Courses tagged with "Business" (1739)

In the second course of the Mandarin Chinese language series, you will learn extensive vocabulary for describing people and objects, making comparisons, and stating your own perspectives by using complex and varied sentence structures.

Learners will focus on tones and intonation with designed practices and learn to build dialogues for everyday communication.  After this Mandarin Chinese language course, you will be able to communicate in Mandarin speaking countries without difficulties.

Supplementary tools or materials are recommended if you would like to learn written language and stroke orders of Chinese characters.

In the third course of the Mandarin Chinese language series, you will advance your Mandarin Chinese with extensive vocabulary and complex sentence structures based on dynamic scenarios.

You will get involved in situations such as buying a cell phone, setting up a date, or going to the movies. You will not only learn to respond correctly but also to deliver your point of view and convey a clear idea in Mandarin Chinese.

Previous knowledge of Mandarin Chinese is needed.

This 7-week Spanish language course is aimed at students who would like to learn conversational Spanish starting with Spanish basics. The course introduces everyday language and includes activities to practice all four language skills: reading comprehension, writing, listening comprehension and speaking.

This course will introduce you to the A1 proficiency level as described in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL, Council of Europe 2001). After completing this course, you will be prepared to introduce yourself, ask basic questions, and conduct a brief conversation in Spanish.

This course uses reference materials, cultural notes, grammar explanations, functions of language, etc. Students will be able to monitor their progress by taking a number of performance tests and a final achievement test.

¡Bienvenidos y bienvenidas! (Welcome!) In this Spanish course, you will learn basic vocabulary to talk about yourself and your everyday life, in the present and in the past, in simple and brief communication situations, as well as about plans for an immediate future. At the end of the course you will be able to communicate in everyday situations according to the A1 proficiency level as described in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL, Council of Europe).

The course, which is designed for English speakers, offers a variety of exercises after going through the stages of content presentation, comprehension and production. You have videos, small texts and audios to improve your pronunciation, glossaries, activities for oral practice with other course students, quizzes, grammar cards and recommendations on external Internet resources to continue learning more and more Spanish.

The topics on which the activities revolve are work life, family life, city life and outdoor life. As you can see, a bit of everything to be able talk about yourself and to engage in everyday communication.

We hope you like our menu. ¡Buen provecho! (Bon appétit!)

• Have you ever wondered how magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) works?
• Do you know how one can determine three-dimensional structures of proteins without crystallization?
• How can chemists know for sure if they succeeded in synthesizing the desired molecules?
• How can you figure out the structure of a freshly discovered natural product extracted from plants or algae?

Sustainability, defined by Rice’s Energy and Environment Institute (EEi), is energy security, affordability, and environmental responsibility as the three required foundational pillars.    

We will explore and understand the fundamental principles of energy sustainability from the perspective of the techno/economic framework and maturity of the market in the geography of interest. Global impact and the effects of global commerce will drive investment and the hierarchy of the three fundamentals. With an emphasis on the oil and gas sector, petrochemicals, and power industry, thought leaders will discuss these principles with participants in the context of real-world industry examples and share their personal insights on best practices and future trends.

The four-week course will examine three fundamentals of energy sustainability and their application in today’s dynamic industry landscape in oil and gas (upstream, midstream, downstream), petrochemicals (upstream and downstream), power and energy trading:

1. Available and secure supply of energy. A portfolio of options and interconnections of supply and demand for long-term access and systems analysis of best available options.
2. Affordable and competitive cost of energy. An analysis of economic competitiveness and investment options for not only generation but a systems analysis of total cost impact.
3. Environmental responsibility in the production and consumption of energy. An analysis of technical options and the optimizing of local and international policy and regulations.

Through guest presentations and interviews with business executives and thought leaders, case studies, cutting-edge research and interactive learning experiences, participants will build the relevant knowledge and capabilities to effectively deliver consulting and support services effectively to specific clients and enterprises in the market. Assessment will include methods such as quizzes, written reflections, individual/team projects, etc.

Description de ce cours : Chaque région du monde présente des facteurs de vulnérabilité au changement climatique mais est néanmoins en mesure d’atténuer les effets de ce phénomène et de renforcer sa résilience. En ratifiant l’Accord de Paris, la communauté internationale a manifesté sa volonté d’agir. En effet, sans action climatique concertée, les progrès accomplis pendant des décennies en matière de développement seront menacés : nous nous trouvons donc à un moment décisif. Ce cours présente les données scientifiques les plus récentes sur la question, explique les différentes répercussions ressenties au plan régional, décrit les stratégies d’action climatique et mentionne différents types d’action qui s’offrent à vous.

Le cours « Bassions la Chaleur: de la science à l’action climatique » se déroule sur quatre semaines. Les deux premières seront consacrées à un tour d’horizon complet des données scientifiques disponibles sur le changement climatique, puis à la description des effets du réchauffement propres à certaines régions au XXIe siècle. Les deux dernières semaines seront axées sur les stratégies d’action que divers pays et régions mettent en œuvre pour relever le défi climatique ainsi que sur la manière dont chacun d’entre nous peut agir.

