Online courses directory (19947)

We have all played and enjoyed games, but how do people actually design them? How do you describe a game? What are the basic elements? How do designers create an experience for the player? What about prototyping and iterating?

This course explores these questions and others through six content units over seven weeks. Participants will be introduced to game design and game design concepts, emphasizing the basic tools of game design: paper and digital prototyping, design iteration, and user testing. The audience for this course includes current and aspiring game designers and those interested in delving deeply into the game creation process.

For the course project, participants will create either a digital game or a board game. This course leverages Gameblox, a game editor that uses a block based programming language to allow anyone to create games. 

This mini-course looks in-depth at modern-day issues surrounding teacher policies in U.S. education.

The teacher is the most important person in our schools. How do we recruit and retain the very best teachers? What are our current methods for recruiting teachers? How well do we compensate them?  What are the effects of adjusting teacher salaries to be based on their performance in the classroom? When should teachers be given tenure? Do current policies encourage or discourage effective teachers from entering the profession?

Many questions come down to budgetary constraints. Should you hire more teachers so you have smaller classes? Should it be a priority to balance how much is spent between wealthy and poor districts?

Throughout this mini-course, we will be focused on using empirical evidence to answer these questions.

This mini-course contains six lectures, with most lectures divided into three videos. The mini-courses also include assigned readings, discussion forums, and assessments.

This is the second mini-course in a four-course sequence.

• Mini-Course 1: History and Politics of U.S. Education
• Mini-Course 2: Teacher Policies
• Mini-Course 3: Accountability and National Standards
• Mini-Course 4: School Choice

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.

"The Ultimate Course to Help You Organize Your Thoughts and Present Them With Greater Precision and Clarity!"

*Note - This is an Archived course*

As fossil-based fuels and raw materials contribute to climate change, the use of renewable materials and energy as an alternative is in full swing. This transition is not a luxury, it is has become a necessity. We can use the unique properties of microorganisms to convert organic waste streams into biomaterials, chemicals and biofuels. This course provides the insights and tools for biotechnological processes design in a sustainable way. Five experienced course leaders will teach you the basics of industrial biotechnology and how to apply these to the design of fermentation processes for the production of fuels, chemicals and foodstuffs. Throughout the course, you will be challenged to design your own biotechnological process and evaluate its performance and sustainability. The undergraduate course includes guest lectures from industry as well as from the University of Campinas in Brazil, with over 40 years  of experience in bio-ethanol production. The course is a joint initiative of TU Delft, the international BE-Basic consortium and University of Campinas.

LICENSE

The course materials of this course are Copyright Delft University of Technology and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Netherlands License.

This is a past/archived course. At this time, you can only explore this course in a self-paced fashion. Certain features of this course may not be active, but many people enjoy watching the videos and working with the materials. Make sure to check for reruns of this course.

This course focuses on conventional technologies for drinking water treatment. Unit processes, involved in the treatment chain, are discussed as well as the physical, chemical and biological processes involved. The emphasis is on the effect of treatment on water quality and the dimensions of the  unit processes in the treatment chain. After the course one should be able to recognise the process units, describe their function, and make basic calculations for a preliminary design of a drinking water treatment plant.

The course consists of 4 modules:

1. Introduction to drinking water treatment. In this module you learn to describe the important disciplines, schemes and evaluation criteria involved in the design phase.
2. Water quality. In this module you learn to identify the drinking water quality parameters to be improved and explain what treatment train or scheme is needed.
3. Groundwater treatment. In this module you learn to calculate the dimensions of the groundwater treatment processes and draw groundwater treatment schemes.
4. Surface water treatment. In this module you learn to calculate the dimensions of the surface water treatment processes and draw surface water treatment schemes.

This course in combination with the courses "Introduction to Water and Climate" and "Introduction to the Treatment of Urban Sewage" forms the Water XSeries, by DelftX.

LICENSE

The course materials of this course are Copyright Delft University of Technology and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 4.0 International License.

Have you always wanted to write a novel? Have you started a novel only to run out of steam halfway through? Led by international best-selling authors and professors from The University of British Columbia’s world-renowned Creative Writing MFA program, this is part of a series of courses designed to take your novel from concept to completion.

