Online courses directory (19947)

The course considers the growing popularity of sustainability and its implications for the practice of engineering, particularly for the built environment. Two particular methodologies are featured: life cycle assessment (LCA) and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The fundamentals of each approach will be presented. Specific topics covered include water and wastewater management, energy use, material selection, and construction.

This free online law course presents the learner with a basic introduction to the world of legal studies. The lessons explore the definition of law and the role it plays in society, the nuanced differences between civil and criminal law and how various laws evolve over time. The course is an ideal study-aid for law students or for those who wish to acquaint themselves with the fundamentals of legal systems.

This second installment of the free legal studies course examines the court and trial system in detail and explores various civil and criminal procedures in the context of real-world case studies. This course is a useful introduction to those who wish to learn and understand the role law plays in modern society and the intricacies of the justice and court system.

This training course offers a comprehensive exploration of Outdoor Education and all its facets. The course takes a broad all-encompassing view and approaches the topic from a psychosocial, anthropological, geo-environmental, historic and marketing angle. This course will be of interest to anyone with an interest in outdoor adventure, either as a personal hobby, or in a professional capacity such as outdoor adventure guide or group leader.<br />

This course offers an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of videogames as texts through an examination of their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while reading current research and theory from a variety of sources in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and industry. Assignments focus on game analysis in the context of the theories discussed in class. Class meetings involve regular reading, writing, and presentation exercises. No prior programming experience required. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.

In this course students create digital visual images and analyze designs from historical and theoretical perspectives with an emphasis on art and design, examining visual experience in broad terms, and from the perspectives of both creators and viewers. The course addresses key topics such as: image making as a cognitive and perceptual practice, the production of visual significance and meaning, and the role of technology in creating and understanding digitally produced images. Students will be given design problems growing out of their reading and present solutions using technologies such as the Adobe Creative Suite and/or similar applications.

This course immerses students in the process of building and testing their own digital and board games in order to better understand how we learn from games. We explore the design and use of games in the classroom in addition to research and development issues associated with computer–based (desktop and handheld) and non–computer–based media. In developing their own games, students examine what and how people learn from them (including field testing of products), as well as how games can be implemented in educational settings.

This course will serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary academic study of videogames, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. By playing, analyzing, and reading and writing about videogames, we will examine debates surrounding how they function within socially situated contexts in order to better understand games' influence on and reflections of society. Readings will include contemporary videogame theory and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.

The television landscape has changed drastically in the past few years; nowhere is this more prevalent than in the American daytime serial drama, one of the oldest forms of television content. This class examines the history of these "soap operas" and their audiences by focusing on the production, consumption, and media texts of soaps. The class will include discussions of what makes soap operas a unique form, the history of the genre, current experimentation with transmedia storytelling, the online fan community, and comparisons between daytime dramas and primetime serials from 24 to Friday Night Lights, through a study of Procter & Gamble's As the World Turns.

This second installment of the free Outdoor Education course examines the environmental impact of human activity and conservation, environmental management and sustainable living in the context of aboriginal Australia. This lesson is particularly valuable for those interested in adventure sports, outdoor activities and managing the environment for recreational purposes.<br />

This free online Physics course covers electronics, electric systems, magnets, sounds and transformers, and much more. It provides a comprehensive grounding in Physics and is ideal as a complement to regular classes, a study or revision aid, or as a resource for someone pursuing an interest in basic science.

This free online tutorial reviews motion, electric fields, spectra, energy transfers, force, acceleration, gravity Newton's Laws, projectiles, light, and much, much more. This comprehensive grounding in Physics is ideal as a complement to regular classes, as a study and revision aid, and as a resource for someone pursuing an interest in basic science.

This course is built around practical instruction in the design and analysis of non-­digital games. It provides students the texts, tools, references, and historical context to analyze and compare game designs across a variety of genres. In teams, students design, develop, and thoroughly test their original games to better understand the interaction and evolution of game rules. Covers various genres and types of games, including sports, game shows, games of chance, card games, schoolyard games, board games, and role-­playing games.

