Get the Most Out of This Course
Welcome! Before we get into the how of finding trustworthy information, let’s take a few minutes to set you up for success: what you’ll walk away able to do, who is guiding you, and how the course is laid out. This is the orientation chapter, so there is nothing to memorize here. Think of it as reading the map before the trip.
Discover What You’ll Be Able to Do
This course has one practical promise: by the time you finish, you will be able to take almost any question you care about and find information you can actually trust to answer it.
That promise breaks down into a handful of concrete skills. By the end of the course, you will be able to:
turn a vague curiosity into a clear, researchable question, one that facts can actually answer.
set the right scope for that question, so it is neither too broad to answer nor too narrow to matter.
build a search strategy, including searches designed to challenge what you are hoping to find.
recognize what kind of source you are looking at and what it was made for, so you can tell where it came from (say, a study or a report) apart from what it is trying to do (inform, persuade, or sell).
trace a claim back to its original source, and separate whether a source is relevant from whether it can be trusted.
You do not need any background in research, statistics, or any particular subject. Every new term is explained the first time it appears, and every example uses an everyday topic, not specialist jargon.
Meet Your Teacher
This course was created by the OpenClassrooms Team with the help of artificial intelligence.
Discover the Course Plan
The course is built in two parts, and they follow the natural order of real research: first you decide what you are looking for, then you go and find it.
Part 1: Frame your question and plan your search. Good research starts long before you type anything into a search bar. In this part, you will learn to turn a fuzzy curiosity into a precise, answerable question, set its scope and success criteria, and build a deliberate search plan, including searches meant to prove yourself wrong.
Part 2: Find, categorize, and choose sources you can trust. Once you are searching, you need to make sense of what comes back. In this part, you will learn to recognize what a source really is and what it was made for, trace a claim back to where it actually originated, separate relevance from credibility, and keep a simple log of the sources you find.
Each part ends with a short quiz so you can check your understanding before moving on. The quizzes are there to help you learn, not to grade you.
With the map in hand, let’s begin where all good research begins, with the question itself. In the next chapter, you’ll learn what separates a researchable question from one that can never really be answered.
