Online courses directory (19947)

This course begins with an overview of the mortgage backed securities market.  We’ll learn about the characteristics of mortgage-backed securities and identify the factors that cause U.S. mortgage-backed securities to be considered a different category of fixed income securities compared to asset-backed securities.

We’ll learn about the U.S. mortgage agencies and be able to distinguish among them regarding their legal status, nature of the guarantees they offer and types of mortgages they securitize. We’ll look at the basic features of agency pass-through securities and collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) and how their structural differences impact cash flows received by investors. We’ll also get familiarized with mortgage-related terminology such as non-recourse debt, underwater mortgages and short sales as well as their implications for mortgage loans and their consequences for the risk and expected returns to investors in mortgage-backed securities and learn about the main aspects involved in the creation of an agency pass-through security.

We’ll learn about mortgage cash flows and prepayments and also learn how the interaction between prepayment risk and reinvestment risk adversely impacts holders of pass-through securities in both rising and falling interest rate environments. We’ll learn how to distinguish between rate of return and the different yields associated with mortgage-backed securities and get introduced to the commonly used prepayment benchmarks for expressing prepayment speeds. We’ll wrap up this course with an understanding of bond math, spreads used in assessing the risk and relative value, option-adjusted spread and collateralized mortgage obligations.

This course is part 1 of the New York Institute of Finance’s Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) Professional Certificate program.

In this course we’ll learn the key features of the most common types of tranches in agency CMOs:

• Z (accrual) bond tranches
• PAC (planned amortization class) tranches
• TAC (targeted amortization class) tranches

We’ll cover the primary differences between non-agency and agency CMOs and identify the main types of internal credit enhancements commonly used in non-agency CMOs. We’ll also learn how to contrast credit risk, prepayment risk and the typical amount of credit enhancements for different types of collateral, especially prime jumbo and subprime mortgage securitizations.

Next, we’ll look at the structure and purpose for creating Giants (FHLMC), Megas (FNMA) and Platinum securities (GNMA) and understand what we mean by reverse mortgages. We’ll review the structural similarities and differences of commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) with both agency and non-agency CMOs and look at the common features of the structured payouts on CMBS including IO strips and super-senior tranches.

This course also describes types of agency multi-family securitizations, the various ways of structuring the collateral pool and the payouts to investors and the characteristics of TBA (to be announced) trading and specified (spec) trading. We’ll review the factors that cause the prices of specified trades and TBA trades to differ, and the forward pricing of TBA trades based on (cost of) carry considerations, structure of a dollar roll, and the factors that determine the attractiveness of dollar rolls to investors holding MBS. We’ll wrap up this course with an understanding of ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) and Hybrids (Hybrid Adjustable Rate Mortgages).

This course is part 2 of the New York Institute of Finance’s Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) Professional Certificate program. This course will begin with a review of the first course in this program, Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS): Part I. 

Ready to earn a professional certificate and stand out in your field?

If you’ve gained a clear, comprehensive understanding of the concepts and theories, your next step is to complete the Mortgage Backed Securities Professional Certificate Examination from the New York Institute of Finance.

The exam comprises 70 questions, timed at two hours. To qualify for the certificate, learners must receive a grade of at least 70% or better.

Prerequisite for this exam:

Earn a Verified Certificate in both parts of the Mortgage Backed Securities program from NYIF:

• Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS): Part I
• Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS): Part II

La Codificación de Audio (también conocida como compresión de audio) es una representación digital de las señales de sonido para ser almacenadas o transmitidas por cualquier medio digital. En este proceso se busca siempre ocupar el mínimo número de bits posible para poder transmitirla por canales limitados en velocidad o bien poder almacenar muchos sonidos o música en el menor espacio posible. Todo ello se debe realizar manteniendo una calidad de sonido cada vez más exigente y, en los últimos años, permitiendo sistemas más avanzados que el estéreo que proporcionan sonido espacial. En este curso veremos los estándares más conocidos, como el MP3, así como otros formatos superiores aparecidos en los últimos años.

