Online courses directory (363)

Modern computer technology requires an understanding of both hardware and software, as the interaction between the two offers a framework for mastering the fundamentals of computing. The purpose of this course is to cultivate an understanding of modern computing technology through an in-depth study of the interface between hardware and software. In this course, you will study the history of modern computing technology before learning about modern computer architecture and a number of its important features, including instruction sets, processor arithmetic and control, the Von Neumann architecture, pipelining, memory management, storage, and other input/output topics. The course will conclude with a look at the recent switch from sequential processing to parallel processing by looking at the parallel computing models and their programming implications.

Because we have compiler programs, software developers often take the process of compilation for granted.  However, as a software developer, you should cultivate a solid understanding of how compilers work in order to develop the strongest code possible and fully understand its underlying language.  In addition, the compilation process comprises techniques that are applicable to the development of many software applications.  As such, this course will introduce you to the compilation process, present foundational topics on formal languages and outline each of the essential compiler steps: scanning, parsing, translation and semantic analysis, code generation, and optimization.  By the end of the class, you will have a strong understanding of what it means to compile a program, what happens in the process of translating a higher-level language into a lower-level language, and the applicability of the steps of the compilation process to other applications.

Economics is traditionally divided into two parts: microeconomics and macroeconomics.  The purpose of this course is to provide you with a fundamental understanding of the principles of macroeconomics.  Macroeconomists study how a country’s economy works and try to determine the best choices to improve the overall wellbeing of a nation.  Typical topics include inflation (the overall level of prices), employment, fiscal policy (government taxing and spending), and money and banking (interest rates and lending policies).  Individuals and firms need to consider how macroeconomic events will affect their own prosperity.  To better define macroeconomics, consider its distinction from microeconomics.  Imagine you are attempting to figure out how the price of a certain good has been determined.  Microeconomics would focus on how supply and demand determine prices, while macroeconomics would study the determination of prices at all levels.  To test particular policies and ideas, or to find out the causes of…

Scholars tend to label the period between the Renaissance and the modern era as the long 18th and 19th centuries, meaning that they span from around 1680 - 1830 and 1775 - 1910, respectively, and that so many literary movements and cultural changes took place during these interim years that a narrower title is difficult to come by. In this course, we will examine these formative cultural and literary developments chronologically, dividing the course into four roughly sequential periods: The Enlightenment and Restoration Literature; The Rise of the Novel; Romanticism; and the Victorian Period. We will identify and contextualize the principal characteristics of each of these movements/periods, reading representative texts and examining their relationship to those texts that preceded or were contemporaneous with them. As such, this course foregrounds the movement, the changes, and the continuities from the neoclassicism of authors such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope through the emergence of the novel in th…

This course is the second installment of Single-Variable Calculus.  In Part I (MA101) [1], we studied limits, derivatives, and basic integrals as a means to understand the behavior of functions.  In this course (Part II), we will extend our differentiation and integration abilities and apply the techniques we have learned. Additional integration techniques, in particular, are a major part of the course.  In Part I, we learned how to integrate by various formulas and by reversing the chain rule through the technique of substitution.  In Part II, we will learn some clever uses of substitution, how to reverse the product rule for differentiation through a technique called integration by parts, and how to rewrite trigonometric and rational integrands that look impossible into simpler forms.  Series, while a major topic in their own right, also serve to extend our integration reach: they culminate in an application that lets you integrate almost any function you’d like. Integration allows us to calculat…

The study of public policy is intended to offer every citizen an understanding of the various and vast roles played by the different branches of the U.S. federal government as well as by state, county, and local governments in various areas of contemporary American life.  It is also a field that focuses on the priorities of American society as portrayed in the public policy choices that elected representatives make on the part of citizens and the size of different interest groups that advocate on behalf of particular policy goals.  This course looks at the process of making public policy from beginning to end and in a wide array of particular policy areas that are of importance to contemporary American society.  Moreover, because the process of public policymaking is best explored by examining particular instances of public debate over a wide array of specific policy areas, this course will adopt a case study approach to explore particular topics. Unit 1 will introduce this case study approach as well va…

With the expansion of law and the legal process into so many areas of everyday life, the responsibilities of the legal profession have expanded to meet new challenges.  For example, the advent of the Internet since the early 1990s has raised a multitude of new legal issues related to various areas of intellectual property, including copyright, patent law, and trademark law.  In recognition of the fact that many law-related responsibilities can be handled by well-educated and trained non-lawyers, the legal profession has increasingly come to depend on the assistance of paralegals.  Paralegals perform key functions within a law office from drafting legal documents to investigating cases and interviewing witnesses.  While they are no replacement for lawyers, paralegals have become recognized as key components of a well-functioning legal office. This course will introduce you to the basic knowledge and skills required of paralegals.  You will familiarize yourself with basics of the American legal system, a…