Outlining is a crucial step in the novel writing process, one that fuels creativity and prepares the writer to stay on track and avoid common pitfalls. Through hands-on weekly exercises with a focus on craft and process, as well as insights from the real-world practices of accomplished authors, this course explores the core elements of fiction writing necessary to build an outline. You will learn the fundamentals of character development, world-building and the basics of storytelling architecture. You'll work intensively on your own creative project and hone your outline through feedback and discussion with fellow writers.

In the tradition of the UBC MFA program, this course draws on the work habits of established authors to help writers move quickly toward creating a blueprint for a successful draft. Whether you’re seeking literary fame or working on a project to share with family and friends, this course offers the tools and skills necessary to plan a novel others will be excited to read.

The course is recommended for professional and aspiring writers, writing groups, participants in NaNoWriMo, teachers and anyone who has ever dreamed of writing a novel.

Curso para nuevos estudiantes de Inglés o para aquellos que quieran repasar conceptos básicos y muy necesarios.

When you’re designing and developing new software, it’s easy to get laser-focused on getting it functional and into the market or deployed as soon as possible. Thus, many engineering teams develop software that supports their native language first, postponing support for other languages until “later,” when they think they will have the bandwidth. In other words, they don’t plan ahead. The problem with this approach, which experienced developers have found out the hard way, is that it sacrifices budget, time, and opportunity.

Redesigning and rebuilding a different edition of your software for each and every language or market can be a colossal effort. As this computer science course will demonstrate, planning ahead is far more efficient, and the marginal cost of supporting multiple languages from the get go is less than you may think. Harnessing international functionality in operating systems and programming languages makes writing code that works for multiple languages and markets much simpler than retrofitting existing code.

The instructors for this course include programmers who have worked on globalization and localization of some of the world’s most successful software. They’ve experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly of creating world-ready software, and they’re here to ensure your software’s user experience works consistently, regardless of where users are from or what languages they speak.

This course has three parts: the business case, world-ready design, and world-ready development. While students can complete parts one and two without programming knowledge, part three requires programming experience.

Tokyo emerged out of the ruins of war to become a large city of 10 million people in only a quarter of a century. During this process of change, the capital of a military empire that once invaded East Asia experienced occupation by the U.S. armed forces, hosted the Olympic Games, and transformed into a consumer hub where young people could enjoy economic “wealth.” It is important to know that this process was recorded in countless photographs, documentary films, TV programs, and so on. We will retrieve many of these archived pictures and videos and analyze what happened in postwar Tokyo from different perspectives. In Part 1, you will look at the changes that occurred in postwar Tokyo over a quarter of a century from four different perspectives: 1) occupation and Americanism; 2) imperial gaze and royal wedding; 3) The Olympic city; and 4) economic-cultural clash in Shinjuku. This examination of urban history will provide you with the insights necessary when considering changes in other large cities in Asia, such as Seoul, Beijing, and Bangkok, at the end of the twentieth century.

Preparing for the AP Environmental Science exam requires a deep understanding of many different topics in environmental science as well as an understanding of the AP exam and the types of questions it asks. This course is Part 1 of our AP Environmental Science series designed to prepare you for the AP exam. 

In Part 1, you will learn about the living world. You will examine environmental issues, look at the history of environmental problems, discuss evolution and its link to biodiversity, climates and biomes, ecosystems and the life found there. 

As you work through this course, you will find lecture videos taught by expert AP Environmental Science teachers, practice multiple choice questions and free response questions that are similar to what you will encounter on the AP exam and tutorial videos that show you step-by-step how to solve problems.  By the end of the course, you will be prepared to take on the AP exam!

This course is authorized as an Advanced Placement® (AP®) course by the AP Course Audit. The AP Course Audit was created by the College Board to give schools and students the confidence that all AP courses meet or exceed the same clearly articulated curricular expectations of colleges and universities.

By taking an AP course and scoring successfully on the related AP Exam, students can:

• Stand Out in College Admissions
• Earn College Credits
• Skip Introductory Classes
• Build College Skills

Advanced Placement® and AP® are trademarks registered and/or owned by the College Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, these offerings.

This Supply Chain Design course is part of the MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management, offered by #1 ranked SCM Master's program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CTL.SC2x Supply Chain Design covers all aspects involved in the design of supply chains for companies and organizations anywhere in the world. The course is divided into four main topic areas: Physical flow design, Supply chain finance, Information flow design, and Organization/Process design. In the design of physical flows, we show how to formulate and solve Transportation, Transshipment, Facility Location, and Network Design Problems. For financial flows we show how to translate supply chain concepts and actions into the language of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of a company. We cover Activity Based Costing, Working Capital, the Cash-to-Cash cycle and Discounted Cash Flow Analysis. The design of the information flow section describes how firms communicate with suppliers (procurement, risk contracts), internal resources (production planning, bills of materials, material requirements planning), and customers (Sales & Operations Planning and other collaboration based processes). In the last section, we introduce performance metric design and organizational design within the supply chain organization focusing mainly on the centralize/decentralize decision.

