Learn more about this course.

Welcome to the course

Dr. Andy Parsons from the University of York introduces the MOOC on Next Steps to Higher Education.

Welcome to our course, Next Steps for University.

Professor Andy Parsons is an Admissions Tutor here at the University of York – anyone who has undertaken FutureLearn courses with us before may recognise him as lead educator on Exploring Everyday Chemistry.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll offer you a friendly guide to what coming to university is all about (it’s OK to be a little nervous, we can help with that too!) and how to make the most of your transition to the world of higher education. We’ll focus initially on making the ‘move’ to university (whether you’re moving home or commuting in), top tips for independent living, and the support that’s available to help you settle in; in the second week, we’ll offer an insight into how teaching and learning actually happen at university, and the skills we can help you develop so you’re well-placed to succeed.

It may sounds like a lot of ground to cover… but by the end, we hope we’ll have helped you map out your own journey to university and offer a better idea of what to expect when you arrive!

We’d recommend that you follow our educators so you can see their comments as they appear:

Please note that active tutor facilitation is limited to the number of teaching weeks from when the course run started. Please do not therefore expect any further tutor engagement from beyond then, although you are very welcome to continue to work through the course materials in a self-directed fashion from that point.

Throughout the course, you will also encounter a number of talking head videos from current students – these have been filmed from home during the pandemic – and we hope that you enjoy hearing first-hand experiences from those who have already made the transition to higher education.

Many of you will be familiar with the FutureLearn platform so we’ll get the ‘housekeeping matters’ out of the way in the next step. After that we’ll dive straight into the main topics for this week.

We hope that you enjoy the course, and again, please do take every opportunity to contribute to the discussions which will be taking place.