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W200 - Understanding law

Welcome to the W200 Understanding law support site, your online guide to the internet as a study aid. Please note that this site is only intended for W200 OU Law Programme Students. (If you are a student on another Law Programme course, remember that your course has its own support site.)

If you are visiting this site for the first time, please see the Course Information section where you will find up-to-date notices that the Law Programme would like to bring to your attention.

As a Law Programme student, you gain all the benefits of being affiliated to The Open University and The College of Law.

As explained in your Study Guide, this Support Site is designed to be a useful additional resource and gives you access to the following information:

  • Internet activities - your course manuals contain a number of activities which MUST be done using the internet. You will find these activities on the site, together with their Comment sections (i.e. answers) so that you can easily check your work when you have completed the activity
  • Research eTMAs - you are required to do one of the W200 eTMAs (eTMA 04) using the internet. This eTMA and its guidance notes are set out on the site so that you can refer to it when working online. (Please note that the material here is the same as in your Assessment Guide, and has been set out on the site simply for convenience)
  • Course Information - where course-related information will appear, and which is regularly updated.  This may include important information relating to the eTMAs or examination, and so it is vital that you check this section of the site regularly.
  • Legal updates - a monthly update on important developments in the law.
  • Items in the News - a monthly update on interesting law-related items in the media.

    For the course policy on how Legal Updates and Items in the News relate to assessment, please see the note on this which you will find in each of these two sections.
  • ELITE - ELITE is the College of Law’s Electronic Legal Interactive Training Environment and it stores the online materials for your course.

    ELITE is used to store electronic versions of hard copy materials you will have received, such as, the manuals and the Study Guide.  It also stores a number of optional resources which are only available electronically.  These are primarily the i-Tutorials and podcasts.  Your Study Guide refers to these electronic resources and on ELITE you can find a guide to the i-Tutorials and podcasts available for your course.  This outlines the content of these resources and when you might like to refer to them.

    To reach the online materials, click on the tab “Online Materials - ELITE”. This will take you to a log on page for ELITE. The log in page gives you the following guidance Open University Students: Please use your OU Student Personal Identification (PI) number as both your Username and Password to login to ELITE (your OU username and password will not work as ELITE is not an OU system). All characters should be in uppercase. There are also special instructions for OU tutors on the ELITE log in page.
  • Optional reading - a monthly update on interesting additional reading which you might like to do if you have the time and scope for some extra internet access.
  • Law Library - this is a law section of the Open Library website, containing legal databases, websites and e-journals, general reference resources and newspapers and information skills resources.
  • Information about careers in law as a solicitor or barrister.

Introduction to W200 - Understanding law