Online courses directory (1728)

This Islamic finance and banking course gives an overview of the basics of Islamic insurance, mutual and investment funds. In this course, you will learn about The Concept of Takaful Ta’awuni (collaborative), The Basis for Takaful, Takaful vs Conventional Insurance, The Tabarru or donation - based Takaful Model.

You will also learn about Islamic Perspectives on Mutual Funds and Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and Islamic Investment Funds.

No previous knowledge is needed.

Why Islamic finance is important for the global financial industry

Islamic finance has grown rapidly, with the trend expecting to continue. Although the concept has been around for much longer, Islamic finance only attained a formal status in Muslim-majority countries in the 1970s. Today, it has become a global phenomenon, eliciting increasing interest around the world, including from non-Muslim countries like the United Kingdom, Luxemburg, Kenya, South Africa, and Hong Kong. Islamic finance has grown into a huge industry with total worldwide assets estimated at about US$2 trillion.

Islamic finance has the potential to contribute to higher and more inclusive economic growth by increasing access of banking services to underserved populations. In addition, it has the potential to promote financial stability due to its risk-sharing feature and its financing being asset-backed and thus fully collateralized. Moreover, Islamic banks offer profit-sharing and loss-bearing accounts that can help mitigate losses and contagion in the event of banking sector distress. These are all indications that Islamic finance is converging to the global finance industry and hence all international finance professionals should be aware of Islamic finance.

Architecture engages a culture’s deepest social values and expresses them in material, aesthetic form. In this course, you will learn how to “read” architecture as a cultural expression as well as a technical achievement. Vivid analyses of exemplary buildings from a wide range of historical contexts, coupled with hands-on exercises in drawing and modeling, bring you close to the work of an actual architect or historian.

Architecture is one of the most complexly negotiated and globally recognized cultural practices, both as an academic subject and a professional career. Its production involves all of the technical, aesthetic, political, and economic issues at play within a given society. Over the course of ten modules, we’ll examine some of history’s most important examples that show how architecture engages, mediates, and expresses a culture’s complex aspirations.

The first part of the course introduces the idea of the architectural imagination as a faculty that mediates sensuous experience and conceptual understanding. Two examples of the architectural imagination—perspective drawing and architectural typology—are explored through video presentations and hands-on exercises. You will be introduced to some of the challenges involved in writing architectural history, revealing that architecture does not always have a straightforward relationship to its own history.

In the second set of modules, we address technology as a component of architecture’s realization and understanding. Architecture is embedded in contexts where technologies and materials of construction—glass and steel, reinforced concrete—are crucial agents of change. But a society’s technology does not determine its architectural forms. You will discover ways that innovative technology can enable and promote new aesthetic experiences, or disrupt age-old traditions. You will witness architecture’s ways of converting brute technical means into meaningful perceptions and textures of daily life. The interactions of architecture and modern technologies changed not only what could be built, but also what kinds of constructions could even be thought of as architecture.

The final set of modules confronts architecture’s complex relationship to its social and historical contexts and its audiences, achievements, and aspirations. As a professional practice deeply embedded in society, architecture has social obligations and the aesthetic power to negotiate social change; to carry collective memories; even to express society’s utopian ideals. You will learn about what we call architecture’s power of representation, and see how architecture has a particular capacity to produce collective meaning and memories.

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Explore the continent of Antarctica and more than 500 million years of geological history and 250 years of geographical discovery and scientific endeavour.

In this course, you will learn through lectures filmed on location on Ross Island and in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica.

Cliff, an Antarctic veteran, with 12 seasons on the ice, will introduce you to some of our planet’s most remarkable landscapes—the Dry Valleys, the Transantarctic Mountains and the world’s southernmost volcanic island. At a remote field camp, he interviews fellow geologists studying fossil-rich sediments—from a time when Antarctica was 20°C warmer than today—to see what Antarctica’s past climate can reveal about what the future might hold.

