Online courses directory (10358)

Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience and was immensely successful. Shakespeare is also rightly regarded as one of the greatest playwrights the world has known. This course will try to understand both Shakespeare’s popularity and his greatness by starting from a simple premise: that the fullest appreciation of Shakespeare can be achieved only when literary study is combined with analysis of the plays as theatre. Hence, as we delve into the dimensions that make Shakespeare’s plays so extraordinary--from the astonishing power of their language to their uncanny capacity to illuminate so much of human life--we will also explore them in performance from Shakespeare’s own theatre to the modern screen. At the same time, actors will occasionally join our effort and demonstrate ways of bringing the text alive as living theatre. Plays to be studied will include Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale.

Image courtesy Castle Rock Entertainment/The Kobal Collection

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Is there a required textbook?
The texts of all six plays will be required. Free, electronic versions can be found on numerous sites on the internet, including the following, which offers pdf downloads: http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/download.html. However, free, internet editions do not provide glosses or notes that explain difficult words and phrases. We strongly recommend that participants purchase texts (paper or electronic) that provide important aids to reading.

The goal of this course is to explore and develop plans of action for improving the job and career opportunities for today and tomorrow’s workforce. At this time, there aren’t enough good jobs or educational opportunities in the U.S. or globally to meet the aspirations and needs of all who want and need to work or to deliver on the expectation that every generation should achieve a higher standard of living for themselves and their families than their parent’s generation. This is a fundamental ideal that drives people all over the world. In the U.S., we call it the American Dream.

If we take the right actions, we can shape the future of work in ways that meet the needs of workers, families, and their economies and societies. To do so, we first have to understand how the world of work is changing, how firms can compete and prosper and support good jobs and careers, and how to update the policies and practices governing the world of work.

We also have to understand and better address the deep divisions and inequalities in societies that threaten the future of our economies and democracies. We will address these by using the materials from the course to build a new social contract across business, labor, government, and education.  You will shape the features of the new social contract as we go through the course and then vote on how well the overall social contract generated by the class meets your expectations for the future.

In this business and management course, we’ll start by tracing the history of work and employment that has made the economy work so well in the past. And we’ll uncover what’s gone wrong, in order to figure out new solutions that fit today’s workforce, economy, and society. We’ll also take you on a personal journey, where you will learn what employers expect in today’s world of work—the skills, flexibility, and knowledge that are crucial for success in the contemporary workplace. We’ll examine what has to happen in order for employers, workers, governments, and regulators to come together to forge new policies, rules, and understandings for governing the world of work in the 21st century. We’ll make this all come alive by highlighting the experiences, contributions, and aspirations of real people who are working right now to address these challenges.

So join us, and let’s get started on shaping the future of work.

Learn effective approaches to English language teaching. This is the first of two teacher training courses based on the internationally-recognized Shaping the Way We Teach English videos and resources and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the University of Oregon. You can begin with either course.

Learn effective approaches to English language teaching. This is the second of two teacher training courses based on the internationally-recognized Shaping the Way We Teach English videos and resources and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the University of Oregon. You can begin with either course. The next Paths course will be November 9-December 14, 2015.

Learn from Microsoft experts the necessary skills to implement SharePoint in your organization. This introductory course is ideal for IT Professionals seeking to understand how to plan and implement SharePoint collaboration tools within their organizations. The course covers the robust features of SharePoint sites, enterprise content management, and search.

You will learn how to plan and establish a server farm for on-premise and cloud, set up site collections, implement an Enterprise Content Management Solution, search, and design Managed Metadata/Term Store.

In this course, you will learn how to configure SharePoint hybrid solutions such as search, Business Connectivity Services, Microsoft OneDrive for Business, profiles, and extranet sharing. You will gain insights into the benefits of each of the hybrid solutions, along with technical steps on how to configure, troubleshoot, and manage a SharePoint hybrid environment.

Learn how to build a business that will not only succeed but satisfy the questions of sharks and venture capitalists.

