Online courses directory (2511)

This course outlines the practical and tactical ins and outs of how to sell technical products to a sophisticated marketplace. How to build and manage a sales force; building compensation systems for a sales force, assigning territories, resolving disputes, and dealing with channel conflicts. Focus on selling to customers, whether through a direct salesforce, a channel salesforce, or building an OEM relationship.

This seminar focuses on understanding the role of high-quality design as a tool to address urban social problems. This course will also examine marginalized spaces and how urban design can intervene as a tool to creatively challenge traditional urban design practices.

How does one writer use another writer's work? Does it matter if one author has been dead 300 years? What difference does it make if she's a groundbreaking twentieth-century feminist and the writer she values has come to epitomize the English literary tradition? How can a novelist borrow from plays and poems? By reading Virginia Woolf's major novels and essays in juxtaposition with some of the Shakespeare plays that (depending on one's interpretation) haunt, enrich, and/or shape her writing, we will try to answer these questions and raise others. Readings in literary criticism, women's studies, and other literary texts will complement our focus on the relationship--across time, media, and gender--between Shakespeare and Woolf. As a seminar, we will work to become more astute readers of literature within its historical, artistic, and political contexts, and consider how literature both reflects and contributes to these societal frameworks. Central texts will include Shakespeare's Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts. This subject is an advanced seminar in both the Literature and the Women's Studies Program.

This course provides an introduction to cellular and population-level systems biology with an emphasis on synthetic biology, modeling of genetic networks, cell-cell interactions, and evolutionary dynamics. Cellular systems include genetic switches and oscillators, network motifs, genetic network evolution, and cellular decision-making. Population-level systems include models of pattern formation, cell-cell communication, and evolutionary systems biology.

SLaM (Systems Leadership and Management) Praxis is a course is designed to introduce students to the dynamics of strategic decision making in corporate boardrooms through team exercises, simulations, and role playing. The case studies and team exercises will introduce students to strategy choices in the high tech sector, but these learnings are just as valid in other industries. We will also have invited guest speakers from the industry who have lived through difficult corporate situations and can provide insights into the cases discussed in class.

This course is an introduction to discrete applied mathematics. Topics include probability, counting, linear programming, number-theoretic algorithms, sorting, data compression, and error-correcting codes. This is a Communication Intensive in the Major (CI-M) course, and thus includes a writing component.

This course introduces the basic ideas for understanding the dynamics of continuum systems, by studying specific examples from a range of different fields. Our goal will be to explain the general principles, and also to illustrate them via important physical effects. A parallel goal of this course is to give you an introduction to mathematical modeling.

This course explores the history of the ideal of personal freedom with an eye towards contemporary debates over the pros and cons of the regulatory state. The first part of the course surveys the sociological and theological sources of the concepts of freedom and civil society, and introduces liberty's leading relatives or competitors: property, equality, community, and republicanism. The second part consists of a series of case studies in the rise of modern liberty and libertarianism: the abolition of slavery, the struggle for religious freedom, and the twentieth-century American civil liberties movement. In the last part of the course, we take up debates over the role of libertarianism vs. the regulatory state in a variety of contexts: counter-terrorism, health care, the financial markets, and the Internet.

This survey provides a general introduction to medieval European literature (from Late Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century) from the perspective of women writers from a variety of cultures, social backgrounds, and historical timeperiods. Though much of the class will be devoted to exploring the evolution of a new literary tradition by and for women from its earliest emergence in the West, wider historical and cultural movements will also be addressed: the Fall of the Roman Empire, the growth of religious communities, the shift from orality to literacy, the culture of chivalry and courtly love, the emergence of scholasticism and universities, changes in devotional practices, the persecution of heretics, the rise of nationalism and class consciousness. Authors will include some of the most famous women of the period: Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise of Paris, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Joan of Arc, Margery Kempe, along with many interesting and intriguing though lesser known figures.

This subject, cross-listed in Literature and Women's Studies, examines a range of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present. It aims to introduce a number of literary genres and styles- the captivity narrative, slave novel, sensational, sentimental, realistic, and postmodern fiction- and also to address significant historical events in American women's history: Puritanism, the American Revolution, industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century, the Harlem Renaissance, World War II, the 60s civil rights movements. A primary focus will be themes studied and understood through the lens of gender: war, violence, and sexual exploitation (Keller, Rowlandson, Rowson); the relationship between women and religion (Rowlandson, Rowson, Stowe); labor, poverty, and working conditions for women (Fern, Davis, Wharton); captivity and slavery (Rowlandson, Jacobs); class struggle (Fern, Davis, Wharton, Larsen); race and identity (Keller, Jacobs, Larsen, Morrison); feminist revisions of history (Stowe, Morrison, Keller); and the myth of the fallen woman (take your pick). Essays and in-class reports will focus more particularly on specific writers and themes and will stress the skills of close reading, annotation, research, and uses of multimedia where appropriate.

This instance of "Media, Education, and the Marketplace" focuses on the rise of information and communications technologies (ICTs) during the age of globalization, specifically examining its effect and potential in developing nations across the world. In particular, the class will focus on the following three components:

• "Media" – ICTs, specifically the dramatic rise in use of the Internet over the past twenty years, have "globalized" the world and created opportunities where very few have been available in the past. We are entering a phase where an individual can significantly improve his or her own economical, political, and social circumstances with just a computer and Internet connection. This course investigate these profound developments through current research and case studies.
• "Education" – With projects such as MIT's OpenCourseWare, the major players in the world are beginning to understand the true power of ICTs in development. Throughout this class, we examine projects that harness the benefits of ICTs to create positive social change around the world.
• "Marketplace" – The focus is on the developing regions of the world. Specifically, the term "digital divide" is tossed around in everyday language, but what does it really mean? Is there an international digital divide, a national digital divide, or both? Should we try to bridge this divide, and how have past attempts succeeded and (for the most part) failed? Why? These are all questions that are asked throughout this course.

This course has a very unique pedagogy, which is discussed in more detail in the syllabus section.

The histories of information, communication, and computing technologies have attracted attention from scholars across a variety of disciplines. This course introduces students to prominent voices in these topics across fields. Alongside readings introducing students to this broad scholarly terrain, the course offers guidance in research and writing for publication based on the reality that PhD candidates on the job market need to be published authors, and that every term paper has the potential to be a journal article. We work towards publication by reading widely-cited scholarly histories both for their content and for what they can tell us about scholarly craft.

This course considers reggae, or Jamaican popular music more generally—in its various forms (ska, rocksteady, roots, dancehall)—as constituted by international movements and exchanges and as a product that circulates globally in complex ways. By reading across the reggae literature, as well as considering reggae texts themselves (songs, films, videos, and images), students will scrutinize the different interpretations of reggae's significance and the implications of different interpretations of the story of Jamaica and its music. Beginning with a consideration of how Jamaica's popular music industry emerged out of transnational exchanges, the course will proceed to focus on reggae's circulation outside of Jamaica via diasporic networks and commercial mediascapes. Among other sites, we will consider reggae's resonance and impact elsewhere in the Anglo Caribbean (e.g., Trinidad, Barbados), the United Kingdom (including British reggae styles but also such progeny as jungle, grime, and dubstep), the United States (both as reggae per se and in hip-hop), Panama and Puerto Rico and other Latin American locales (e.g., Brazil), Japan and Australia, as well as West, South, and East Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda).