Online courses directory (13677)

Nick shows a video of a motion capture technique used in the latest video games. He stresses the need for such innovatio

Learn about the ethics and policy issues that arise in the science and application of synthetic biology, from bioremediation to medicine.

Learn Engineering Mechanics, anywhere, on your own, at your own pace.

The study of structures and mechanisms in static equilibrium.

Statics is the study of methods for quantifying the forces between bodies. Forces are responsible for maintaining balance and causing motion of bodies, or changes in their shape. You encounter a great number and variety of examples of forces every day, such as when you press a button, turn a doorknob, or run your hands through your hair. Motion and changes in shape are critical to the functionality of man-made objects as well as objects the nature. Statics is an essential prerequisite for many branches of engineering, such as mechanical, civil, aeronautical, and bioengineering, which address the various consequences of forces. This course contains many interactive elements, including: simulations; “walk-throughs” that integrate voice and graphics to explain a procedure or a difficult concept; and, most prominently, computer tutors in which students practice problem solving with hints and feedback. This course uses algebra and trigonometry and is suitable for use with either calculus- or non-calculus-based academic statics courses. Completion of a beginning physics course is helpful for success in statics, but not required. Many key physics concepts are included in this course.

Effective writing skills are important for you to succeed in your studies at the collegiate level, as well as for your future career. This course is designed to improve your writing ability, which is necessary for entrance into English Composition 1, as well as for your ongoing success in other academic subjects. Pre-College English coursework focuses on active reading and analytic writing, with emphasis on organization, unity, coherence, and adequate development; an introduction to the expository essay; and a review of the rules and conventions of standard written English. In Unit 1, you will learn the basics of active reading and how active reading is paramount in your success as a student and beyond. You will also learn how to identify the main idea in a piece of literature, and how to create a topic sentence that conveys the main idea in your own writing. You will discover the benefits of prewriting, and will learn prewriting techniques that can be used at the onset of any writing project. In Unit 2, you…

No matter what career you pursue, you must be able to communicate effectively and clearly if you want to be successful.  This course will enhance your ability to do so by sharpening your critical thinking and writing skills.  We will begin with a unit designed to change the way in which you think about writing.  First, you will learn to think of writing not as a solitary act but as a conversation between yourself and an audience.  In this light, writing becomes a dynamic, interactive, and creative rather than a rote practice.  You will also begin to value writing as a process an admittedly difficult one  rather than a product.  You will come to see that writing is an act of discovery rather than a recitation of prefabricated ideas. Because this course is designed specifically for students in a university setting, the second unit will focus on academic writing.  We will learn how to respond to an assignment or test question by using the “PWR-Writing” or “Power-Writing” Method (PWR: Pre-write…

The ability to research topics and incorporate information from your sources into your work is an important skill both in college and on the job.  This course will reinforce the concepts you practiced in English Composition I by introducing you to basic research concepts and techniques.  It will also give you a chance to put these new concepts and techniques to work as you develop a final research paper.  We will begin by looking at how to build research into an effective writing process.  First, you will learn to think of researching not as a requirement for getting a good grade on a paper but as a valuable tool that can make your writing more powerful and convincing.  You will learn how to build research into your writing process so that you can add persuasive power to your finished work.  Through rigorous practice of the fundamental techniques, you will come to see that, like writing itself, research is an act of discovery rather than a search for prefabricated ideas. The intent of this course is t…

This course will introduce you to the history and practice of English as a scholarly discipline with the goal of preparing you for your future endeavors as an English major. It has been designed to familiarize you with the various tools that scholars have devised in order to facilitate the study of literary expression in English, from critical frameworks to close reading techniques. After an introductory unit outlining basic approaches to literary analysis, we will embark upon a genre study, devoting each of the four remaining units to a different genre of writing: poetry, the novel, drama, the rhetorical essay, and the critical essay. In each of these units, we will review a general history of the genre, read a representative sample or set of samples, learn genre-specific critical terms and theories, and apply what you have learned to essays of your own. By the end of this course, you will have developed strategies that will enable you to understand, analyze, and critically respond to works in any genre at a…

The medieval period, or the Middle Ages, spans about a thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire, which occurred around 500 CE, and the beginning of the European Renaissance, which was a bit later in England around 1500 CE. The idea of a period called the Middle Ages was a product of later thinkers who contrasted the explosive creativity and cultural transformation of the Renaissance with the seemingly subdued work of earlier centuries. Many saw this earlier period as less intellectually and culturally valuable. It is worth noting that contemporary historians often refer to the Renaissance as the Early Modern. The ideas, values, and tastes of this period are more in alignment with our own, and it is easy to appreciate and identify with them more than with those of earlier times. Nonetheless, the Middle Ages produced artistic works that not only reveal the culture and thought of that age, but also link strongly with artistic representations from later ages, including our own. Many fundamental ideas…

At the outset of the 16th century, Europeans tended to dismiss English literature as inferior to continental literary traditions; the educated Englishman was obliged to travel to the continent and speak in other languages in order to “culture” himself.  By the end of the Renaissance, however, some of the greatest works in the English languagefrom Shakespeare’s dramas to Thomas More’s Utopiahad been written.  In this course, we will read and examine these works, situating them within their socio-historical and literary contexts, while attempting to determine how the art of English language and letters came into its own during this dynamic period. We will begin with an overview of European history during the centuries leading up to the Renaissance in order to acquaint ourselves with the profound cultural and social changes brought about by the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, nationalism/colonialism, and the growing power of the middle class.  We will then embark upon a genre study,…

Scholars tend to label the period between the Renaissance and the modern era as the long 18th and 19th centuries, meaning that they span from around 1680 - 1830 and 1775 - 1910, respectively, and that so many literary movements and cultural changes took place during these interim years that a narrower title is difficult to come by. In this course, we will examine these formative cultural and literary developments chronologically, dividing the course into four roughly sequential periods: The Enlightenment and Restoration Literature; The Rise of the Novel; Romanticism; and the Victorian Period. We will identify and contextualize the principal characteristics of each of these movements/periods, reading representative texts and examining their relationship to those texts that preceded or were contemporaneous with them. As such, this course foregrounds the movement, the changes, and the continuities from the neoclassicism of authors such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope through the emergence of the novel in th…