Did you know that you can track some sharks’ movements on Twitter? Or that the scales on their skin have influenced the way humans design boats, planes, and even swim suits? Or that sharks have more senses than humans?

In this biology course, you will learn how scientists study sharks. You will join researchers on location in labs, aquariums, and oceans across the globe to learn about the biodiversity, biology, and conservation of sharks, rays, and chimaeras.

In this activity‑rich course, you’ll track movements of a wild shark, observe shark habitats and behavior, and dig deep into the fossil record. You will also examine topics in the functional anatomy, sensory biology, reproduction, behavior, and ecology of many of the 1,200 living species.

This is an exciting time to be a shark biologist. An explosion of new research methods and technologies are leading to a surprising world of discovery. We’ll introduce new, as well as traditional techniques, for classifying sharks, understanding behavior, and unraveling the mysteries of shark evolution. You’ll be invited to explore global shark populations and consider shark-human interactions and their impacts on history and culture.

You’ll be rewarded by your ability to see virtually any animal with new eyes. Practice thinking like a biologist while honing critical skills that can lead to broader observations about the ongoing history of life on Earth.

ArcGIS for Desktop users learn how to publish maps, tools and data to ArcGIS Online and turn GIS into Web GIS.

A quick, one-lesson introduction to the Unix-style command-line environment. This course is intended to get you up to speed on the shell — using a terminal, managing files and directories, and running command-line programs.

This course is intended for first year graduate students and advanced undergraduates with an interest in design of ships or offshore structures. It requires a sufficient background in structural mechanics. Computer applications are utilized, with emphasis on the theory underlying the analysis. Hydrostatic loading, shear load and bending moment, and resulting primary hull primary stresses will be developed. Topics will include; ship structural design concepts, effect of superstructures and dissimilar materials on primary strength, transverse shear stresses in the hull girder, and torsional strength among others. Failure mechanisms and design limit states will be developed for plate bending, column and panel buckling, panel ultimate strength, and plastic analysis. Matrix stiffness, grillage, and finite element analysis will be introduced. Design of a ship structure will be analyzed by "hand" with desktop computer tools and a final design project using current applications for structural design of a section will be accomplished.

This course was originally offered in Course 13 (Department of Ocean Engineering) as 13.122. In 2005, ocean engineering subjects became part of Course 2 (Department of Mechanical Engineering), and this course was renumbered 2.082.   

Learn how maritime archaeology investigates our changing relationship with the world’s oceans and seas, from 2.5 million years ago until today.

Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt (John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities) guides learners through an exploration of Shakespeare’s unforgettable character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and his historical origins.

In the first act of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock proposes a “merry sport” to the merchant Antonio: he will lend Antonio the money he needs if Antonio agrees to let Shylock take a pound of his flesh should he default. Shylock calls this contract a “merry bond,” and Shakespeare’s First Folio calls the play a comedy. But what does Shylock want from the bond, and how merry does the play ultimately prove? 

This course introduces learners to Jewish history both in Venice and in England, to the ways in which Shakespeare’s own audience might have responded to the play and its genre, and to the history of the play’s production through the twenty-first century. 

Learners will also be invited to share their own theatrical interpretations of The Merchant of Venice and to ask how the meaning of a work of art may change in different times, contexts, and cultures.

