Online courses directory (19947)

Preparing for the AP Physics 1 exam requires a deep understanding of many different topics in physics as well as an understanding of the AP exam and the types of questions it asks. This course is designed to teach you everything you need to know and help you prepare for the AP Physics 1 Exam.

As you work through this course, you will find lecture videos taught by Rice professors, problem-solving sessions with expert AP Physics teachers, interactive lab experiences and practice questions. By the end of the course, you should be ready to take on the AP exam!

Bioethics provides an overview of the legal, medical, and ethical questions around reproduction and human genetics and how to apply legal reasoning to these questions.

This law course includes interviews with individuals who have used surrogacy and sperm donation, with medical professionals who are experts in current reproductive technologies like In Vitro Fertilization and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, and bioethicists and journalists who study the ownership and use of genetic information within human tissue. Additional Harvard colleagues will also share with you their thoughts on topics such as disability law as it relates to reproductive technology.

While the law and ethics surrounding these technologies are a central component to this course, we also show you examples of the deeply personal and human side of these issues. Throughout the course, and with the help of law students, we will discuss leading legal cases in this field, which will illuminate the types of questions the law has struggled with – stretching and evolving over time. From the famous Baby M surrogacy case, to cases on the paternity of sperm donors, to a case related to the ownership of human tissue turned into a commercial product, and others. We will show you the ethical, legal, and rhetorical underpinnings, which have served as the basis for various court decisions over the past 20 or 30 years. We will also explore potential future technologies and their implications for society: genetic enhancements to increase our intelligence, let us live a hundred years longer, or make us immune to diseases – and the possibility of creating animal-human hybrids, for example a mouse with a humanized brain.

The content within this course is intended to be instructive, and show how legal reasoning has been applied, or could be applied, to questions related to parenthood, reproduction, and other issues surrounding human genetic material. The material organized within this course should be considered an authoritative overview, but is not intended to serve as medical or legal advice.

This course is designed for a diverse audience including, but not limited to, law students, prospective law students, medical professionals, as well as members of the general public interested in questions and topics related to surrogacy, parenthood, genetic and reproductive technology, ownership of genetic material, and more. You do not need any background in law, medicine, philosophy, or really any subject to enjoy this course. This course is meant to be an introduction for anyone interested in these topics.

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This computer science course is the first of a two-course sequence about writing good software using modern software engineering techniques.

In this course, you will learn what software engineers mean by "good" code -- safe from bugs, easy to understand, and ready for change. You will also learn ways to make your code better, including testing, specifications, code review, exceptions, immutability, abstract data types, and interfaces.

This is a challenging and rigorous course that will help you take the next step on your way to becoming a skilled software engineer.

Photo by Wizou on Flickr. (CC BY) 2.0

This computer science course is the second of a two-course sequence on how to write good software using modern software engineering techniques.

This course will dig deeper into what makes for "good" code -- safe from bugs, easy to understand, and ready for change. We will explore two paradigms for modern programming: (1) grammars, parsing, and recursive datatypes; and (2) concurrent programming with threads.

This is a challenging and rigorous course that will help you take the next step on your way to becoming a skilled software engineer.

Photo by raincrystal on Flickr. (CC-BY-SA) 2.0

Marketing is a crucial function in all businesses and organizations, and is becoming increasingly crucial to success in our modern global economy. This course, regardless of your industry background, will teach you core concepts and tools to help you better understand and excel in marketing. Key topics include Market Research and its importance to strategy, brand strategy, pricing, integrated marketing communication, social media strategy and more.

Learn through the award-winning teaching approaches of the Sauder School of Business’s marketing faculty. This course will bring a marketing lens to complex business and organization challenges and aid in holistic decision-making that aligns with customer and company goals.

This course is for anyone interested in marketing.

Did you know your best opportunities for growth may not lie solely in developing new “blockbuster” products or services? They may instead be found by focusing on your existing best customers — and finding new customers with similar behavioral tendencies. Created by Professor Peter Fader, a world-renowned thought leader on marketing analytics and co-founder of Zodiac, a predictive analytics solution built on the breakthrough consumer behavior models developed by Professor Fader, this marketing course is designed to help you identify your most valuable customers and maximize their strategic value.