Rebecca, a science historian and writer who has written extensively about Antarctica, visits Captain Robert Scott’s huts on Ross Island and interviews conservators from the Antarctic Heritage Trust and scientists and logistics staff working at Scott Base and McMurdo Station. You’ll learn about the explorers and scientists from around the world who have been drawn to work and sometimes risk their lives here—from James Cook’s first venture below the Antarctic Circle, to the British scientists who discovered the ozone hole, to the first women to work on the ice.

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. 

A randomized evaluation, also known as a randomized controlled trial (RCT), field experiment or field trial, is a type of impact evaluation that uses random assignment to allocate resources, run programs, or apply policies as part of the study design.

This course will provide step-by-step training on how to design and conduct an RCT. You will learn about why and when to conduct RCTs and the key components of a well-designed RCT.

In addition, this course will provide insights on how to implement your RCT in the field, including questionnaire design, piloting, quality control, data collection and management. The course will also go over common practices to ensure research transparency.

No previous economics or statistics background is required. However, economic and statistics concepts and vocabulary will be used and some familiarity is advised.

In this course, you will examine the various areas of network security including intrusion detection, evidence collection and defense against cyber attacks.

The issues and facilities available to both the intruder and data network administrator will also be examined to illustrate their effect.

You will learn the principles and concepts of wired and wireless data network security. You will be guided through a series of laboratories and experiments in order to explore various mechanisms for securing data networks including physical layer mechanisms, filters, applications and encryption.

You will analyze attack/defend scenarios and determine the effectiveness of particular defense deployments against attacks.

This course is a part of the RITx Cybersecurity MicroMasters Program.

Learn how electronic gadgets are designed, developed, and built as embedded systems that shape the world.

This is part two of a two part sequence. In this class, we will use interrupts to design a range of real-time systems including an audio player, a data acquisition system, a control system, and an interactive game. This is a hands-on, learn-by-doing course that shows you how to build solutions to real-world problems using embedded systems. These courses use a bottom-up approach to problem solving, building gradually from simple interfacing of switches and LEDs to complex concepts like display drivers, digital to analog conversion, generation of sound, analog to digital conversion, motor control, graphics, interrupts, and communication. We will present both general principles and practical tips for building circuits and programming the microcontroller in the C programming language. You will develop debugging skills using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and software instrumentation. Laboratory assignments are first performed in simulation, and then you will build and debug your system on the real microcontroller. At the conclusion of this course you will possess the knowledge to build your own arcade-style game from the ground up.

This is the fourth time we have offered this course. Since the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive we do not plan major changes over the previous offerings of the course. We did however break the large class into two smaller classes. There are eight labs in part 1 and six labs in this class. Students can pick and choose a subset of labs to achieve certification. The three labs that students found most rewarding were the hand-held video game, generating sound using a digital to analog convertor, and creating a smart object using Wifi communication.

To complete this course, you will be required to purchase a Texas Instruments TM4C123 microcontroller kit and a few electronic components. This microcontroller has a state-of-the-art ARM Cortex-M4 processor.

We will provide instructions about purchasing the kit and installing required software at: http://edx-org-utaustinx.s3.amazonaws.com/UT601x/index.html.

Esta es el segundo de una serie de cursos de introducción a los sistemas de información en las empresas, diseñada en base al el temario del examen USA CLEP Sistemas de Información y Aplicaciones Informáticas que te introducirá en el apasionante mundo de las TIC.

En este curso aprenderás los conceptos básicos hardware en los que se basan los sistemas de información y las redes de comunicaciones

To make sense of modern China, you simply cannot ignore Marxism. ‘From Mao to Now’ presents current topics that anyone who wishes to engage with China should know.

Rather than praising or condemning, the course focuses on building a deeper understanding of this history through two interwoven elements.

The first structures the course in terms of some ‘red tourism’ to the sites important to the communist revolution in the first half of the twentieth century.

Much of the course footage was filmed on location in China, including Shaoshan, Ruijin, Yan’an and important locations in Beijing, such as Tiananmen and the Nationalities Museum (minzuyuan).

The second element of the course will take those experiences and use them to help answer some fundamental questions:

• Is China socialist or capitalist today, or is it perhaps both at one and the same time?
• Is there such a thing as Chinese socialist democracy, and, if so, what is it?
• Does China have its own theory of human rights, drawn from the long Chinese tradition and Marxism?
• If the Chinese state is a form that has not been seen before, then what is it?