Unidades:

• Sección 1: Digitalización y compresión de audio, ¿cómo afecta a nuestra percepción?
• Sección 2: Escalas auditivas y tipos de compresión
• Sección 3: Estándares MPEG de compresión de audio
• Sección 4: Codificadores avanzados de audio
• Sección 5: Evaluación de codificadores

Want to learn how to think clearly about important financial decisions and improve your financial literacy? Finance for Everyone will showcase the beauty and power of finance. This introductory finance course will be a gateway into the world of finance and will examine multiple applications to apply to your everyday life. Join us to better understand how to apply frameworks and tools to make smart financial choices.

You will be able to value the impact of different choices available to you: from renting or buying, evaluating car, home and student loans, or deciding whether to go to college versus pursuing a new idea to simply understanding how the financial world works.

Starting with time value of money, the course will help you develop a full appreciation for the many applications of finance. Using real world examples, the course will enable you to understand and analyze many personal and professional decisions we confront on a daily basis. You will understand stocks and bonds, learn to allocate scarce resources in a value-add way, and adopt smart tools for making every day decisions.

Finance is simultaneously a way of thinking and a set of tools. Finance is everywhere. There are no prerequisites for this course except for a sense of curiosity and a positive attitude. However, a comfort level with algebra and numbers and an understanding of accounting (the language of business) will clearly help. We will, however, try to cover everything starting with fundamentals and highlight when there is a need to do some further work in specific subjects.

In this course, we’ll trace the evolution of the rocket, from rudimentary battlefield weapon to essential vehicle in the exploration of space.

Beginning with Germany’s effort to avoid the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles by developing rockets, you will learn how Wernher von Braun led the German effort during WWII. The course will then follow several parallel paths, including simultaneous rocket development in the US and in the Soviet Union, home of another rocket engineering genius, Sergei Korolev.

The end of WWII saw both the US and Soviet Union in a rush to acquire as much rocket technology as possible. You’ll learn how the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union drove this development and the roles both von Braun and Korolev played in the creation of these advanced rockets.

The course then traces how von Braun and Korolev led the transformation from rockets of war to rockets for space exploration. Von Braun’s and Korolev’s contributions created the space age.

You will learn how Korolev’s R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile became the launch vehicle for the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik. And you will learn how in the US, now working with Von Braun, used the Redstone ballistic missile to launch their first satellite, called Explorer.

The course culminates with the formation of NASA and America’s official entry it what would soon be called the “Space Race” between the US and the Soviet Union.

With identity as the new perimeter in today’s security landscape, it’s important to keep up on the latest ways to manage it. Identity—which defines what protocols you’re allowed to use, who you’re allowed to interact with, and what you’re allowed to do—has evolved significantly in the last few years.

In this security course, go beyond the firewall and ports, and learn practical steps and prescriptive guidance on identity management, based on proven, real-world experience from Microsoft Incident Response teams.

Start with a conceptual look at identity, explore Active Directory best practices, find out how to secure Azure Active Directory, and then get hands-on with a combination of videos, text, and hosted labs.

You will create a protective bastion host for an existing domain, configure Privilege Access Management (PAM) and Just in Time Administration (JIT), install JRE, and set up Microsoft Identity Manager. With successful course completion, you will understand the hows and whys of improving the security posture of your environment, and get started implementing and managing identity as part of your cybersecurity defense plan.

This course is part of the Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Big Data, and the Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Data Science.

Excel is one of the most widely used solutions for analyzing and visualizing data. It now includes tools that enable the analysis of more data, with improved visualizations and more sophisticated business logics. In this data science course, you will get an introduction to the latest versions of these new tools in Excel 2016 from an expert on the Excel Product Team at Microsoft.