This course is designed to introduce you to the study of calculus.  You will learn concrete applications of how calculus is used and, more importantly, why it works.  Calculus is not a new discipline; it has been around since the days of Archimedes.  However, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, two 17th century European mathematicians concurrently working on the same intellectual discovery hundreds of miles apart, were responsible for developing the field as we know it today.  This brings us to our first question, what is calculus today?  In its simplest terms, calculus is the study of functions, rates of change, and continuity.  While you may have cultivated a basic understanding of functions in previous math courses, in this course you will come to a more advanced understanding of their complexity, learning to take a closer look at their behaviors and nuances. In this course, we will address three major topics: limits, derivatives, and integrals, as well as study their respective foundations and ap…

This course will introduce you to the history of the Middle East and Southwest Asia from the pre-Islamic period to the end of World War I.  You will learn about the major political, economic, and social changes that took place.  The course will be structured chronologically.  Most units will include representative primary-source documents that illustrate important overarching political, economic, and social themes, such as the formation of ancient empires in the second and first millennia BCE, the political and social influence of Islam on the region in the first millennium CE, the growth and expansion of Muslim states in the second millennium CE, and the impact of European imperialism on the region in the 18th and 19th centuries.  By the end of the course, you will understand how the Middle East and Southwest Asia developed politically, economically, and socially prior to World War One and recognize the critical role that the region played in the broader development of European and Asian societies.

This course is a continuation of CHEM103 [1]: Organic Chemistry I.  As you progress through the units below, you will continue to learn the different chemical reactions characteristic of each family of organic compounds.  We will focus on the four most important classes of reactions: electrophilic substitution at aromatic rings, nucleophilic addition at carbonyl compounds, hydrolysis of carboxylic acids, and carbon-carbon bond formation using enolates.  The enolate portion of this course will cover the reactivity of functional groups. We will also look at synthetic strategies for making simple, small organic molecules, using the knowledge of organic chemistry accumulated thus far.  At the end of this course, you will possess the tools you need to plan the synthesis of fairly complicated molecules, like those used in pharmaceutics.  From the perspective of a synthetic organic chemist, the two most challenging aspects of synthesizing drug molecules are the incorporation of  "molecular rings" (rings of 5…

This course will provide you with an analytical framework for the study of international trade.  Historically, international trade has played a critical role in enabling countries to grow, develop, and become economically powerful.  Through international trade in goods and services, the economies of different countries are more closely linked to one another now than ever before.  At the same time, the world economy is more turbulent now than it has been in decades.  Keeping up with the shifting international environment has become a central concern in business strategy and national economic policy.  This course uses the same fundamental methods of analysis deployed in other branches of economics, as the motives and behavior of individuals and firms remain the same whether they are in the context of international trade or domestic transactions.  You will learn, however, that international trade introduces an entirely new and different set of concerns as well. This course will cover a broad array of rel…

How does the brain function? How does it interact with the body in order to control and mediate behaviors and actions? Though psychologists have long studied these questions, the workings of the brain remain, in large part, a mystery. In this course, we will explore the field of psychology devoted to the pursuit of these questions: neuropsychology or the study of the structure and function of the brain as it relates to psychological processes. We will study significant findings in the field, noting that technological improvements have often enabled substantial advancements in field research. You may, for example, take MRIs or PET scans  devices used to diagnose medical problems  for granted, but these have only relatively recently enabled researchers to study the brain in greater detail. While a formal background in biology is not required for this course, you will find that neuropsychology relies heavily on the discipline. In fact, psychologists and biologists have often explored similar issues, though t…

This course will present a comparative overview of world history from the 17th century to the present era.  You will examine the origins of major economic, political, social, cultural, and technological trends of the past 400 years and explore the impact of these trends on world societies.  This course will be structured chronologically and thematically, with each unit focusing on a significant historical subject.  The units will include representative primary-source documents and images that illustrate important overarching themes, such as the emergence of modern nation-states, the economic and technological interactions between Western and non-Western peoples, the changing social and cultural perceptions about religion and the state, and the development of physical and virtual networks of information exchange. This course is designed to align with Thomas Edison State College TECEP examination. Visit the TECEP website [1], and click on “World History from 1600 to Present (HIS-126-TE)” to download t…

