Online courses directory (217)
This course focuses on the period between roughly 1550-1850. American ideas of race had taken on a certain shape by the middle of the nineteenth century, consolidated by legislation, economics, and the institution of chattel slavery. But both race and identity meant very different things three hundred years earlier, both in their dictionary definitions and in their social consequences. How did people constitute their identities in early America, and how did they speak about these identities? Texts will include travel writing, captivity narratives, orations, letters, and poems, by Native American, English, Anglo-American, African, and Afro-American writers.
The course is an introduction to Dante and his cultural milieu through a critical reading of the Divine Comedy and selected minor works (Vita nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistle to Cangrande). An analysis of Dante's autobiography, the Vita nuova, establishes the poetic and political circumstances of the Comedy's composition. Readings of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise seek to situate Dante's work within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, with special attention paid to political, philosophical and theological concerns. Topics in the Divine Comedy explored over the course of the semester include the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; love and knowledge; and exile and history.
Great managers are made, not born. Learn about the qualities and skills of great managers in this Business 101 course. Instructor Sherri Hartzell holds both an MBA and Ed.D., so she's an excellent choice to teach you about principles of management.
Start by learning about the different levels of management in organizations and then dive into how good managers lead to great employees. Students of business, budding entrepreneurs and independent online learners alike can benefit from these short, engaging video lessons and interactive online quizzes. Business 101: Principles of Management can prepare you to earn real, widely transferable college credit by taking the Principles of Management CLEP exam or the Excelsior Principles of Management exam .
When learning a new language an important first step is to learn the rules of grammar that allow people express what they want to say and understand what others are saying in a coherent manner. An equally important second step is to practise using the rules of grammar to become proficient in communicating in the language. In this free online English language course you will get to practise using important rules of grammar that will greatly improve your ability to communicate in both spoken and written English. You will practise the use of tenses such as the present continuous, past perfect, past simple, present perfect continuous and past perfect continuous to improve your ability to communicate. You will also practise and learn how to use superlatives and comparatives, and practise using reported speech. This free online English language course will be of great interest to all learners who have studied previous English language courses on ALISON such as 'Fundamentals of English Grammar' and 'Introduction to Conversational English', and who now want to further practise and improve their ability to communicate confidently in English.<br />
Lyrics Training is a Web application that allows you to read and listen to the lyrics from music videos and can be used as a fun and interactive way for language teachers and trainers to introduce new vocabulary and grammar to their students in a classroom setting. This free online language learning course will introduce you to the features and functionality of Lyrics Training, you will learn how to choose a song in the language you are learning and listen to the lyrics of the song word by word. Lyrics Training allows students to fill in the lyrics as they go along, and the difficulty level they choose decides how many words in a sentence are missing and they must fill in. This online language learning tool is particularly useful for students of foreign languages who want a fun and entertaining way to learn the correct pronunciation of words and it will improve their listening skills as students must identify words from a song. This free language learning course will be of great interest to all language teachers and trainers who would like to learn more about Web 2.0 applications that can greatly improve the learning experience of their students, and to all learners who would like to learn about using Lyrics Training for a fun way of learning a new language.<br />
This course is a continuation of 24.951. This semester the course topics of interest include movement, phrase structure, and the architecture of the grammar.
Tradition and innovation in representative fiction of the early modern period. Recurring themes include the role of the artist in the modern period; the representation of psychological and sexual experience; and the virtues (and defects) of the aggressively experimental character. Works by Conrad, Kipling, Babel, Kafka, James, Lawrence, Mann, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.
This course is the second of the three parts of our graduate introduction to semantics. The others are 24.970 Introduction to Semantics and 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory. Like the other courses, this one is not meant as an overview of the field and its current developments. Our aim is to help you to develop the ability for semantic analysis, and we think that exploring a few topics in detail together with hands-on practical work is more effective than offering a bird's-eye view of everything. Once you have gained some experience in doing semantic analysis, reading around in the many recent handbooks and in current issues of major journals and attending our seminars and colloquia will give you all you need to prosper. Because we want to focus, we need to make difficult choices as to which topics to cover.
This year, we will focus on topics having to do with modality, conditionals, tense, and aspect.
This course focuses on phonological phenomena that are sensitive to morphological structure, including base-reduplicant identity, cyclicity, level ordering, derived environment effects, opaque rule interactions, and morpheme structure constraints. In the recent OT literature, it has been claimed that all of these phenomena can be analyzed with a single theoretical device: correspondence constraints, which regulate the similarity of lexically related forms (such as input and output, base and derivative, base and reduplicant).
The Acoustics of Speech and Hearing is an H-Level graduate course that reviews the physical processes involved in the production, propagation and reception of human speech. Particular attention is paid to how the acoustics and mechanics of the speech and auditory system define what sounds we are capable of producing and what sounds we can sense. Areas of discussion include:
- the acoustic cues used in determining the direction of a sound source,
- the acoustic and mechanical mechanisms involved in speech production and
- the acoustic and mechanical mechanism used to transduce and analyze sounds in the ear.