You Can Innovate prepares you for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp!

The bootcamp is a one-week, intensive entrepreneurship education program that challenges you to start a company in 5 days. The Bootcamp offers you the unique opportunity to be mentored by MIT faculty and MIT alumni entrepreneurs and investors as you begin your new entrepreneurial journey

This course is not only for those planning to attend the Bootcamp, this course will teach you how to develop your ideas for innovative ventures whether you continue to the Bootcamp or not.

We’ll let you in on a secret. Innovation happens everywhere. More often than not, it is about ordinary people solving problems that matter to them personally. This could be you.

Examples of user innovation are infinite. A surfer created the GoPro to take “selfies” while surfing. A student came up with Dropbox after forgetting his flash drive. Two broke entrepreneurs rented out their living room to help pay rent, and Airbnb was born. They’ll share their paths to startup success.

Based on the work of Eric von Hippel, the founding scholar of user innovation, this course will help you think about what problems you should choose to solve and how to share your innovations with others.

This course is terrific for:

• Aspiring entrepreneurs searching for ideas for innovation;
• Inveterate inventors searching for ways to diffuse their innovations;
• Entrepreneurship educators looking for practical methods for meaningful ideation.  

You Can Innovate has also been valuable for policymakers who work to energize the innovation ecosystems in their regions and for innovators within established companies working to anticipate or, better, productively engage with disruptive innovations.  

In the Verified track, the MIT course team composed of Faculty, Teaching Fellows, and Alumni Mentors, will review, grade and provide feedback on your assignments.  In the Verified track you will also be enrolled in weekly review and discussion sessions.  

You can innovate.

Organizations are increasingly moving their critical information and assets to the cloud. Understand the technology, best practices, and economics of cloud computing, and the rewards and risks of this rush to the cloud.

In this course, part of the Cloud Computing MicroMasters program, you will learn the essentials of cloud computing, including Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), Platform As A Service (PaaS), Software As A Service (SaaS), and other "X as a service" platforms.

You will explore how the cloud can support businesses by increasing productivity and effectiveness.

This Islamic Finance and Capital Markets course gives an overview of the Tradability of Sukuk, also known as Islamic bonds, and the development of Islamic Money Markets.

You will learn about the different instruments and components of an Islamic Money Market. We will also discuss the role of money markets and the need for Shari’ah-compliant sources of funds.

Additional Topics Include:

• Monetary Operations in Islamic Money Markets
• Credit Facilities Offered by Central Banks
• Monetary Operations and Public Debt Management
• Islamic Money and Foreign Exchange Markets

At the end of the course, you will learn about Islamic Money Markets through various Case Studies from Malaysia, Sudan, Pakistan and more.

No previous knowledge is needed.

Why Islamic finance is important for the global financial industry

Islamic finance has grown rapidly, with the trend expecting to continue. Although the concept has been around for much longer, Islamic finance only attained a formal status in Muslim-majority countries in the 1970s. Today, it has become a global phenomenon, eliciting increasing interest around the world, including from non-Muslim countries like the United Kingdom, Luxemburg, Kenya, South Africa, and Hong Kong. Islamic finance has grown into a huge industry with total worldwide assets estimated at about US$2 trillion.

Islamic finance has the potential to contribute to higher and more inclusive economic growth by increasing access of banking services to underserved populations. In addition, it has the potential to promote financial stability due to its risk-sharing feature and its financing being asset-backed and thus fully collateralized. Moreover, Islamic banks offer profit-sharing and loss-bearing accounts that can help mitigate losses and contagion in the event of banking sector distress. These are all indications that Islamic finance is converging to the global finance industry and hence all international finance professionals should be aware of Islamic finance.

Offered by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in collaboration with National Arts Strategies, this course focuses on equipping leaders in the cultural sector with the critical skills for inspiring employee engagement and performance while motivating people to adjust behavior and embrace change.