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The vaunted Information Revolution is more than Web surfing, Net games, and dotcoms. Indeed, it is the foundation for an economic and social transformation on a scale comparable to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. As a culture we have learned from earlier such transformations and it is important to recognize those lessons and chart a path toward intellectual and practical mastery of the emerging world of information. This course will provide the foundational knowledge necessary to begin to address the key issues associated with the Information Revolution. Issues will range from the theoretical (what is information and how do humans construct it?), to the cultural (is life on the screen a qualitatively different phenomenon from experiences with earlier distance-shrinking and knowledge-building technologies such as telephones?), to the practical (what are the basic architectures of computing and networks?). Successful completion of this "gateway" course will give you, the student, the conceptual tools necessary to understand the politics, economics, and culture of the Information Age, providing a foundation for later study in Information or any number of more traditional disciplines. Course Level: Undergraduate This Work, SI 110 - Introduction to Information Studies, by Robert Frost is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Ethics and Information Technology focuses on the ethical dilemmas that exist where human beings, information objects, and social computing technologies interact. The course explores emerging ethical models from historical and cross-cultural perspectives and then applies these models to a variety of new and emerging technologies that are inherently social in their construction and use. Initial examples of issues that the course covers in discrete modules include: the integrity of digital content in a networked world; identity and avatars; and interpersonal engagement through online games and virtual environments. Students explore the technological underpinnings of associated technology systems, experiment with individual and group interaction with technologies, and examine the mechanics of ethical and unethical behaviors. Course Level: Undergraduate This Work, SI 410 - Ethics and Information Technology, by Paul Conway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

To appreciate the opportunities and make wise choices about the use of technology, information professionals need to understand the architectures of modern information systems. In alternative system architectures, storage, communication, and processing substitute for and complement each other in different ways. This course introduces students, at several different levels of abstraction, to sets of functional components and alternative ways of combining those components to form systems. It also introduces a set of desirable system properties and a core set of techniques that are useful in building systems that have those properties. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 502 - Networked Computing: Storage, Communication, and Processing, by Charles Severance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

This course introduces students to the conceptual, institutional, and practical foundations of information policy analysis and design. The course explores the regulatory histories, paradigms, processes, and actors shaping the ongoing development of the information field. Course topics provide a comprehensive grounding in telecommunications policy; competition and antitrust; concentration, diversity and expression; intellectual property; standards and innovation; peer production and user innovation; information privacy; digital governance; and transnational information policy. The course also emphasizes the development of core information policy skills, introducing students to relevant analytic contributions from the fields of economics, communication, law, and public policy. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 507 / 703 - Information Policy Analysis and Design, by Steven J. Jackson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

SI 508 has been taught in various forms from 2006 to 2008 to master

As data collection and information networks expand (and stories of security breaches and the misuse of personal information abound), data security and privacy issues are increasingly central parts of the information policy landscape. Legislators, regulators, businesses, and other institutions of all kinds are under increasing pressure to draft and implement effective laws, regulations, and security and privacy programs under rapidly changing technological, business, and legal conditions. A strong need is arising for individuals with the training and skills to work in this unsettled and evolving environment. This course examines security issues related to the safeguarding of sensitive personal and corporate information against inadvertent disclosure; policy and societal questions concerning the value of security and privacy regulations, the real-world effects of data breaches on individuals and businesses, and the balancing of interests among individuals, government, and enterprises; current and proposed laws and regulations that govern data security and privacy; private-sector regulatory efforts and self-help measures; emerging technologies that may affect security and privacy concerns; and issues related to the development of enterprise data security programs, policies, and procedures that take into account the requirements of all relevant constituencies, e.g., technical, business, and legal. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 510 - Special Topics: Data Security and Privacy: Legal, Policy and Enterprise Issues, by Don Blumenthal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This course introduces students to the ideas and practices surrounding teaching, learning and research at a world class research university like the University of Michigan, and the emerging role in these practices of Open Educational Resources, including open content such as opencourseware, open access initiatives, open publishing of research and learning materials as found in open journals, databases and e-prints, open textbooks, related open software efforts such as open learning systems, and emerging open teaching experiments. The course will ground the students in how teaching, learning and research is done at the university level, and then survey relevant OER efforts, looking at their history, development, potential futures, and the underlying motivations for their progressive adoption by various members of the community of scholars. more... This course uses an open textbook Open Educational Resources at the University of Michigan. The articles in the open textbook (wikibook) were written by the School of Information Graduate students in the class. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 521 - Special Topics: Open Educational Resources and the University of Michigan, by Joseph Hardin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.