The Comprehensive Academic Skills Fast Track
Instructor
kurdalib
Reviews
Course Overview
Welcome to the Comprehensive Academic Skills Course!
Congratulations on taking the first step towards honing your academic skills! This course is designed specifically for university students, graduates, and early-career professionals like you, who are eager to achieve academic success.
The course is designed and led by an experienced educator with advanced degrees (MPhil, MA, PhD) in education and language studies, and over 20 years of expertise in supporting students to strengthen their language and academic skills.
Throughout this course, you will explore essential skills that are crucial for your success in university and professional settings. Our structured modules will guide you through various activities and exercises aimed at enhancing your reading, writing, listening, and speaking abilities.
This course equips you with the essential communication skills needed to succeed at university and beyond. You will learn to read complex texts with a critical eye, extract and synthesise ideas, and transform them into clear, structured writing that meets academic and professional standards.
Through practice in planning, drafting, and refining your work, you will gain the ability to argue persuasively, avoid common writing pitfalls, and adapt your style to different contexts and audiences. The course also builds strong listening and speaking skills for discussions and presentations, helping you to engage confidently, respond thoughtfully, and communicate with impact.
By integrating reading, writing, listening, and speaking, you will develop versatile abilities that transfer seamlessly from academic tasks to real-world challenges.
What You'll Learn?
- Course Objectives
- By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Apply advanced reading strategies and critical analysis to extract, evaluate, and integrate ideas from complex texts.
- Produce clear, structured, and persuasive academic writing across a range of formats, demonstrating control of argument, evidence, and style.
- Manage the full writing process effectively—from generating ideas to drafting and revising—while overcoming common challenges such as weak argumentation, irrelevant content, or writer’s block.
- Practise the crucial stage of synthesising information from multiple sources to organise and plan writing that is coherent, purposeful, and original.
- Demonstrate effective listening skills in academic discussions and presentations, with the ability to summarise, take notes, question, and respond constructively.
- Deliver confident and well-organised oral presentations and contributions in discussions, tailored to academic and professional contexts.
- Recognise the different requirements of university assignments and workplace texts, and adjust writing style, tone, and organisation to meet specific expectations and conventions.
- Adapt writing to meet marking criteria and academic conventions, showing awareness of formality, purpose, and discipline-specific practices.
- Integrate reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills to approach academic and professional tasks with versatility and confidence.
- The course is designed to make a huge difference to the performance of university students who need to develop and apply key academic skills to complete written assignments and improve their grades. The course is also highly relevant for learners seeking to advance their careers by gaining new qualifications and expanding their knowledge in their subject area. In addition to providing essential transferrable academic and critical thinking skills, the course provides support in developing language skills for effective communication in English.
- Participants should ideally have an intermediate level of English proficiency, basic computer literacy, and access to the internet. A genuine interest in improving academic and professional skills is also essential.
- Interactive exercises and self-assessment quizzes
- Video tutorials and recorded lectures
- Downloadable templates for academic writing and referencing
- Reading lists and recommended resources
- Language practice materials for academic English
- Additional online resources and links