Summary
Online Social Work courses can equip you with transferable skills like communication, negotiation and conflict management
Basic- and intermediate-level online courses are available for students willing to pursue Social Work as an academic discipline
Social work is all about understanding and improving the lives of marginalised people. Armed with patience, understanding and communication, social workers deal with people of all ages and from different backgrounds. Doing an online course in Social Work will help you undertake a variety of professional roles within this domain.
What is Social Work
Social Work is a profession based on practice and techniques that bring about social change, development and empowerment of different communities. It is an interdisciplinary field that makes use of various disciplines like Sociology, Psychology, Geography and Media.
Scope of Social Work:
Social Work courses will provide you with transferable skills like communication, negotiation and conflict management. With these skills and your passion for improving the lives of the most vulnerable, you can work in different roles in a variety of social setups.
After completing your course, you can work as a community social worker, mental health social worker, school social worker and military social worker. It is also possible to do some freelance work for social work staffing agencies or as an independent practitioner within social enterprises.
Some online courses in Social Work:
Social Work: Practice, Policy and Research — by Coursera
This four-month online course offered by the University of Michigan will equip you with all the skills needed to become a social worker. The programme modules highlight the importance of social work practice, the history of social work, the influence of public policies on society and how research work helps in the domain. It also discusses in detail how justice, equality, ethics, policies and international relations play a part in this domain. The course explains how social work can become an important weapon to forge bilateral ties, corporate collaborations and international relations.
Social Psychology — by Coursera
Drawing heavily from the concepts of Social Psychology, this 38-hour course offered by Wesleyan University, US, focuses on individual behaviour and perceptions. It explains how the need to understand individuals is important for a social worker as they work directly with people from different backgrounds and psyche. The course goes on to describe the interplay between human behaviour, perception, misperception, prejudices, reduction of prejudices, conflict and its resolution. The objective of this course is to train you to grasp the psyche of the individual so that you can apply other behavioural methodologies to improve their quality of life.
Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation — by Coursera
The University of Capetown offers this 6-week course that mainly focuses on technology and innovation. Drawing on social innovations and methodologies, the course aims to resolve problems by designing innovative solutions. It highlights the ways in which you can spot a problem. Here you will learn how to move beyond your comfort zone and apply newer problem-solving methods. The course also incorporates design principles to chart out such methods for the benefit of documentation.
Social Work 202 - The Foundations of Social Work — by Udemy
This 2.5-hour video course provides intermediate-level training for those interested to pursue a career in Social Work. Here you will be taught the basics of maintaining boundaries with clients, the choice of intervening on a case-to-case basis and the significance of confidentiality in the work field. The course presupposes basic knowledge of working as a social worker. Apart from outlining different areas under social work, it explains the different types of roles in the career structure to choose from. It also gives an overview of bias and how a social worker should deal with it.
How to Become a Social Worker: Training — by Udemy
This one-hour crash course can benefit those students who are set to enrol in Social Work programmes in college. It describes essential topics like social work ethos, policy, power, class, identification of social problems. It also enables students to think critically when they enter the formal world of this ‘helping profession’. The course identifies several parameters required to work with people and tells you how to use them judiciously. It also demonstrates how to work with different communities and map the demographics of a certain area, apart from outlining the ethical code of conduct needed for working at the grassroots level.
Last updated on 20 May 2022