You will learn how to create a shared vision for your team and effectively communicate it to your teammates. You will also learn how to set effective goals and expectations in a way that best enables your team to attain the shared vision. Finally, you will understand the most important needs and drivers of performance across cultures, and will learn to align rewards with desired behaviors so that your teammates are motivated to attain the team’s objectives.

Motivation represents a crucial challenge for contemporary organizations. A recent Gallup poll revealed that only 13% of workers worldwide exhibit high levels of engagement and motivation. We will show you why these motivation problems are not simply due to a “bad” or “unmotivated” team member. Rather, motivation is very much driven by what work conditions we create for our teammates, how we structure goals and objectives, and how we reward people for the accomplishment of those goals. This course will help you diagnose and solve motivation problems so that you can bring out the best in your people.

This course features lessons from both University of Michigan, Ross School of Business faculty and practitioners in the arts and culture field. Leaders such as Franci Phelan (Kennedy Center), Aaron Dworkin (UM School of Music, Theatre and Dance) and Tim Cynova (Fractured Atlas) share their stories on effective leadership and HR practices in the cultural sector.

The world’s greatest orchestras have the incredible ability to sound so unified they feel like one single instrument. Listening to the music of an orchestra can feel invigorating, exciting, and life-affirming all at the same time. But how do you learn to hear and appreciate the nuances of each instrument? How have the instruments that make up an orchestra evolved and improved over time?

Dr. L Michael Griffel, Chair of Juilliard’s Music History Department, takes you on a journey into the orchestra and introduces you to the history of its principal instruments.

You will learn about each instrument, from violin to timpani, and will gain the ability to recognize their individual sounds and textures when listening to any orchestral music.

Through four modules you will discover the four families of instruments: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion, giving you confidence to further discover the music of the orchestra. No prior musical experience necessary.

Government works best when citizens are directly engaged in policymaking and public service delivery.

This social sciences course explores citizen engagement and the role citizens can play in actively shaping public policy.

Throughout the course, you will learn about cutting edge research and theories related to citizen engagement, and examples of ways citizens and governments are working together in new ways to improve their societies.

This course was developed in partnership with many individuals and organizations. We have partnered with top experts from a wide range of fields and countries to present this course, creating a truly global faculty.

We have also partnered with 4 leading institutions – the London School of Economics, Overseas Development Institute, Participedia and CIVICUS – who have taken leading roles in the development of each week’s content.

Qué diferencia un líder exitoso a un mediocre? En este curso, aprenderá cómo son los lideres exitosos del siglo 21 y cómo usted puede adoptar su estilo de liderazgo inclusivo. Usando investigaciones y mejores prácticas, además de historias de grandes lideres y gente cotidiana, usted pondrá en práctica empoderamiento, responsabilidad, valor y humildad—habilidades claves vinculadas a equipos inclusivos y exitosos. Durante el curso, conocerá a gente como usted, que quieren ser los mejores lideres posibles al incorporar el liderazgo inclusivo en sus vidas diarias. Con pequeñas pruebas y casos prácticos cautivadores, mejorará sus habilidades en cada sección. De mayor importancia, se aplicarán sus nuevas habilidades de liderazgo a través de emocionantes ejercicios de la vida real. Al fin del curso, usted va a crear un Plan de Liderazgo Personal que le ayudará a seguir desarrollarando sus habilidades, conocimiento, y percatación, en su búsqueda para  llegar a ser un líder exitoso e incluyente.  

Customer Relationship Management, also known as CRM, helps businesses successfully implement strategies, practices and technolgies aimed at winning and retaining customers profitably. The objective of this business and management course is to equip you with a sound foundation of CRM concepts and best practices so you can implement CRM practices successfully for long-term profitability.

Businesses aim to win and keep customers. Their competitors also seek to do the same. Even the most successful firms, with excellent marketing programs for attracting customers, have trouble with customer retention.

In this course, you will learn how to shift from a short-term customer transaction based mode of operation to a long-term relationship mode and understand the benefits of having strong customer relations.

Topics covered include:

• Customer retention
• Customer centricity
• Customer lifetime value
• Customer value management

Entrepreneurship 101 prepares you for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp!