You might have the data and the technology to track your best customers, but how can you meaningfully differentiate them from the rest? How do you align your operations around them? And how do you create and sustain competitive advantages from such practices? In this course, you’ll radically rethink how you develop and implement customer-centric strategies that you can apply to your existing customers today. You’ll also gain valuable insights into how to apply performance metrics and rethink product development processes in order to meet the needs of your most valuable customers.

This course is part of Wharton's Digital Marketing Professional Certificate. For more information, see here.

Video games as a medium go back more than 50 years to mainframe computers. Even the central design of video games can be traced back to the first games themselves.

To be a good game designer, it’s essential to have an understanding of the video game design industry’s fascinating history.

We’ve partnered with The Strong National Museum of Play to give you a unique look into the history of all things video game. The International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong is the largest and most comprehensive public assemblage of video games and related materials in the world. The staff are celebrated experts in the field and the ICHEG is visited by scholars of video games from around the world. You’ll gain amazing insight into the history of video games with a guided exploration of key artifacts from the collection of more than 100,000 electronic games and materials.

This course is part of the MITx MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Development Policy (DEDP). To audit this course, click “Enroll Now” in the green button at the top of this page.

To enroll in the MicroMasters track or to learn more about this program and how it integrates with MIT’s new blended Master’s degree, go to MITx’s MicroMasters portal. 

In this course, we will study the different facets of human development in topics such as education, health, gender, the family, land relations, risk, informal and formal norms, public policy, and institutions. While studying each of these topics, we will delve into the following questions:

• What determines the decisions of poor households in developing countries?
• What constraints are poor households subject to?
• What is the scope for policy interventions (implemented by the government, international organizations, or NGOs)?
• What policies have been tried out? Have they been successful?

At the same time, you will discover modern empirical methods in economics, in particular Randomized Control Trials (RCTs). Throughout the course, we will expose you to all facets of empirical projects, from experimental design and ethical issues, to data collection and data analysis.You will have the chance to gain experience working with real data using software for statistical analysis during weekly assignments.

This is the second course of “Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture” series, with the focus on the second facet: technology.

The technology portion will focus on works by architects who explored the use of technology—from techniques used for traditional crafts to computational processes—as a vehicle for their investigations into the conceptualization and production of architecture. Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Manabu Chiba, Kengo Kuma, Kazuhiko Namba, and Yusuke Obuchi will visit their buildings to discuss the ideas behind their respective works.

Production Team

Music by Jun Miyake

Organized by (T_ADS) Kengo Kuma, Yusuke Obuchi, Toshihiko Kiuchi

Filmed by Hiromoto Oka

Across organizations, managers are expected to have sound knowledge of finance and accounting. As part of their job, managers use large volumes of information produced by accounting systems to make business decisions every day.

This business and management course will show you how accounting information is relevant to managers, and how it can be processed and analyzed for effective managerial decision-making. By examining accounting information that is extensively used across three key managerial functions of planning, decision-making and controlling, the course equips non-finance managers with basic accounting and finance skills. This course also discusses activity based costing, which provides insight on the cost structure of products and services.

What sets this course apart is the practicing manager-centric approach that is a part of each week of the course. Whether you are a student or a practicing manager, this course will allow you to easily follow all topics and directly apply concepts in practice.

The "sense-and-correct" nature of feedback controllers make them an appealing choice for systems whose actuators, or environments, are highly variable. If the system also requires high performance (e.g. an industrial robot, a car, or an aircraft), the usual approach is to use a state-space feedback controller derived from a physics-based model. And when performance is less critical (e.g. for toys and appliances), the traditional choice has been to tune a low-cost proportional-derivative-integral (PID) controller.

Over the last few years, much has changed. The dramatic decline in the cost of accurate sensors and fast microcontrollers have made state-space controllers practical even for inexpensive toys. In addition, modeling approaches have become far more reliant on measurement and computation rather than physics and analysis. In this course, we examine the theory and application of this arc of alternatives to control, starting with PID, then moving to physical-modeling and state-space, and ending with state-space using measurement-based modeling. In each case, you will design and test controllers with your own copter-levitated arm, to solidify your understanding and to gain insight in to the practical issues.

