Communication Skills Course 1: Essential

Communication Skills I is a General Communications Skills Course, specially designed for students reading for a Bachelor’s Degree. It draws on the expertise of international specialists offering an International Communication Skills Certificate (ICSC) on successful completion of the course.

Over the next 10 lessons, this course will guide your studies of communication, i.e. of understanding the basics of how communication works, and to acquire the knowledge and skills to put it to the best use in your academic and social life as well as in your career development. In this first lesson, you will learn what this course is about, how to study it, and how to get the most out of it.

The course is a certificate course. After finishing Course I, you will have the option to take Course II. If you successfully complete Course II, you will automatically get an International Communication Skills Certificate sent to your email address in pdf format. On application, the Certificate is also available as a beautifully illuminated hard copy which you can order by post. This Course will help you develop in the following direction::

Global and local: It helps you to acquire skills for communication in the global marketplace worldwide, which has become so important today, with its challenges, pitfalls and bewildering variety, but also with its breath-taking opportunities and career prospects. At the same time the course is situated in the local here and now: It wants to help you just as much to cope better with your daily life as a student who has to become an expert reader, an expert listener, an expert academic writer and an expert presenter of your ideas to your teachers and fellow students. Also, despite today’s importance of the global perspective, you are not expected to leave your identity as a student at a Nigerian University in Abuja and your national, ethnic or cultural identity behind, but to reflect on it, be aware of it, and make the best use of it.

Digital and online: All the course content will be available online. While you need to spend about an hour per week in an online interaction, there will also be material you can download, even send to your mobile phone, for further study and repetition while you are offline. Although print cultures persist and may do so for the foreseeable future, the digital interaction during this course already prepares you in itself for an important and ever­ expanding way in which today’s communications and human interactions take place: virtual, digital and in or nearly in real time.

Supplementary and complementary: This course complements your degree courses, as these are specialist courses in a given subject, whereas this course has a general setup and hence includes areas not covered by the degree course in which you specialize. It prepares and supplements the courses you attend and equips you to profit even better from the precious time you have in the collaboration rooms.

Basic and expanding: Students following the course will come from various backgrounds and have very divergent levels of English language proficiency and communications skills. Therefore, the course starts at a basic level and explains in detail. Students at a more advance level may simply skip parts they find too easy or basic, while others may want to repeat these passages again and again and follow the advice occasionally provided for remedial action until they are sure they have mastered them.

Incentive for further learning activities: Finally, the course cannot cover all aspects in this wide-ranging area of study. What it wants to achieve, however, is to make you aware of the difficulties, challenges and opportunities in communication processes and situations, and once you have taken this in, you will be able to proceed and improve on your communication skills on your own. This course wants to equip you well to be able to do this. Remember: As you and your life, and the world you live in will never stop changing, your learning process in communication skills will not be accomplished with the end of this course: They are a life-long challenge!