Learn how to import data from different sources, create mashups between data sources, and prepare data for analysis. After preparing the data, find out how business calculations can be expressed using the DAX calculation engine. See how the data can be visualized and shared to the Power BI cloud service, after which it can be used in dashboards, queried using plain English sentences, and even consumed on mobile devices.

Do you feel that the contents of this course is a bit too advanced for you and you need to fill some gaps in your Excel knowledge? Do you need a better understanding of how pivot tables, pivot charts and slicers work together, and help in creating dashboards? If so, check out DAT205x: Introduction to Data Analysis using Excel.

This course is also a part of the Microsoft Excel for the Data Analyst XSeries. 

This course is part of the Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Data Science.

In this data science course, you will explore the theory and practice of select advanced methods commonly used in data science.

In the first two modules, you will learn about common applications of specialized data types. Then, in the remaining two modules, you will focus on unstructured data. You will work with tools such as R, Python, and Azure Machine Learning to solve advanced data science problems.

This technology-agnostic course begins by explaining the benefits of distributed cloud applications with an emphasis on maintaining high-availability and scalability in a cost-effective way while also dealing with inevitable hardware and software failures. Then, the course moves on to:

• Microservices and containers
• Networking communication
• Messaging communication
• Versioning, upgrading and configuration
• Data storage services
• Disaster recovery

This course is for anyone considering or actively working on a distributes cloud application. It is designed to provide you with a thorough understanding of these concepts, the various pros and cons of specific technologies, and the resilient patterns that are heavily used by distributed cloud applications. This knowledge will help you to easily build cost-efficient and fault-tolerant systems.

The course contains labs to practice your learning, review questions for self-assessment, and a final exam to validate learning. A score of 70% is required to pass the final exam and receive a certificate for the course.

In this course, you'll learn all about back-end web development so that you can turn a basic web app prototype into something that can store live data. We'll cover the basics of Node.js so that you can write JavaScript code to build the back-end of your app, as well as the basics of SQL and SQLite to write queries to work with a database. By the end of this course, you'll have a functional web app prototype that can be accessed on the Web.

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Distinguish between front-end and back-end within the context of web app development
• Create a back-end web server using Node.js
• Understand the uses and types of databases and DBMSs
• Construct SQL queries to perform CRUD operations on a database
• Deploy a web app on Azure

In this course, you'll learn how to turn a static web front-end into something that users can interact with. You'll learn the fundamentals of JavaScript and how to apply JavaScript to enhance the interactivity of webpages. By the end of this course, you'll have a web app prototype that allows basic interaction.

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Read code and describe what it does
• Utilize understanding of program execution to formulate algorithms to solve specific tasks
• Write JavaScript code to manipulate DOM elements on a webpage

Once you complete this course, continue onto Building Functional Prototypes using Node.js to learn how to write JavaScript code to build the back-end of your app!

ReactJS is the latest JavaScript framework to capture the hearts and attention of the frontend developer community.

Developers love ReactJS because it highly performant and renders changes almost instantly. The best part about ReactJS is that it is a relatively small framework and does not take too much time to learn!

Starting with the basics of JSX syntax, this course will teach you how to model UI components using React Components. By the end you should be able to manage the state and life cycle of React Components and use them to dynamically generate lists and forms.

What do hiring managers look for in entry-level developers? According to a recent survey, one of the most requested job skills is "strong object oriented design". Yet traditional computer science programs rarely focus on this area.

In this Java course, examine the role of objects in code, explore how to use them, and see how to design them for optimal code reuse and structure. Get tons of hands-on coding experience using popular Java objects, like Arrays and Lists, and then leverage those learnings to design your own object hierarchies. Plus, practice using inheritance, interfaces, abstract classes, and encapsulation techniques to help you manage large code bases.

Get comfortable employing industry standards in designing and managing complex relationships within a code base, as you add to your computer science skill set.

This course is part of the Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Data Science.