The bootcamp is a one-week, intensive entrepreneurship education program that challenges you to start a company in 5 days. The Bootcamp offers you the unique opportunity to be mentored by MIT faculty and MIT alumni entrepreneurs and investors as you begin your new entrepreneurial journey.

This course is not only for those planning to attend the Bootcamp. If you have a business idea and don't know how to move forward, this course will help you immeasurably whether you continue to the Bootcamp or not.

As you’ll learn in this course, to go from idea to business, you’ll need a paying customer. Sound daunting? It’s OK – there is a systematic methodology for you to get a paying customer. Specifically, upon completion of Entrepreneurship 101, you’ll have the skills to:

• Conduct Market Segmentation
• Select your Beachhead Market
• Develop an End User Profile
• Calculate your Total Addressable Market Size
• Understand your Customer Persona

Entrepreneurship 101 is based on case studies of MIT startup companies and their founders. Through them you’ll get exposed to innovations in mobile apps, 3D printing, power electronics, international development, watchmaking, and more. In the process you will learn how to interview potential customers, understand the crucial difference between top-down and bottom-up market analysis, and develop a strategic framework for deciding what markets to pursue for your product or service.

This course is particularly useful for:

• Corporate entrepreneurs building a new product line;
• Scientists and engineers commercializing a new technology;
• Entrepreneurs whose innovations have created radically new markets.

This course is equally valuable to educators, particularly former entrepreneurs, who are beginning to teach entrepreneurship. In addition, the course is relevant for policymakers who work to energize the innovation ecosystems in their regions.

In the Verified track, the MIT course team composed of Faculty, Teaching Fellows, and Alumni Mentors will review, grade and provide feedback on your assignments. In addition, we will review and provide feedback on your business plan, which has been a frequent and emphatic request for in the past that we are now excited to meet. In the Verified track you will also be enrolled in weekly review and discussion sessions.

Finally, it is great to take Entrepreneurship 101 as a team, for the course will give you a common framework to make decisions, laying the foundation for your long-term success.

Image: Marius Ursache

Learn to use the open development tool, App Inventor, to program on Android devices. You will learn how to design and build mobile apps -- apps that are aware of their location, send and receive text messages, and give advice and directions. The only limit on the types of apps you will learn to build is your own imagination!

However, computer science is not just about coding and building apps. We will also learn some of  the fundamental principles of computer science. We'll learn about the potential and the limitations of computing and coding. We'll learn how the Internet works and about the positive and negative aspects of computing in today's society, and much more!

For these broader computing concepts we will work within an emerging curricular framework -- the Computer Science Principles (CSP). The CSP framework is being developed by leading computer science educators from around the country under the auspices of the College Board and with funding support of the National Science Foundation.

In addition to programming and CSP the course is project-based and emphasizes writing, communication, and creativity. Multiple-choice questions, in the style that students can expect to encounter on the AP exam, will also be a key component of this course.

In this business and management course, you’ll learn how make effective supply chain decisions that take into consideration all aspects of your business.

The course will take a helicopter view for decision-making. The helicopter view is built upon:

• Key questions to decide on: manufacturing organization, late differentiation, location, distribution networks, …
• Objectives relevant to your business: cost, speed, flexibility, reliability, …

We will work through questions such as:

• Should you locate a process in a given country? This decision has an obvious impact on your HR costs, but it also affects your working capital and your ability to react to the market needs.
• Should you centralize your distribution? This decision leads to economies of scale and a better product availability, but it also impacts your carbon emission.

By the end of this course, you will have built a framework that allows you to make better decisions.

Want to store and process data at scale? This data analysis course teaches you how to apply the power of the Azure cloud to big data using Azure Data Lake technologies.

Learn how to manage data in Azure Data Lake Store and run U-SQL jobs in Azure Data Lake Analytics to generate insights from structured and unstructured data sources.

Note: To complete this course, you will need a Microsoft Azure subscription. You can sign up for a free trial subscription at http://azure.microsoft.com, or you can use your existing subscription. The labs have been designed to minimize the resource costs required to complete the hands-on activities.