Online courses directory (19947)

The daily responsibility for protecting the patient from additional injury or illness rests with the nursing team. Following on from the Introduction to Nursing Studies course, the learner is now introduced to the essential elements of adult patient care. This free online nursing course provides an overview of the skills and techniques required in areas such as advanced patient hygiene procedures, environmental health and safety awareness for the practice nurse, and how to ensure patient safety and comfort in the adult care setting. Advanced principles of hygiene provides the learner with an overview of the functions, methods and techniques applied in providing adult patient care with particular emphasis on the daily bath, oral hygiene and the benefits of a back massage in patient comfort. Essential patient personal care routines are also discussed. Environmental health outlines the necessary health and safety procedures relating to patient care and the safe operational use of electrical equipment. Patient care safety measures introduces the learner to techniques that help prevent falls and protect patients who are at risk from injury, burns or scalds, together with steps to prevent the spread of micro-organisms in the care environment. This free online nursing course will be of great interest to all healthcare professionals who would like to learn more about advanced nursing practices and procedures in adult patient care.<br />

C is a powerful system programming language and is commonly used to programme operating systems such as Unix. One of the main advantages of programming in C is that it allows the programmer to write directly to memory. This means that key constructs such as pointers, constants and strings can be used within the memory in an efficient and machine-independent fashion. This free online computer programming course covers topics such as using pointers for direct memory access and manipulation in C, changing the memory address contained within a pointer and introduces constants and string literals. You will learn why pointers contain memory addresses of multi-byte variables, and how to visualise RAM in a new way. This free online computer programming course will be of great interest to IT and software professionals who would like to learn more about this powerful and efficient programming language, and to all learners who would like to learn more about the kind of programming language that is used to develop operating systems.<br />

A virus is a small infectious particle which can only replicate inside the cells of a living organism. Most viruses are harmless to humans, some are infectious and make us ill for a short period of time such as the flu virus, but some are highly infectious and can be deadly such as the Ebola virus. The study of viruses is called virology and is a very important scientific discipline. In this free online virology course you will be introduced to the fundamentals of virology. You will learn the basics of what a virus is and how it attaches to and replicates within cells. You will study the infectious cycle of a virus and how it uses the DNA replication processes within a cell to multiply rapidly. This free online virology course will be of interest to all healthcare professionals who would like to learn more about viruses and how they affect human health, and to any lay person wishing to dispel the myths surrounding viruses.<br />

Cell physiology is the branch of science that studies the structure and function of individual cells. Our increasing knowledge and understanding of cellular mechanisms and processes have led to great advances in all areas of biology and medicine. In this free online physiology course you will be introduced to the main topics in cell physiology such as the major components of a typical animal cell. You will learn about the mechanisms behind cell growth and multiplication, about the movement of substances into and out of cells, how energy is processed within the cell, and how and why cells maintain an electrical charge across their membranes called membrane potentials. This free online cell physiology course will be of great interest to all healthcare professionals who would like to learn more about the structure and function of cells, and to all students of biology and medicine who would like a greater knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms and processes involved in cell physiology.<br />

The use of interactive whiteboards has become common place in many school classrooms and training rooms. Interactive whiteboards give teachers and trainers an enormous capability in terms of the type of teaching techniques they can engage in and the kind of materials they can present as part of their teaching programs. One advantage of interactive whiteboards is that they allow a teacher to prepare lessons in advance and the SMART Technologies application provides a number of templates to help with this. This free online SMART Technologies course follows on from our Introduction to Using Whiteboards course and goes into much more detail about the use of the Lesson Activity Toolkit and also gives the learner useful tips and techniques to help with editing and using the application. You will be shown examples of the different templates from image sequencing and matching to timelines and anagrams, and where there is flexibility in the use of an activity such as using the timeline for more than dates. The course also provides tips on editing and managing the objects and text on the pages as well as showing you how to use the Paperclip feature to quickly access resources and the camera to capture information from the Web. This free online SMART Technologies course will be of great interest to teachers and trainers looking to make full use of the flexibility, interactivity and student participation allowed by an interactive whiteboard within the classroom or training room, and to all learners who would like to learn more about the functionality of interactive whiteboards within an educational setting.<br />

