Online courses directory (19947)

World War 1 was the original catastrophe of the 20th-century. This course investigates the complex ways in which the First World War mobilized philosophical reflection during the war and the varied ways in which philosophical thought responded to the war.

Students in this course will be introduced to different philosophical reactions to the First World War through discussion and analysis of texts, documents, images, artworks, film, and music. The relation between philosophy and poetry will also be explored. In this course, students will gain historical knowledge, conceptual understanding, and literacy for a clearer grasp of the complex ways in which philosophy and the Great War intersected.

The course is divided into four thematic sections:

• An Absolute War
• The Clash of Civilizations
• Memento Mori
• The Hope of Peace

Across each of these thematic sections, we will explore different philosophical traditions and movements in England, France, and Germany during the war.

Discussions will be held in English, Dutch and French.

Scott Kriens describes how Juniper was able to take advantage of the rapidly growing internet router space. He states th

Chris Larsen, a veteran entrepreneur, CEO and co-founder of Prosper.com shares the ups and downs he faced during the fir

Rick Wallace, the new CEO of KLA-Tencor shares his insights about managing a large organization. &n

Kathy Eisenhardt, co-director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program and professor in Management Science and Engineerin

Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia, talks about the things that attracted him to eBay and the vision he had of where the company

Pam Marrone, founder and former Chairman/CEO of AgraQuest Inc., talks about how she turned her childhood passion and lov

Printing, or the capacity to reproduce text and image mechanically, has rightly been hailed as a technology with far-reaching impact. But the technology takes more than one form and originated in more than one historical context.

In this module of The Book: Histories Across Space and Time, you will learn how early printed books in mid-fifteenth century Europe were first modeled on medieval manuscripts, but soon developed new conventions that remain familiar to us today. This module also explores printing in East Asia, by wood block and movable type, and the late dominance of manuscript production in the Islamic world. 

In the first units of this module we compare and contrast manuscripts and printed books produced mainly in Europe from 1470-1700, looking at continuities and differences in layout, format, and the methods, materials, and economics of production. We also discuss examples of illustrated books and of handwritten annotations in books, including marginal annotations by readers and the marks of censors.

Two shorter units in this module focus on printing in East Asia, especially China, to highlight the features of woodblock printing which was common there, and on the Middle East, especially the Ottoman context, where a vibrant manuscript culture remained dominant until 1800. Taken together, this module gives an overview of three different contexts and technologies of book production before 1800.

Each unit features rare manuscripts and printed books in the Harvard Libraries, which viewers can investigate in more depth within the courseware and on their own.

HarvardX requires individuals who enroll in its courses on edX to abide by the terms of the edX honor code. HarvardX will take appropriate corrective action in response to violations of the edX honor code, which may include dismissal from the HarvardX course; revocation of any certificates received for the HarvardX course; or other remedies as circumstances warrant. No refunds will be issued in the case of corrective action for such violations. Enrollees who are taking HarvardX courses as part of another program will also be governed by the academic policies of those programs.

HarvardX pursues the science of learning. By registering as an online learner in an HX course, you will also participate in research about learning. Read our research statement to learn more.

Harvard University and HarvardX are committed to maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the community is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination or harassment in our program. All members of the HarvardX community are expected to abide by Harvard policies on nondiscrimination, including sexual harassment, and the edX Terms of Service. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact harvardx@harvard.edu and/or report your experience through the edX contact form.

Actuary is rated the best job of 2015 by CareerCast.com because it pays well and offers abundant opportunities for advancement. 

You may have heard of actuarial science, or you might even know an actuary, but do you know what an actuary does? During the course you’ll hear from a wide variety of actuaries about their careers.

And don’t be scared that the course will be “just a whole lot of mathematics”. Together, we will go beyond the math to learn how actuaries approach problems relating to risk, using examples from:

• Finance
• Investments
• Banking
• Insurance

You will learn how actuarial science applies mathematical and statistical methods to assess risk in these industries and other professions.

You’ll experience “hands-on” learning using Excel (or an equivalent spreadsheet tool) to project and investigate the financial condition of a company choosing appropriate strategies for the company through the use of simulations.

The course has been carefully designed for students from a wide variety of backgrounds, with secondary/high school level being the only assumption of mathematical background. Even if you don’t have any background in, for example, calculus, the course has been designed so you can skip over these sections without affecting your understanding of the rest of the course. You also do not need to have any Excel or other spreadsheet background to take the course.

For those with stronger mathematical backgrounds, extension questions are provided to test you further. You’ll learn a huge amount about actuarial science no matter what your background is!

Join us today. To connect with the course community before and during the course, join our Facebook group, and tweet us with #actuarialedX.

"Great introduction to this specialized field; every day there are new challenges where as a student you are put in a situation to learn and apply the lessons with practical exercises. Great structure of the course, with main concepts to review at the end of a lesson. I would recommend to anyone who would like to learn more about actuarial science." - Previous student

John Roos, chief executive officer of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, recommends having a simple mission state

Chong-Moon Lee, chairman and CEO of Ambex Venture Group, and founder of Diamond Multimedia Systems, talks about his humb

Do you love printed paper and wonder how much longer it will survive in the age of ebooks? Are you curious about how the mass-produced modern book emerged in the first place?  Come behind the scenes in Harvard’s libraries to explore the look, feel and even smell of nineteenth-century British and American books in this module of The Book: Histories Across Time and Space.