The main topic areas we will focus on in this course are:

• Supply Chain Network Design
• Supply Chain Finance
• Supplier Management
• Production and Demand Planning
• Process and Organizational Design

This course is indispensable if you’re considering a supply chain management career and, specifically, the positions of Supply Chain Analyst, Operations Manager, or Logistics Coordinator.

MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management

The MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management is specifically designed and administered by MIT’s Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) to teach the critical skills needed to be successful in this exciting and growing field. In addition to being a standalone certificate demonstrating expertise in the field, students who complete all of the required courses and the final proctored exam will be qualified to apply to gain credit at MIT for the blended graduate master's degree program. In order to qualify for the MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management you need to earn a Verified Certificate in all of the required courses. When you register for a Verified Certificate you will also be granted access to additional practice problems, supplemental readings, and opportunities for increased interaction with the faculty and teaching staff.

To learn more about the MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management, please visit http://scm.mit.edu/micromasters

MITx requires individuals who enroll in its courses on edX to abide by the terms of the edX honor code. MITx will take appropriate corrective action in response to violations of the edX honor code, which may include dismissal from the MITx course; revocation of any certificates received for the MITx course; or other remedies as circumstances warrant. No refunds will be issued in the case of corrective action for such violations.

Preparing for the AP Biology exam requires a deep understanding of many different topics in biology as well as an understanding of the format of the AP exam and the types of questions it asks. This course is Part 5 of our AP Biology series, designed to help you prepare for the AP Biology exam. 

In this special Review and Exam Preparation Course, you will find study guides, review material and practice exams that cover all material relevant to the AP exam.

By the end of the course, you should be prepared to take on the AP exam!

This course is authorized as an Advanced Placement® (AP®) course by the AP Course Audit. The AP Course Audit was created by the College Board to give schools and students the confidence that all AP courses meet or exceed the same clearly articulated curricular expectations of colleges and universities.

By taking an AP course and scoring successfully on the related AP Exam, students can:

• Stand Out in College Admissions
• Earn College Credits
• Skip Introductory Classes
• Build College Skills

Advanced Placement® and AP® are trademarks registered and/or owned by the College Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, these offerings.

8.EFTx is an online version of MIT's graduate Effective Field Theory course. The course follows the MIT on-campus class 8.851 as it was given by Professor Iain Stewart in the Fall of 2013, and includes his video lectures, resource material on various effective theories, and a series of problems to facilitate learning the material. Anyone can register for the online version of the course. When the course is being taught on campus, students at MIT or Harvard may also register for 8.851 for course credit.

Effective field theory (EFT) provides a fundamental framework to describe physical systems with quantum field theory. In this course you will learn both how to construct EFTs and how to apply them in a variety of situations. We will cover the majority of the common tools that are used by different effective field theories. In particular: identifying degrees of freedom and symmetries, formulating power counting expansions (both dimensional and non-dimensional), field redefinitions, bottom-up and top-down effective theories, fine-tuned effective theories, matching and Wilson coefficients, reparameterization invariance, and various examples of advanced renormalization group techniques. Examples of effective theories we will cover are the Standard Model as an effective field theory, integrating out the massive W, Z, Higgs, and top, chiral perturbation theory, non-relativistic effective field theories including those with a large scattering length, static sources and Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET), and a theory for collider physics, the Soft-Collinear Effective Theory (SCET).

Course Flow

Since this is an advanced graduate physics course, you will find that self-motivation and interaction with others is essential to learning the material. The purpose of the online course is to set you up with a foundation, to teach you to speak the language of EFT, and to connect you with other students and researchers that are interested in learning or broadening their exposure to this subject. Each week you will complete automatically graded homework problems to test your understanding and to help you master the material. You are expected to discuss the homework with other people in the class, but your online responses must be done individually. To facilitate these interactions there will be a forum for student-to-student discussions, with threads to cover different topics, and moderators with experience in this field. Student learning and discussions will also be prompted by questions posed after each lecture topic.