Ensuring adequate health and safety is vital in the healthcare setting to prevent the spread of pathogens and to protect both the nursing professional and their patients. This free online nursing course provides the learner with an overview of important health and safety guidelines that aid in the prevention and transmission of human immunodeficiency virus and blood-borne pathogens. Other key elements of the course focus on good body mechanics that demonstrate the importance of correct posture and body alignment for lifting heavy objects or when moving patients or materials from one location to another. Ambulating the patient is one of the tasks the nursing professional performs regularly to assist the recovery process and ensure patient comfort, sleep, and relaxation when bed bound. The type and range of positions are outlined, together with procedures to apply when positioning and turning adult patients with specific spinal or surgical conditions. Range-of-motion exercises introduce the learner to the challenges presented by immobility, the impact on the patient’s overall body system, and the resulting psychosocial effects. The purpose, type, and time of exercises are discussed with guidelines for planning the appropriate range-of-motion exercises, the possible contraindications and the importance of documenting a patient’s progress. This free online nursing course will be of great interest to all healthcare professionals who would like to learn more about good nursing practices and techniques that help protect and maintain the health and safety of both nursing professional and patient in any healthcare setting.<br />

In computer science control flow is a very important concept to understand for the development of effective and efficient software programs. Control flow is the order in which individual statements, instructions, or function calls are executed within a piece of software. In this free online computer programming course you will learn more about the use of statements and logic in C programming. You will be introduced to conditional flow statements, the mechanisms for controlling flow statements, and how to implement simple statements in C. Logical operators such as OR, GOTO and the While loop are also discussed in detail. This free online computer programming course will be of great interest to all IT professionals who would like to learn more about the use of control flow when developing software using the C programming language, and to all learners who want to learn more about the procedures used to write effective software programs.<br />

Since the late 1990s public spending in Greece was on the rise but revenue generated by the Greek economy did not keep pace. This resulted in a growing government deficit that was not made known to the European Central Bank. When the global economic downturn started in 2007 it added further to the Greek debt crisis and today Greece finds itself having been bailed out by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. This free online economics course looks at the key causes of how the economy of a modern European country can collapse. Different aspects of the Greek financial debt crisis are discussed, from rising debt-to-GDP ratios, to the fall in real growth resulting in recession. With falling investor confidence, Greece could no longer afford to borrow on the open market. They were bailed out by the EU and IMF with the proviso that the Greek government implement severe austerity measures. The Greek government and their EU partners are still negotiating about how to progress. You will learn about the options that are available including bailout and further austerity measures, debt default, or an exit from the Euro. The issues associated with each of these options are also discussed from both the Greek and EU perspectives. This free online economics course will be of great interest to finance and economics professionals who would like to learn more about the Greek financial crisis and to students interested in world or European economics and politics.<br />

Every year millions of people in the developing world fall ill or die from infectious diseases due to lack of awareness of basic health guidelines and practices. In this free online healthcare course you will learn about guidelines for avoiding various infectious diseases such as cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis, as well as guidelines for treating the resulting symptoms like diarrhoea. These guidelines include why it is so important to keep individuals and family members clean in order to avoid germs and infections. This course will provide healthcare and aid workers in developing countries with practical knowledge of these diseases and how they can be avoided by using simple and effective hygiene practices and procedures. This free online healthcare course will be of great interest to all healthcare professionals who would like to learn more about the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, and to all learners who would like a greater understanding of healthcare guidelines for avoiding infectious diseases.<br />

Dyslexia is a condition affecting literacy skills. It is not caused by problems with vision, rather, it is a developmental reading disorder that occurs when the brain does not properly recognise and process certain symbols. This free online dyslexia course analyses how our image of normality affects the way we as a society define conditions such as dyslexia. You will learn how important it is to integrate the different psychological accounts of dyslexia in order to provide a full explanation of potential causes and strategies for remediation. The course presents dyslexia as a ‘case study’ in how different perspectives might be complementary to each other and outlines different approaches to the definition of ‘abnormality’. You will learn about the different explanations of dyslexia including behavioural, cognitive, and biological perspectives. The course also considers the more practical issue of how to approach the treatment of dyslexia and associated difficulties. This free online dyslexia course will be of great interest to all professionals in the areas of education, child development, and adult literacy who would like to learn more about the causes of and treatment for dyslexia, and to all learners who would like a greater understanding of this common condition.<br />

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a very important topic to understand in economics. It measures the monetary value of final goods and services of a country within a given time period and is a key metric which can be used to gauge a country's standard of living. In this free online economics course you will start by learning about the circular flow of money in an economy. The components of Gross Domestic Product are then identified and explained in terms of how different expenditure is categorised. A single Gross Domestic Product figure gives very little information so you will learn how to look at it in relation to past history by using Price Indexing to work out what is real growth and what inflation is when compared with a base year. This free online economics course will be of great interest to economics, finance and business professionals who would like a better understanding of Gross Domestic Product and its role as an indicator of the economic health of a country, and to any learner who wants to have a better understanding of financial news and how the economies of countries work.<br />