PLEASE NOTE: This is intended to be an advanced course and students should have a background in linear algebra and differential equations, as well as some experience with control systems. IN ADDITION: THIS IS A BETA COURSE, THINGS WILL GO WRONG. We are testing a new type of on-line class, one where students use advanced concepts to design and then examine performance results on their own hardware. There will be difficulties, and we will be updating content and focus in response to student input.

Learn a selection of valuable Photoshop skills in just over six hours

Discover the big ideas and thinking practices in computer science plus learn how to code using one of the friendliest programming languages, Snap! (based on Scratch).

Computing has profoundly changed the world, opening up wonderful new ways for people to connect, design, research, play, create, and express themselves. However, just using a computer is only a small part of the picture. The real transformative and empowering experience comes when one learns how to program the computer, to translate ideas into code.

This course teaches students how to do exactly that, using Snap! (based on Scratch), one of the friendliest programming languages ever invented. It's purely graphical, which means programming involves simply dragging blocks around, and building bigger blocks out of smaller blocks. But this course is far more than just learning to program. We focus on seven big ideas (creativity, abstraction, data and information, algorithms, programming, the Internet, and global impact), and six computational thinking practices (connecting computing, creating computational artifacts, abstracting, analyzing problems and artifacts, communicating, and collaborating). Throughout the course, relevance is emphasized: relevance to the student and to society.

Topics include:

• Abstraction
• Programming Paradigms Algorithms
• Global Implications of Computing
• Lab-Based Topics: Snap! Programming, Conditionals and Abstraction, Lists and the Internet

This fun, introductory course is not just for computer science majors, it’s for everyone… join us!

Probability and inference are used everywhere. For example, they help us figure out which of your emails are spam, what results to show you when you search on Google, how a self-driving car should navigate its environment, or even how a computer can beat the best Jeopardy and Go players! What do all of these examples have in common? They are all situations in which a computer program can carry out inferences in the face of uncertainty at a speed and accuracy that far exceed what we could do in our heads or on a piece of paper.

In this data analysis and computer programming course, you will learn the principles of probability and inference. We will put these mathematical concepts to work in code that solves problems people care about. You will learn about different data structures for storing probability distributions, such as probabilistic graphical models, and build efficient algorithms for reasoning with these data structures.

By the end of this course, you will know how to model real-world problems with probability, and how to use the resulting models for inference.

You don’t need to have prior experience in either probability or inference, but you should be comfortable with basic Python programming and calculus.

“I love that you can do so much with the material, from programming a robot to move in an unfamiliar environment, to segmenting foreground/background of an image, to classifying tweets on Twitter—all homework examples taken from the class!” – Previous Student in the residential version of this new online course.

Technology has greatly altered how we write, listen to and enjoy music. This music course will show you how to apply new technologies to your own creative practice. Music Technology Foundations draws on Adelaide’s world-class pioneering expertise in making electronic music, to provide a great foundation to a career in music and to enable any learner to use technology in creative ways.

In Music Technology Foundations, you’ll learn about the core principles of music technology, including sound, audio, MIDI, effects and sequencing. Each week, you’ll complete creative practical tasks in freeware and browser based apps, and you’ll share the music you make with the course instructors and fellow learners. This practical work is underpinned with historical context and essential theory, so that you can gain even greater insight into your music.

Discover the big ideas and thinking practices in computer science plus learn how to code using one of the friendliest programming languages, Snap! (based on Scratch).

Computing has profoundly changed the world, opening up wonderful new ways for people to connect, design, research, play, create, and express themselves. However, just using a computer is only a small part of the picture. The real transformative and empowering experience comes when one learns how to program the computer, to translate ideas into code.

This course teaches students how to do exactly that, using Snap! (based on Scratch), one of the friendliest programming languages ever invented. It's purely graphical, which means programming involves simply dragging blocks around, and building bigger blocks out of smaller blocks. But this course is far more than just learning to program. We focus on seven big ideas (creativity, abstraction, data and information, algorithms, programming, the Internet, and global impact), and six computational thinking practices (connecting computing, creating computational artifacts, abstracting, analyzing problems and artifacts, communicating, and collaborating). Throughout the course, relevance is emphasized: relevance to the student and to society.