Machine learning uses computers to run predictive models that learn from existing data in order to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends.

In this data science course, you will be given clear explanations of machine learning theory combined with practical scenarios and hands-on experience building, validating, and deploying machine learning models. You will learn how to build and derive insights from these models using R, Python, and Azure Machine Learning.

Cities are first and foremost built for people, and in today’s world, people produce large amounts of valuable data, thus contributing to what we call “smart cities." As almost every building and every city is a prototype, these communities are in the early stage of development and require specific attention and expertise as we advance.

Smart cities, such as Zurich and Boston, consist of human-made structures or environments that are, in some capacity, monitored, metered, networked and controlled. With this functionality, combined with stationary sensors and mobile devices, data and information have become the new building materials of future cities. Using this data, citizens are now beginning to influence the design of future cities and the re-design of existing ones.

In this architecture course, you will learn the basics of information cities and urban science research, as well as how dynamic behavior and citizen-driven learning differentiate the responsive city from the smart city. The cities we present and develop in this course use the stocks and flows of information as the main drivers of change.

To deepen your knowledge of smart cities and give a perspective on the future of these cities, we also introduce the concept of citizen design science, a combination of citizen science, urban design, and cognitive design computing. Participants will furthermore have unique access to a design research platform for citizen design science. The intelligent use of data and information is at the core of this course, and these concepts will be the next generation of participatory design and design computing environments.

This course is part of the “Future Cities” XSeries, and builds on the experiences from our first two urban MOOCs: Future Cities and Livability in Future Cities.

In Troubleshooting Skype for Business, we examine the Skype for Business 2015 architecture and learn how to troubleshoot Skype for Business related issues including:

• Analyzing the client sign in process
• Conferencing
• Persistent chat
• Presence issues
• Remote connectivity
• Firewalls
• Edge Server configurations
• PBX integrations

This course will be most valuable for IT Professionals who manage Skype for Business deployments.

Effective and meaningful engagement with complex modern medical systems requires an overarching set of tools.

System dynamics is such a tool, allowing health practitioners to model and simulate problems ranging from the molecular level to the entire healthcare system and beyond. This introductory course will teach you the fundamental principles of system dynamics as you learn how to use system dynamics software to explore problems relevant to your field of health. Whether you work in molecular biology, clinical medicine, health policy, or any other health-related field, this course will equip you to investigate the effects of time delays, feedback and system structure. You will learn how to interpret the causes of typical system behaviors such as growth, decay and oscillation in terms of the underlying system properties, and to rapidly develop computer-based models and run simulations to gain insight into the problems in your domain.

This course will empower you with a deeper understanding and an enhanced capacity to achieve useful interventions in healthcare.

Want to take your design skills to the next level? Join a team of industry experts on this practical and informative journey from concept to conclusion.

This course will introduce you to the Design Thinking process and illustrate best practices for each step along the way. You’ll find this is an incredibly powerful tool for any field: from Engineering to Entrepreneurship and beyond.

You will utilize everything you learn in this course to create your very own project. In doing so, you will learn many practical and applicable skills such as user research and rapid prototyping, which will set you apart in your field.

The goal of this course is to provide high school students and college freshman a broad outline of engineering and help them decide on a career in engineering. The course explores the different disciplines of engineering and providing participants with a broad background in different areas of engineering.

Do you want to learn how race-cars are built? How robots are able to work independently? How is energy harvested? How is energy stored? How are organs built? How is the body imaged? How do you design an aircraft? How do electrons travel in micro and nanoelectronics? How are drugs delivered in the body? How do you build on soils that are unstable? How do robots see? How is light used in devices? How is data stored and managed? How is pollution mitigated? How are electrical signals processed? How are strong and tough materials designed and built? How is thermal energy managed? How is data transmitted? How are systems integrated? How do you make sure goods and services reach their destination? These are all things that engineers are dealing with on a daily basis and will form the basis of the first part of the course.