The C programming language is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages and is commonly used to program operating systems such as Unix. It is a general-purpose programming language and one of the main advantages of programming in C is that it allows the programmer to write directly to memory. This means that key constructs within C-generated software programs can be used within the memory in an efficient and machine-independent fashion. <br /><br />ALISON's free online C programming Diploma course introduces you to the important concepts when programming in C. You will learn how the C programming language works with data, what program flow is, and how to use functions, methods and routines. You will be introduced to conditional flow statements, the mechanisms for controlling flow statements, and how to implement simple statements. Logical operators such as OR, GOTO and the While loop are also discussed in detail. The course covers topics such as using pointers for direct memory access and manipulation in C, changing the memory address contained within a pointer and introduces constants and string literals. You will learn why pointers contain memory addresses of multi-byte variables, and how to visualize RAM in a new way. You will also get step by step instructions on how to create simple C programs and how to run them. <br /><br />This free online C programming Diploma course will be of great interest to all IT, software and computer professionals who would like a greater knowledge and understanding of the C programming language and its key concepts and features, and to learners who would like to learn more about this widely used programming language.<br />

Vast quantities of data and information appear on the web every year. This data takes on a wide variety of forms such as text, images, video, code and statistics to name just a few. Data and information can also be multi-lingual and dynamic in that, for example, blogs and wikis are being constantly updated and modified. Companies like Google spend millions of dollars trying to continuously improve human-computer information retrieval methods so that the information obtained from a search is relevant. This is now considered to be one of the most important areas in web development. This free online human-computer information retrieval course shows how modern search techniques integrate information retrieval methods with human-computer interaction studies so that data and information are represented in such a way that leads the user quickly and efficiently to relevant results. In this course you will learn about techniques associated with human-computer information retrieval such as spelling suggestions and automatic query reformulation which puts control of selection and interpretation in the user’s hands. Faceted search enables users to navigate information hierarchically, going from a category to its sub-categories, while ‘lookahead’ provides a general approach to exploration. For example, various web applications employ AJAX to automatically complete query terms and suggest popular searches. This free online human-computer information retrieval course will be of great interest to all IT professionals who would like a greater knowledge and understanding of human-computer information retrieval methods, and to all learners who would like to learn more about how data and information are accessed by search engines.<br />

Adobe Photoshop CS6 is the world's most popular graphics and digital photo-editing software program. It is used by millions of graphic designers and photographers. This free online Adobe Photoshop CS6 video tutorial course is the ideal introduction to the skills and techniques needed to master image manipulation and photographic re-touching. The course will guide you through how to use Adobe Photoshop CS6 and its user interface and you will learn in a step-by-step manner how to use the basic essential tools for editing and enhancing your photographs. The course will show you how to remove background elements from the image, re-touch blemishes in the original photograph, crop elements out of the image, insert text onto an image, create marquees around elements to remove or modify them, and free transform a selection that has been cut from an image. This free online Adobe Photoshop CS6 tutorial video-based course is ideal for photographers and graphic designers who would like to learn more about image manipulation using the range of tools found in Adobe Photoshop CS6. It is also ideal for small business owners or home-based entrepreneurs keen to develop their image production skills and build a web presence using content created and produced independently. The Adobe Photoshop CS6 tutorial course can be used alongside ALISON's Graphic Design suite of courses to truly allow you express your creativity.<br />

The human skeleton is an amazing and complex structure and is involved in vital functions such as supporting the bodily organs, providing points of attachment for the musculature system to allow movement, maintaining body shape, and protecting vital organs such as the brain and spinal cord. In this free online human anatomy course you will learn about the structure, development and function of bones within the human skeletal system. It outlines how bones develop from the fetal through to the adult stages of life. You will be introduced to the bones of the axial skeleton formed by the vertebral column, rib cage and skull. You will also learn about the appendicular skeleton formed by the pectoral girdle, the pelvic girdle and the upper and lower limbs. This free online human anatomy course will be of great interest to all healthcare professionals who would like to learn more about the human skeletal system and its biological functions, and to all learners who would like to learn more about the vital role it plays in maintaining human health.<br />