Topics include:

• Data and Information
• Complexity Theory
• Recursion, Lambda and Higher Order Functions
• Artificial Intelligence
• Human Computer Interaction
• Lab-based Topics: Algorithms and Data, Trees and Fractals, Recursion and Higher Order Functions

This fun, introductory course is not just for computer science majors, it’s for everyone… join us!

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, is by far the most abundant form of known matter in the universe. Its behavior is very different from the other states of matter we are usually familiar with. To understand it, a rigorous formalism is required. This is essential not only to explain important astrophysical phenomena, but also to optimize many industrial and medical applications and for achieving fusion energy on Earth.

This physics course, taught by world-renowned experts of the field, gives you the opportunity to acquire a basic knowledge of plasma physics. A rigorous introduction to the plasma state will be followed by a description of the models, from single particle, to kinetic and fluid, which can be applied to study its dynamics. You will learn about the waves that can exist in a plasma and how to mathematically describe them, how a plasma can be controlled by magnetic fields, and how its complex and fascinating behavior is simulated using today’s most powerful supercomputers.

This course is the first of two courses introducing plasma physics and its applications. After completing this course, you will have the prerequisites to enjoy Plasma Physics: Applications, which deals with plasma applications in astrophysics, industry, and nuclear fusion.

Have you ever wondered why you can play at a high level when you're practicing alone at home, but as soon as you play in front of other people, your hands start shaking, your heart starts racing, and everything begins to fall apart?

If you have ever felt crippled by anxiety, this four-module course is your first step to developing the psychological skills that will help you perform at your best under pressure.

Created by Juilliard’s Dr. Noa Kageyama, whose performance psychology classes are a favorite among Juilliard music students, the course combines applied exercises, insights gleaned from interviews with renowned performers, and research in performance psychology and motor learning.

You will learn how to overcome your fears around performing in front of an audience and discover how universal the experience of performance anxiety is amongst musicians at all levels – from beginner to professional.

The three psychological skills covered in this course are:

• Practice that Sticks;
• Beating Anxiety;
• Getting (and Staying) in the Zone.

Word of mouth is 10x as effective as advertising, and companies are shifting more of their marketing dollars to social media and word of mouth marketing as a result. Small businesses and entrepreneurs want to help their businesses grow but don’t have the money for big marketing campaigns. Word of mouth can help them grow for less money. But for all these efforts to be successful, managers have to understand how to get people to talk and share.

This course provides a step-by-step guide to getting anything to catch on.

• How does a product’s name, price, or other attributes change how people perceive it?
• What makes ideas memorable and message stick?
• How can we increase our influence and shape others’ behavior?
• Why is word of mouth ten times as effective as traditional advertising and how can we get people to talk about and share our product or idea?
• How can we leverage the power of social media and what are the right metrics to pay attention to?

You’ll learn the answer to these, and numerous other questions, while learning how all sorts of different businesses, from B2C to B2B, for-profits to non-profits, and large to small, have applied these insights to drive their success.

By the end of this course you’ll be able to craft contagious content, build stickier messages, leverage social media, and make any product or idea catch on. Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur, an employee in a big business, or leading a non-profit, this course will provide a roadmap to help you make your stuff more successful.

This course is especially useful for:

• Marketing managers
• Small business owners
• Product managers
• Entrepreneurs or start-up founders 
• Leading a non-profit
• Social media managers
• Advertising executives

This course is part of Wharton's Digital Marketing Professional Certificate. For more information, see here.

Maintaining a competitive advantage takes more than great timing or a single solution. Sustainable advantage requires a well-designed and well-executed strategy. This course was created to give you the tools and frameworks you need to develop and execute a successful strategy.

You’ll learn how to evaluate your own strategy, as well as how to locate sources of potential competitive advantage from a perspective that encompasses the internal, external, and dynamic fit of your strategy. You’ll also learn how to enhance your ability to assess the strategic impact of the moves of your competitors and how to maintain competitive advantage, understand the general drivers that create and sustain competitive advantage, and how to identify organizational barriers to change.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to assess and redesign your current strategy and develop plans for effective implementation to give your firm a competitive advantage.

Limited time only: master strategy for $199. Enroll now!