In 19th-century Britain and America, schooling expanded, paper cheapened, and new technologies allowed print to reach wider audiences than ever before.  After the rare and beautiful manuscripts and books showcased by earlier modules, the mass-produced, disposable objects that survive from the nineteenth century bear witness to the rise of the reading public.

This module investigates what scholars know about nineteenth-century reading, as well as how they know it.

This module’s six sections guide you through underlined, inscribed, defaced and repaired books in Harvard’s collections:

1. Name That Book
Find out what you can tell about a book when you’re blindfolded.

2. Handheld Books and Mobile Readers
What book did one soldier carry to Civil War battlefields in his pocket? (Hint: it’s not what you think.)

3. The Pen and the Needle
Did 19^th-century girls have to choose between sewing and reading?  The holes pricked in one book suggest they did both at once.

4. Leaving your Mark
Luckily for future historians, these children didn’t listen when people told them not to write in their books.

5. Detective Work
Try out some tools that build on what you’ve learned about books at Harvard to discover the stories hidden in your local library.

6. Over to You
Your chance to share what you have found in the books around you.

Join us, and discover how people in the first information age read, underlined, and repaired the pages that they treasured. 

HarvardX requires individuals who enroll in its courses on edX to abide by the terms of the edX honor code. HarvardX will take appropriate corrective action in response to violations of the edX honor code, which may include dismissal from the HarvardX course; revocation of any certificates received for the HarvardX course; or other remedies as circumstances warrant. No refunds will be issued in the case of corrective action for such violations. Enrollees who are taking HarvardX courses as part of another program will also be governed by the academic policies of those programs.

HarvardX pursues the science of learning. By registering as an online learner in an HX course, you will also participate in research about learning. Read our research statement to learn more.

Harvard University and HarvardX are committed to maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the community is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination or harassment in our program. All members of the HarvardX community are expected to abide by Harvard policies on nondiscrimination, including sexual harassment, and the edX Terms of Service. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact harvardx@harvard.edu and/or report your experience through the edX contact form.

More and more organizations are taking on the challenge of analyzing big data. This course teaches you how to use the Hadoop technologies in Microsoft Azure HDInsight to build batch processing solutions that cleanse and reshape data for analysis. In this five-week course, you’ll learn how to use technologies like Hive, Pig, Oozie, and Sqoop with Hadoop in HDInsight; and how to work with HDInsight clusters from Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX client computers.

NOTE: To complete the hands-on elements in this course, you will require an Azure subscription and a Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X client computer. You can sign up for a free Azure trial subscription (a valid credit card is required for verification, but you will not be charged for Azure services). Note that the free trial is not available in all regions. It is possible to complete the course and earn a certificate without completing the hands-on practices.

Brook Byers, partner at KPCB, talks about the diversity of the VC industry and uses a biological metaphor to compare the

Katherine Ku, Director of the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) at Stanford University, talks about the mission of th

John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talks about what distinguishes successful companies fro

Karen Richardson, CEO of E.piphany, talks briefly about her family background, and the attitude any entrepreneur should

Savi Technology has been called an overnight success 15 years in the making. Vic Verma, president and CEO of Savi Techno

Medieval Europe has preserved enormous quantities of books and documents—many millions of pages, in fact—written in Latin and other languages. However, only a tiny percentage of these texts have been edited and published. To gain access to the rest, you need to learn the art and science of reading medieval handwriting,

This module of The Book: Histories Across Time and Space introduces students to the world of medieval paleography, the science of reading old handwriting. This particular module focuses on notarial handwriting from the city of Marseille in the 14th and 15th centuries. The module features household inventories, which identify some of the fascinating objects found in people’s houses. Assessments and quizzes will allow you to track your progress as you move from letter-group to letter-group. In addition to learning the handwriting, we will take special care to explore some of the many abbreviations and other elements of the secular registers of the later Middle Ages.

Some knowledge of Latin or another Romance Language will be very helpful for understanding the texts you will read, but students without these language skills will still enjoy this chance to explore medieval handiwork.

HarvardX requires individuals who enroll in its courses on edX to abide by the terms of the edX honor code. HarvardX will take appropriate corrective action in response to violations of the edX honor code, which may include dismissal from the HarvardX course; revocation of any certificates received for the HarvardX course; or other remedies as circumstances warrant. No refunds will be issued in the case of corrective action for such violations. Enrollees who are taking HarvardX courses as part of another program will also be governed by the academic policies of those programs.

HarvardX pursues the science of learning. By registering as an online learner in an HX course, you will also participate in research about learning. Read our research statement to learn more.

Harvard University and HarvardX are committed to maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the community is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination or harassment in our program. All members of the HarvardX community are expected to abide by Harvard policies on nondiscrimination, including sexual harassment, and the edX Terms of Service. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact harvardx@harvard.edu and/or report your experience through the edX contact form.

Phenomena as diverse as the motion of the planets, the spread of a disease, and the oscillations of a suspension bridge are governed by differential equations. MATH226x is an introduction to the mathematical theory of ordinary differential equations. This course follows a modern dynamical systems approach to the subject. In particular, equations are analyzed using qualitative, numerical, and if possible, symbolic techniques.

MATH226 is essentially the edX equivalent of MA226, a one-semester course in ordinary differential equations taken by more than 500 students per year at Boston University. It is divided into three parts. MATH226.3x is the last part.

For additional information on obtaining credit through the ACE Alternative Credit Project, please visit here.