standard closed book examination. Closed-book means that you will not be able to take any books or papers into the examination with you.

2) 2 hour IT classtest (worth 50% of the total marks - learning outcome 3)

In this classtest, you will show that you can carry out a number of IT tasks using Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint (e.g. format a text, import images into a file, produce charts, produce PowerPoint presentation slides).

Additional formative exercises

Formative work means work that helps you to prepare for your formal assessments. It gives you practice in building up your skills but you don't get marks for it.

Learning maths and IT skills requires you to practise, so to help you build up your competence in these subjects, you'll be doing exercises in class most weeks.

The exercises will be of various types, for example: solving mathematical problems, producing of graphs using Excel, processing and displaying statistical information, preparing PowerPoint presentation slides, word-processing a Word document, etc. You'll get feedback from your tutor after you've done each exercise. This will help you prepare for the closed book maths exam and the IT classtest.

You will have reached a level of GCSE + 1 year or equivalent in your education system.

* The Library
* A PC with MS Office and Internet
* Individual and group study space

This module provides you with two main things:

1) a foundation in basic numerical skills and calculations.

2) the ability to confidently utilise the MS Office suite applications data manipulation, word-processing and presentation.

In more detail: the maths part of the module covers simplification and expansion of algebraic expressions, including expanding brackets and factorisation; linear and quadratic functions; indices and logarithms; and basic statistical measures such as mean and standard deviation.

The IT skills part of the module deals with basic keyboard skills, introduces you to MS Windows and Office tools including Word, Excel, Powerpoint and the Internet and how to use these effectively.