There will be no tests or final exam, but at the end of the course each student will give a 30-minute presentation on an EFT topic of their choosing. The subject of effective field theory is rich and diverse, and far broader than we will be able to cover in a single course. The presentations will create an opportunity for you to learn about additional subjects beyond those in lecture from your fellow students. To facilitate this learning opportunity, each student will be required to watch and grade five presentations from among their fellow students.

Since this is a graduate course, we anticipate that learning the subject and having the 8.EFTx materials available as an online resource will be more valuable to most of you than obtaining a grade. Therefore anyone who registers for the course will be able to retain access to the course materials after the course has ended. Note that when the course is archival mode that the problems can be attempted and checked in the same manner as when the course was running.

This course evaluates the medieval history of Toledo from the reign of King Alfonso “The Wise” (1252-1284) until the creation of the blood purity statutes in the 1450s.

This local history will concentrate on the relations of Jews, Old Christians, and converts to Christianity (conversos). We will study King Alfonso X’s efforts to characterize himself as the “king of three religions” via his legal codices, the creation of the Cantigas de Santa María, and his intellectual endeavor known as the Toledo School of Translators.

We evaluate the robust Jewish and converso noble families of the city and appreciate their intellectual, religious, and economic contributions to Castilian life. We will bear witness to the rise of anti-Jewish blood purity statutes, the creation of the Inquisition, and the expulsion of the Jews. We will virtually-tour the Cathedral of Toledo, El Transito Synagogue, Santa Maria la Blanca Synagogue, and several of its neighborhoods.

We also will study and transcribe manuscripts from the municipal, cathedral, and national historic nobility archives to make new scholarly breakthroughs.

No knowledge of Spanish is needed to participate in the course or in our transcription efforts.

*Note - This is an Archived course*

Do you have a personal improvement goal that has proven resistant to your sincerest intentions, smartest plans, and best efforts? If so, then this course is for you. Last spring, we kicked off a world-wide experiment to see if Kegan and Lahey’s ground-breaking, award-winning approach (the Immunity to Change process) could be deployed online to help tens of thousands of people make lasting changes at work or in their private lives. The experiment was largely a success! Many participants succeeded at making important changes in their lives. Here’s what our students have to say:

• “When I first started, I was a bit skeptical on how I would actually change. Looking back at myself 14 weeks ago and comparing it with how I am now is incredible! I couldn't be happier that I decided to take this course and learn a new approach to change. My life is so much better because of it.”
• “Someone asked me recently if I felt like I'd just wasted 14 whole weeks on self-inquiry. I can honestly say no - I feel like I wasted 30 years sleepwalking!  An incredible experience. Bob and Lisa have created a truly wondrous process, and the staff and fellow students have built a rich and supportive learning environment.” 
• “I appreciated the opportunity to feel like I was a part of a bigger community striving to grow and improve. This made me want to constantly push myself because I believed in the power behind the material and in the power of being part of a community working toward similar goals.”
• “This has been an amazing course and I have made long lasting changes that I didn't even dream about when I began this course. There is no way to express my deepest thank you for that . . . my life is changed.”

This fall, we invite you to join us in a continuation of this experimental personal development course. Via demonstrations, exercises, readings, personal experiments, and novel interactive tools, this course will teach you new psychological theory about personal change, but—more than this—it will engage you in applying that theory to yourself from the first class to the last.

In 2011 Oprah Winfrey listed the Top Ten Things You Should Do to Start the New Year Right. Number One on the list was, “Try the Immunity-to-Change approach.” Come, join us!

This course runs from Tuesday, September 16 to Monday, December 15, 2014. It begins on September 16 with a one-week orientation. The orientation is designed to introduce you to the culture of the community we will form together and the technology we will use. Some of you may not need the full week to complete the orientation. The substance of the course begins a week later, on September 23.

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.

This is a past/archived course. At this time, you can only explore this course in a self-paced fashion. Certain features of this course may not be active, but many people enjoy watching the videos and working with the materials. Make sure to check for reruns of this course.

Enhance your software skills and capabilities from a software innovation perspective. Do you have a career in the software industry? Join us for this 8-week course to find out.

The world is becoming increasingly digital and software is everywhere. Every company is affected by software so having the knowledge to succeed in this industry is essential. This course will introduce the skills necessary to create software. We will explain how people from different professions can work together in order to create innovative software. We will also present the most important activities for generating effective software products and services to meet tomorrow’s demands.

