Online courses directory (19947)

This course begins with a comparative review of conventional and advanced multiple attribute decision making (MADM) models in engineering practice. Next, a new application of particular MADM models in reliable material selection of sensitive structural components as well as a multi-criteria Taguchi optimization method is discussed. Other specific topics include dealing with uncertainties in material properties, incommensurability in decision-makers opinions for the same design, objective ways of weighting performance indices, rank stability analysis, compensations and non-compensations.

This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

Experienced project manager teaches you tricks of the project management trade.

Master the math questions on the ACT and new SAT.

In this teacher training course, you'll learn Singapore's innovative and practical strategies for solving addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems.

Veteran teacher reveals the secrets to an orderly classroom. A step-by-step approach to effective, positive discipline.

Express your creativity in a fun and profitable way, by starting a home-based business as a gift basket designer. 

Uncover the secrets of the adolescent mind. Gain valuable information on how they feel, how their identities develop, and how you can best meet their needs.

How are math, art, music, and language intertwined? How does intelligent behavior arise from its component parts? Can computers think? Can brains compute? Douglas Hofstadter probes very cleverly at these questions and more in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach". In this seminar, we will read and discuss the book in depth, taking the time to solve its puzzles, appreciate the Bach pieces that inspired its dialogues, and discover its hidden tricks along the way.

In this course, you will study the various artistic movements that comprise 19th- and 20th-century modern art. You will examine several dozen artists, all of whom helped define their respective artistic styles and eras through their innovative approaches to representation, artistic space, and the role of the artist in society. Each unit will cover a significant period in the history of modern art and explore the ways in which both the principal figures from each period and the corresponding movements challenged the limits of art through the incorporation of modern life, as each artist addresses the political, philosophical, and personal implications of “modernity” and how it relates to the production of artwork. This course will begin with a brief review of the artists and movements that immediately preceded French Impressionism and will then take an in-depth look at the key artists and characteristics of Impressionism, widely considered the first “modern” art movement. You will then spend time read…

In this course, we will study important movements and some influential artists in Western art history.  We will begin with the “Proto-Renaissance” in Italy in the 13th century and continue through to the late 20th century.  You will become acquainted with certain regional and personal styles of art through this period, as well as a number of renowned works of art and architecture. Art forms and imagery are influenced by the surrounding world, the biography of the artist who produced the artwork, and other circumstances of artistic production.  This course provides a framework for considering how and why certain artistic movements emerged in certain places at certain times.  Some of the names and works we will look at might already be familiar to you, while others will be new.  The ultimate goal of this course is not to provide data on individual works of art, although that is part of art history, but to act as a sort of springboard.  You will gain tools for looking at and analyzing not only art by…

Physics 101 is the first course in the Introduction to Physics sequence. In general, the quest of physics is to develop descriptions of the natural world that correspond  closely to actual observations.  Given this definition, the story behind everything in the universe is  one of physics.  In practice,  the field of physics is more often limited to the discovery and refinement of the basic laws that underlie the behavior of matter and energy.  While biology is founded upon physics, in practice, the study of biology generally assumes that the present understanding of physical laws is accurate.  Chemistry is more closely dependent on physics and   assumes that physical laws provide accurate predictions.  Engineering, for the most part, is applied physics. In this course, we will study physics from the ground up, learning the basic principles of physical laws, their application to the behavior of objects, and the use of the scientific method in driving advances in this knowledge.  This first course o…

Neurobiology is all about the biology of our nervous system, from the spinal cord to the brainand everything in between. The nervous system allows us to have conscious thoughts, enables us to learn, and gives us voluntary control of our muscles. Our understanding of neuroscience begins with the ancient Egyptians, who practiced surgical drilling to treat certain neurological disorders. The earliest philosophers believed that the heart (not the brain) was the center of consciousness and intelligence. As scientific knowledge matured and developed, philosophers disproved that belief but discovered that there is much more to neurobiology than “the brain.” Researchers found that there are literally hundreds of billions of nerves and other cells that cooperate and share information to make the nervous system work. Accordingly, neurobiology is an extremely complex field of study. This course is designed to provide you with an overview of the most important areas of neurobiological study. We will not pay much…

Law, in its simplest form, is used to protect one party from another. For instance, laws protect customers from being exploited by companies. Laws protect companies from other companies.  Laws even protect citizens and corporations from the government. However, law is neither perfect nor all encompassing. Sometimes, societal ethics fill the voids that laws leave behind; other times, usually when societal ethics have been systematically violated by a group of the population, we write laws that are designed to require individuals to live up to certain ethical standards. In the backlash of the Enron scandal (where Enron executives used accounting tricks to hide losses) for example, new accounting laws were passed. Similarly, as a result of the financial crisis of 2008, legislators proposed new regulations designed to enforce a certain standard of ethical behavior within the financial services industry. This course will introduce you to the laws and ethical standards that managers must abide by in the course o…