A thorough understanding of the systems of the body and the ways in which they fit together is imperative for study in many fields of biological inquiry, including medicine, physiology, developmental studies, and biological anthropology.  This course will provide you with an overview of the body from a systemic perspective.  Each unit will focus on one system, or network of organs that work together to perform a particular function.  At the end of this course, we will review the body from an integrative perspective, creating a more realistic vision of the ways in which the systems overlap.  We will also discuss current body imaging techniques and learn how to correctly interpret the images in order to put our newly-gained anatomical knowledge to practical use. This is a terminology-heavy course.  We will identify tissues and organ systems according to their functional and regional contexts, but information concerning the processes by which the tissues and organ systems actually function will be covered…

Political thought, or political philosophy, is the study of questions concerning power, justice, rights, law, and other issues pertaining to governance. Whereas political science assumes that these concepts are what they are, political thought asks how they have come about and to what effect. Just as Socrates’s simple question “How should we be governed?” led to his execution, the question “What makes a government legitimate?” leads to political turmoil when posed at critical times. Political thought asks what form government should take and why; what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any; and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if ever. Generally speaking, political thought, political philosophy, and political theory are terms often used interchangeably to mean the study of philosophical texts related to politics. This course examines major texts in the history of political thought. Many of these texts pose difficult questions concerning the political community, social order,…

If you invest in financial markets, you may want to predict the price of a stock in six months from now on the basis of company performance measures and other economic factors. As a college student, you may be interested in knowing the dependence of the mean starting salary of a college graduate, based on your GPA. These are just some examples that highlight how statistics are used in our modern society. To figure out the desired information for each example, you need data to analyze. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the subject of statistics as a science of data. There is data abound in this information age; how to extract useful knowledge and gain a sound understanding in complex data sets has been more of a challenge. In this course, we will focus on the fundamentals of statistics, which may be broadly described as the techniques to collect, clarify, summarize, organize, analyze, and interpret numerical information. This course will begin with a brief overview of the discipline of stat…

This chemistry survey is designed to introduce students to the world of chemistry.  The principles of chemistry were first identified, studied, and applied by ancient Egyptians in order to extract metal from ores, make alcoholic beverages, glaze pottery, turn fat into soap, and much more.  What began as a quest to build better weapons or create potions capable of ensuring everlasting life has since become the foundation of modern science.  Take a look around you: chemistry makes up almost everything you touch, see, and feel, from the shampoo you used this morning to the plastic container that holds your lunch.  In this course, we will study chemistry from the ground up, learning the basics of the atom and its behavior.  We will use this knowledge to understand the chemical properties of matter and the changes and reactions that take place in all types of matter.

This course will introduce you to historical research methods and familiarize you with the tools and techniques that historians use to study the past.  You will learn about the process of modern historical inquiry and gain a better understanding of the diverse resources that historians use to conduct research.  The course will be structured topically.  The first four units will focus on research methodology and examine how and why historians conduct research on the past.  Later units will examine how different historical resources can be used for historical research.  By the end of the course, you will understand how to conduct research on past events and be familiar with the variety of physical and electronic resources available for historical research.

This course will introduce you to the history of Europe from 1800 to present day.  You will learn about the major political, economic, and social changes that took place in Europe during this period.  This course is structured chronologically, with each unit focusing on a particular historical event or trend.  Each unit will include representative primary-source documents that illustrate important overarching political, economic, and social themes, such as the Industrial Revolution, the First and Second World Wars, imperialism, and the Cold War.  By the end of this course, you will understand how nationalism, industrialization, and imperialism fueled the rise of European nation-states in the nineteenth century, as well as how world war and oppressive regimes devastated Europe during the 1900s.

Calculus can be thought of as the mathematics of CHANGE. Because everything in the world is changing, calculus helps us track those changes. Algebra, by contrast, can be thought of as dealing with a large set of numbers that are inherently CONSTANT. Solving an algebra problem, like y = 2x + 5, merely produces a pairing of two predetermined numbers, although an infinite set of pairs. Algebra is even useful in rate problems, such as calculating how the money in your savings account increases because of the interest rate R, such as Y = X0+Rt, where t is elapsed time and X0 is the initial deposit. With compound interest, things get complicated for algebra, as the rate R is itself a function of time with Y = X0 + R(t)t. Now we have a rate of change which itself is changing. Calculus came to the rescue, as Isaac Newton introduced the world to mathematics specifically designed to handle those things that change. Calculus is among the most important and useful developments of human thought. Even though it is over…