Course videos are presented in Mandarin with English subtitles.

China's architectural history spans thousands of years. In this course, we will explore the ancient cities of Chang'an of Han, Luoyang of Northern Wei, Chang'an and Luoyang of Sui and Tang, Kaifeng of Song and Dadu of Yuan, and delve into the history of the awe-inspiring ancient buildings that still grace the landscape of these bustling cities. The course will cover construction and aesthetics of these imperial palaces, religious structures, pagodas, tombs and gardens. We will study the basis of Chinese architecture, the wood framed building, as well as the brick and stone construction of many Buddhist pagodas and tombs. The course will culminate in an examination of the Summer Palace in Beijing, the ancient royal garden at the Chengde Mountain Resort, and the private gardens of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Two seminal textbooks on the Song and Qing dynasties are included in the course in electronic form.

关于本课程

数千年的中国历史上，曾出现了很多伟大的城市，汉长安、北魏洛阳、隋唐长安和洛阳、北宋开封、元大都，都是当时世界上最繁华的大都市。这些城市虽已星光黯淡，却留下了一座座优美壮丽的建筑杰作，令人叹为观止。中国的宫殿、宗教建筑、佛塔、陵寝和园林等建筑类型，无论建造技术还是美学追求，都达到了很高的水平。中国古代的建筑有着自成体系的一套营造方法，以木结构为主，也有不少砖石结构的佛塔和陵寝。历史上建造了大量宫殿建筑，北京故宫是现存世界上最大宫殿建筑群。自南北朝至唐，出现了大批佛教寺院与石窟寺。南北朝以来各地建造的砖石塔，也使中国砖石建筑达到很高水平。唐、辽、宋、金时期留下了一大批宗教建筑遗存，包括大型殿堂，多层楼阁，与高度达67米的高层木塔。明清时期坛壝、祠庙、陵墓与民居，有了高度发展，北京天坛，曲阜孔庙、明十三陵，北京四合院等，是这一时期重要建筑实例。北京颐和园、承德避暑山庄是古代皇家园林代表，明清私家园林则是数千年中国园林艺术的结晶。宋《营造法式》和清《工部工程做法则例》是中国官式建筑两部重要文本，对于理解中国建筑有着重要的意义。课程资料中也将包括这两部著作的电子版。    

Before your course starts, try the new edX Demo where you can explore the fun, interactive learning environment and virtual labs. Learn more.

Poetry lives in any reader, not necessarily in performance by the poet or a trained actor. The pleasure of actually saying a poem, or even saying it in your imagination—your mind’s ear—is essential. That is a central idea of “The Art of Poetry,” well demonstrated by the videos at favoritepoem.org: the photographer saying Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick,” the high school student saying Langston Hughes’ “Minstrel Man.” Those readers base what they say about each poem upon their experience of saying it.

The course is demanding, and based on a certain kind of intense reading, requiring prolonged, thorough— in fact, repeated—attention to specific poems.

The focus will be on elements of the art such as poetry’s historical relation to courtship; techniques of sound in free verse; poetry and difficulty; kidding and tribute—with only incidental attention to “schools,” jargons, categories, and coteries.

Learners are encouraged to think truly, carefully and passionately about what the poem says, along with how the poem feels in one’s own, actual or imagined voice. As Robert Pinsky says, in the Preface to Singing School: “this anthology will succeed if it encourages the reader to emulate it by replacing it . . . create your own anthology.” In a comparable way, this course hopes to inspire a lifelong study of poetry.

This course was developed in partnership between W3C and Intel®.

Learn the basics of Web design and style to give your Web sites a professional look and feel. The Intel® XDK team and experts from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will guide you step-by-step in how to use the latest Web standards to create a site to be proud of.

During the course, you will learn the basic building blocks of Web design and style – HTML5 and CSS – to give your site a professional look and feel.

By the end of the course, you should understand all the fundamental elements – from headers and links to images and sidebars – and leave having built a basic framework for your own Web site. 

China is one of the world’s most populated countries and one of the largest markets with an increasingly powerful economy. As a result, China influences the world with its outbound travel, trade, politics and culture. China is a society transforming itself through economic development where travelling and tourism play an important role.

The purpose of this subject is to introduce travel trends within and outside China from global perspectives and to explore the present and future development in China’s tourism and hotel business.

This interactive course empowers you to understand China’s tourism sector from a global scale to its local impacts.