Organic chemistry is a branch of chemistry that focuses on a single element: carbon!  Carbon bonds strongly with other carbon atoms and with other elements, forming numerous chain and ring structures.  As a result, there are millions of distinct carbon compounds known and classified.  The vast majority of the molecules that contain carbon are considered organic molecules, with few debatable exceptions such as carbon nanotubes, diamonds, carbonate ions, and carbon dioxide.  Carbon is central to the existence of life as it is an essential component of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), sugars, lipids, and proteins.  A well-rounded student of science must take courses in organic chemistry to understand its application to various topics, such as the study of polymers (plastics and other materials), hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals, molecular biology, biochemistry, and other life sciences. In the first semester of organic chemistry, you will learn the basic concepts needed to understand the three-dimensional structu…

Analytical chemistry is the branch of chemistry dealing with measurement, both qualitative and quantitative.  This discipline is also concerned with the chemical composition of samples.  In the field, analytical chemistry is applied when detecting the presence and determining the quantities of chemical compounds, such as lead in water samples or arsenic in tissue samples.  It also encompasses many different spectrochemical techniques, all of which are used under various experimental conditions.  This branch of chemistry teaches the general theories behind the use of each instrument as well analysis of experimental data. This course begins with a review of general chemistry and an introduction to analytical terminology.  You will learn terms relevant to the process of measuring chemical compounds, such as sensitivity and detection limit.  The course continues with a unit on common spectrochemical methods, followed by an extension of these methods in a unit on atomic spectroscopy.  These methods allow…

In the 1960’s, H. Marshall McLuhan, media theorist, critic, and visionary, asserted that societies are changed by the advances of technology, especially communication technologies.  He is well known for his prophecy that communication technology would one day make us one great “global village.”  In the end, the processes and theories regarding communication in our daily lives to exchange information, create meaning, and share understanding remain a critical component of human relationships.  Whether we are chatting with a stranger while waiting for a bus, solving a problem with a group of coworkers, or sharing our dreams and goals with our best friend, principles and practices of human communication are at the foundation of each of these human transactions. This course provides an introduction to the human communication concentration in the communications major.  This course will introduce you to communication principles, common communication practices, and a selection of theories to better unders…

Marketing is an understanding of how to communicate with the consumer.  It includes four activities: Creating products and services that serve consumers; Communicating a clear value proposition; Delivering products and services in a way that optimizes value; Exchanging, or trading, value for those offerings. Many people incorrectly believe that marketing and advertising are the same thing.  In reality, advertising is but one of the many tools used in marketing, which is the process by which firms determine which products to offer, how to price those products, and to whom the products should be made available. In this course, you will learn about the marketing process and examine the range of marketing decisions that an organization must make in order to sell its products and services. You will also learn how to think like a marketer, discovering that the focus of marketing has always been on the customer.  You will begin to intuitively ask: what does the customer need?  What does the customer…

This course has been designed to provide you with a clear, accessible introduction to discrete mathematics. Discrete mathematics describes processes that consist of a sequence of individual steps (as compared to calculus, which describes processes that change in a continuous manner). The principal topics presented in this course are logic and proof, induction and recursion, discrete probability, and finite state machines. As you progress through the units of this course, you will develop the mathematical foundations necessary for more specialized subjects in computer science, including data structures, algorithms, and compiler design. Upon completion of this course, you will have the mathematical know-how required for an in-depth study of the science and technology of the computer age.

This course focuses on the fundamentals of computer algorithms, emphasizing methods useful in practice.  We look into the algorithm analysis as a way to understand behavior of computer programs as a function of its input size.  Using the big-O notation, we classify algorithms by their efficiency.  We look into basic algorithm strategies and approaches to problem solving.  Some of these approaches include the divide and conquer method, dynamic programming, and greedy programming paradigms.  Sorting and searching algorithms are discussed in detail as they form part of a solution to a large number of problems solved using computers.  We also provide an introduction to the graph theory and graph algorithms as they are also used in many computer-based applications today.  We conclude the course with a look into a special class of problems called the NP-complete problems.

In economics, the term "labor" refers to workers.  As a factor of production, labor earns wages for the services that it renders.  As such, students of labor economics have traditionally set out to understand wage formation, the level of employment, and all elements that go into the making of a wage relationship.  Over the years, the social and economic contexts in which labor markets operate have become increasingly complex; nowadays, labor economics is no longer limited to the study of wages.  Modern labor economics instead seeks to understand the complex workings of the labor market by studying the dynamics between employers, employees, and their wage-, price-, and profit-making incentives.  In other words, modern labor economics explores the outcomes of the labor market under the assumption that workers strive to maximize their wellbeing and firms strive to maximize profits.  It also analyzes the behavior of employers and employees and studies their responses to changes in government policies and/or…