Online courses directory (19947)
This course develops skills in research design for policy analysis and planning. The emphasis is on the logic of the research process and its constituent elements. The course relies on a seminar format so students are expected to read all of the assigned materials and come to class prepared to discuss key themes, ideas, and controversies. Since the materials draw broadly on the social sciences, and since students have diverse interests and methodological preferences, ongoing themes in our discussions will be linking concepts to planning scholarship in general and considering how different epistemological orientations and methodological techniques map on to planning specializations.
If you’re an emerging researcher, this course will introduce you to research methodology and prepare you to design and conduct research, as well as to write a research proposal and research paper.
Learn the most efficient and effective methods to conduct research for any writing project.
A PhD or master’s level research project is an enormous undertaking, and you might find yourself a bit uncertain about the process or how to achieve the desired outcome. In this research course, you will learn the underlying principles that are needed to conduct research from an engineering perspective.
This course is designed for engineering students conducting postgraduate research work on engineering projects. The objective of the course is to translate current research methods, which are mostly from a social science perspective, into something more relatable and understandable to engineers. Our hope for this course is to go beyond the concepts to understand the actual reasons for doing research in a certain way. While engineers are the main target audience, non-engineers will find this information useful as well.
The methods taught in this course will equip you with the knowledge needed to design, plan and construct your own research process.
STS.467 examines the intellectual foundations of archaeology in the deep sea. The course explores the current convergence of oceanography, archaeology, and engineering which allows scientists to discover, survey, and excavate shipwrecks in deep water with robots and submarines. The course seeks to address the following questions: How are new devices best employed for archaeological work? How do new capabilities (e.g. higher frequencies, higher resolution, all digital data output) change operations plans and research designs? What new technologies will be required? Area studies focus on the Aegean in Minoan times and western Sicily during Phoenician, Greek, and Roman hegemony.
Business organizations and markets use a bewildering variety of structures to coordinate the productive activities of their stakeholders. Dramatic changes in information technology and the nature of economic competition are forcing firms to come up with new ways of organizing work. This course uses economic theory to investigate the roles of information and technology in the existing diversity of organizations and markets and in enabling the creating of new organizational forms.
Doctoral level seminar in system dynamics modeling with a focus on social, economic and technical systems. The course covers classic works in dynamic modeling from various disciplines and current research problems and papers. Participants critique theories and models, often including replication, testing, and improvement of various models.
Seminar participants and invited guests will lead critical discussions of current literature and ongoing research. Each student will be responsible for identifying, reviewing, and presenting one structured discussion of articles from the current literature that are relevant to their research topic. The remaining time will be spent working on individual projects or thesis proposals. This fall, the seminar will focus on the following core issues that underlie most implementations of urban information systems and decision support tools: the sustainable acquisition and representation of urban knowledge; the emergent technological infrastructure for supporting metropolitan decision-making; and the innovative organizational and institutional arrangements that can take advantage of modern urban information systems.
ArcGIS/ArcMap/ArcInfo Graphical User Interface is the intellectual property of ESRI and is used herein with permission. Copyright © ESRI. All rights reserved.
In this seminar, students will design and perfect a digital environment to house the activities of large-scale organizations of people making bottom-up decisions, such as with citizen-government affairs, voting corporate shareholders or voting members of global non-profits and labor unions. A working Open Source prototype created last semester will be used as the starting point, featuring collaborative filtering and electronic agent technology pioneered at the Media Lab. This course focuses on development of online spaces as part of an interdependent human environment, including physical architectures, mapped work processes and social/political dimensions.
A cross-disciplinary approach will be taken; students with background in architecture, urban planning, law, cognition, business, digital media and computer science are encouraged to participate. No prior technical knowledge is necessary, though a rudimentary understanding of web page creation is helpful.
This series of research talks by members of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences introduces students to different approaches to the study of the brain and mind.
Topics include:
- From Neurons to Neural Networks
- Prefrontal Cortex and the Neural Basis of Cognitive Control
- Hippocampal Memory Formation and the Role of Sleep
- The Formation of Internal Modes for Learning Motor Skills
- Look and See: How the Brain Selects Objects and Directs the Eyes
- How the Brain Wires Itself