This course focuses on novels and films from the last twenty-five years (nominally 1985–2010) marked by their relationship to extreme violence and transgression. Our texts will focus on serial killers, torture, rape, and brutality, but they also explore notions of American history, gender and sexuality, and reality television—sometimes, they delve into love or time or the redemptive role of art in late modernity. Our works are a motley assortment, with origins in the U.S., France, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Japan and South Korea. The broad global era marked by this period is one of acceleration, fragmentation, and late capitalism; however, we will also consider national specificities of violent representation, including particulars like the history of racism in the United States, the role of politeness in bourgeois Austrian culture, and the effect of Japanese manga on vividly graphic contemporary Asian cinema.

We will explore the politics and aesthetics of the extreme; affective questions about sensation, fear, disgust, and shock; and problems of torture, pain, and the unrepresentable. We will ask whether these texts help us understand violence, or whether they frame violence as something that resists comprehension; we will consider whether form mitigates or colludes with violence. Finally, we will continually press on the central term in the title of this course: what, specifically, is violence? (Can we only speak of plural "violences"?) Is violence the same as force? Do we know violence when we see it? Is it something knowable or does it resist or even destroy knowledge? Is violence a matter for a text's content—who does what, how, and to whom—or is it a problem of form: shock, boredom, repetition, indeterminacy, blankness? Can we speak of an aesthetic of violence? A politics or ethics of violence? Note the question that titles our last week: Is it the case that we are what we see? If so, what does our obsession with ultraviolence mean, and how does contemporary representation turn an accusing gaze back at us?

This course explores the properties of non-linear, multi-linear, and interactive forms of narratives as they have evolved from print to digital media. Works covered in this course range from the Talmud, classics of non-linear novels, experimental literature, early sound and film experiments to recent multi-linear and interactive films and games. The study of the structural properties of narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time, space, and of storyline is complemented by theoretical texts about authorship/readership, plot/story, properties of digital media and hypertext. Questions that will be addressed in this course include: How can we define 'non-linearity/multi-linearity', 'interactivity', 'narrative'. To what extend are these aspects determined by the text, the reader, the digital format? What kinds of narratives are especially suited for a nonlinear/ interactive format? Are there stories that can only be told in a digital format? What can we learn from early non-digital examples of non-linear and interactive story telling?

Note: This is the Arabic version, for English version, <a href="http://alison.com/courses/MSDL-M3">click here</a>.<br /><br />The third module of the free online course Microsoft Digital Literacy describes the common features and commands of different productivity programs. It also explains how to work with various categories of productivity programs, such as word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs, and database programs.

Ajax, which is an amalgam of asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a great way to create more dynamic web pages and enhanced user interaction. With Ajax, web pages can be dynamically updated without having to reload. This short video-based course is a perfect introduction to Ajax for those with a very basic knowledge of the programming language. The course is of particular interest to IT professionals and those who would like to build up a repertoire of programming languages.

Note: This is the Arabic version, for English version, <a href="http://alison.com/courses/MSDL-M4">click here</a>.<br /><br />It's easy to use a computer safely and responsibly if you know how. The fourth module of the free online course Microsoft Digital Literacy will help you gain confidence in computing by explaining the risks and threats to computer security and privacy so that you can understand and prevent them. <br />

What is the history of popular reading in the Western world? How does widespread access to print relate to distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, between good taste and bad judgment, and between men and women readers? This course will introduce students to the broad history of popular reading and to controversies about taste and gender that have characterized its development. Our grounding in historical material will help make sense of our main focus: recent developments in the theory and practice of reading, including fan-fiction, Oprah's book club, comics, hypertext, mass-market romance fiction, mega-chain bookstores, and reader response theory.

Asia in the Modern World: Images and Representations examines visual representations of Asia, interpreting them from both historical and modern contexts. This course is based around using the Visualizing Cultures website. Case studies focus on Japan and China from the mid-19^th to the mid-20^th centuries.