Fiscal and monetary policies are two strategies used to direct a country's economic goals. Fiscal policy involves the government and how it uses revenue and expenditure to influence a country's economy. Monetary policy is implemented by the central bank of a country and is used to influence that country's money supply. Fiscal and monetary policies are very important concepts to understand in economics as they can have profound effects on the lives and livelihoods of a country's entire population. In this free online economics course you will gain a thorough knowledge and understanding of the economic concepts behind both fiscal and monetary policies and how they are implemented to influence a country's economic goals. You will also learn about supply and demand for money and how this impacts interest rates. This free online economics course will be of great interest to all economics and finance professionals who would like to learn more about the role fiscal and monetary policies play in shaping a country's economy, and to all learners who would like to learn more about economic policies that can have a direct effect on their lives.<br />

In order for the nursing professional to devise a correct, accurate and effective care plan for their patients, it is necessary to perform a series of medical tests and evaluations. This free online nursing studies course provides the learner with an overview of the vital role of the nursing professional in supporting both the Patient and Physician along with the procedures and techniques applied when performing the Physical Examination, the Physical Assessment, Specimen Collection and measurement of Patient Vital Signs to ensure accurate patient diagnosis and corresponding care plan. The learner will first gain an overview of the systematic approach to conducting an effective physical examination. Components of the physical assessment provides the learner with an overview of the assessment process which is based on subjective data from the patient's complaint and objective data resulting from tests carried out and observations made during the physical examination. Specimen collection provides a more focused series of test procedures to determine the functioning and health status of vital internal organs and body components. Patient vital signs are measured through weight, blood pressure, pulse and temperature readings. These measurements form the basis for other more in depth medical checks that are performed when necessary. This free online nursing studies course will be of great interest to all healthcare professionals who would like to learn more about practises and procedures utilised by nursing professionals for the effective diagnosis and treatment of patients in a healthcare setting.<br />

Business and travel English language skills are in great demand around the world as more and more businesses and organisations conduct their international business operations through the medium of the English language. In this free online business and travel English language course you will be introduced to conversational vocabulary and dialogues that will help you learn English language skills in the areas of business and travel. You will listen to dialogues about job interviews and how to ask and answer interview questions in English. You will also learn important and useful vocabulary when making business telephone calls. You will learn about the importance of small talk when initiating and forming business relationships and how to differentiate between colloquial and formal English. You will also learn how to reserve a hotel room, book a table in a restaurant and use different modes of transport when travelling. This free online English language course will be of great interest to all business professionals who would like to improve their English language skills in the areas of business and travel, and to all learners who would like to become more confident when communicating in English.<br />

The human cardiovascular system is made up of the heart, blood vessels and blood supply. These act as one system to supply vital oxygen, nutrients, and hormones to tissues and remove carbon dioxide and metabolic waste products. This system also plays a central role in stabilizing body temperature and pH levels, as well as maintaining homeostasis. In this free online cardiovascular anatomy and physiology course, the learner will explore the structure and functions of the cardiovascular system. The course explains the composition of blood and provides an overview of how blood is used for transport and energy mobilization. It also outlines how the blood responds to haemorrhage and is involved in maintaining the correct body temperature. The course then examines blood vessels, explaining the function and location of arteries, veins and capillaries. Finally, it covers the anatomy of the heart, describing the structure of the chambers of the heart, the cardiac valves and the heart walls. It also describes the pericardium, the NAVL and the fibrous skeleton of the heart. This free online cardiovascular anatomy and physiology course will be of great interest to professionals in the health care sector who would like a greater knowledge and understanding of the human cardiovascular system. Students of medicine and biology who would like to study the structure and function of the heart, blood vessels and blood supply, which make up this very important anatomical system, will also find this course of great help.<br />

Aggregate supply and demand are key concepts in macroeconomics as they help economists interpret events in the past to help predict the future. The aggregate supply curve model demonstrates the relationship between the overall price level of a country and the quantity of goods and services produced by the suppliers of that country, whereas the aggregate demand curve model demonstrates the quantity of goods and services produced domestically that consumers, businesses, the government and foreigners are willing to purchase during a particular period of time. This free online economics course first introduces the learner to the business cycle to show that the local economy is constantly expanding and contracting in response to changes in the global economy, technology and national and international politics. The course then introduces the concept of aggregate demand, how it shifts and how it is modelled. You will also learn about aggregate supply, and how changes in supply can be slower than changes in demand. This free online economics course will be of great interest to professionals in the areas of economics, finance, and business who would like to learn more about modelling aggregate supply and demand. It will also appeal to all learners interested in business, economics or political studies who would like to understand why the health of the economy is cyclical and why one event can have a significant effect on an economy.<br />