Format du cours

Ce MOOC est conçu selon un rythme hebdomadaire : il prévoit les ressources, les activités et les exercices qui vous sont destinés durant chacune des quatre semaines du cours. Chaque semaine, divers matériels pédagogiques seront mis à votre disposition :

• Des présentations vidéo interactives effectuées par de grands spécialistes et praticiens des questions climatiques
• Diverses ressources : activités interactives fondamentales ou optionnelles (approfondies) et distrayantes sur le thème de la semaine
• Des interrogations destinées à évaluer vos connaissances, compléter l’enseignement donné et fournir une rétroaction immédiate
• Des tâches qui affineront votre capacité d’analyse, de réflexion et de communication
• Des forums de discussion et des échanges sur les médias sociaux pour collaborer avec d’autres habitants de la planète, tout en enrichissant l’interaction entre les participants
• Une séance de questions-réponses interactive en direct avec des spécialistes internationaux du changement climatique sur l’application Google Hangout
• Enfin, votre projet final consistera en un document numérique.

Everyone experiences adversity and stress at some level, whether it’s the pressure to perform in school or work, relationship problems, financial difficulties, or simply the number of tasks to do in a short period of time. All stress isn’t bad, but chronic stress can take its toll on our minds, bodies, and behavior. Research has shown that people can learn and use specific resilience skills (such as optimistic thinking, relaxation strategies, choosing one’s attention) and positive routines (good sleep, scheduling in fun, and so on) in order to better manage stress, bounce back quicker after a setback, be more effective in their academic and vocational pursuits, develop stronger relationships with others, be physically and mentally healthy, and be satisfied with their lives overall. In short, resilience is ordinary magic and can be learned. It does not necessarily mean that you have to be born resilient or get lucky in life.

The purpose of this course is to teach individuals the science behind becoming a resilient person. Stated simply, resilience is the ability to survive and thrive. Resiliency is not only about your ability to positively adapt in the face of adverse or challenging circumstances (that is, survive), but it is also about learning the positive skills, strategies and routines that enable you to live a happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life (in other words, thrive). This course gives you the permission to take care of yourself in order to effectively manage life stressors and do what matters most in life. 

By the end of this course, you will have learned about the knowledge and skills that you can apply in your life now and in the future to be a resilient person.

Course goal:

The goal for this course is to give you permission to take care of yourself and empower you to be a resilient person. A resilient person is someone who:

• purposely strives to be as mentally and psychically healthy as possible,
• possesses the confidence to effectively cope with and manage stressful situations,
• is compassionate towards self and others,
• demonstrates grit or perseverance even in the face of adversity, and
• focuses on the positive and fulfilling aspects of life.

Course supporting objectives: When you complete this course, you will be able to:

• Describe why ‘functioning from the inside out’ is critical to becoming a resilient, effective person
  • Explain the benefits of resilience and how the specific skills translate into optimizing social-emotional wellbeing and doing what matters most in life
• Directly practice a variety of resilience skills in different aspects of your life, including but not limited to:
  • Mindfulness practices
  • Strategies to manage intense emotions
  • Activities that induce positive emotions
  • Clarifying important personal values (that is, what matters most) and committing to behaving consistent with them
  • Making health lifestyle choices that are cheap and readily available, yet promote well-being
• Describe why ‘practicing’ and integrating resilience skills into one’s life is critical to making them a habit and becoming a resilient person
• Develop a resilience plan that serves as a roadmap for your future

What separates a successful leader from a mediocre one? In this course, you will learn what successful 21st-century leaders look like and how you can adopt their inclusive leadership style. Using research and best practices, as well as stories from great leaders and everyday people, you will practice empowerment, accountability, courage, and humility—key leadership skills linked to inclusive, successful teams. Throughout the course, you will meet people like yourself, who want to be the best leaders they possibly can by incorporating inclusive leadership into their everyday lives. With short quizzes and compelling case studies, you will refine your skills each section. Most importantly, you will apply your new leadership skills through exciting real-life exercises. At the end of the course, you will create a Personal Leadership Plan that will help you continue to develop your skills, knowledge, and awareness in your quest to become a successful, inclusive leader. 

Curious about entrepreneurship, but not sure where to start? Learn from MIT’s premier program for aspiring entrepreneurs, MIT Launch.

Becoming an Entrepreneur is an innovation and business course designed for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to explore an entrepreneurial path and overcome some of the initial challenges in taking those first steps.

From developing new business ideas and doing market research to entrepreneurial strategy and pitching, this course follows MIT’s successful approach to entrepreneurship. There will be a combination of short videos, thought-provoking case studies, and activities that will challenge you to get you away from your computer screen and into the community to make a real impact.

No previous business or entrepreneurship experience needed. Join us to embark on your entrepreneurial journey.

How can we get people to save more money, eat healthy foods, engage in healthy behaviors, and make better choices in general? There has been a lot written about the fact that human beings do not process information and make decisions in an optimal fashion. This course builds on much of the fascinating work in the area of behavioral economics and allows learners to develop a hands-on approach by understanding its methods and more importantly, how it can be harnessed by suitably designing contexts to “nudge” choice.

In three modules, learners will be able to a). explain and interpret the principles underlying decision-making and compare the nudging approach to other methods of behavior change, b). learn how to critique, design and interpret the results of experiments; and c). design nudges and decision-tools to help people make better decisions.

Understanding experimental design and interpretation is central to your ability to truly use behavioral economics and will set you apart from people who merely know about the behavioral research. After the first two weeks learning the basic principles, we will devote two weeks to studying experimental design and analysis, and the final two weeks to understanding processes for designing nudges and for helping people make better decisions.

You will also witness and participate in weekly topical debates on various topics like “does irrationality impact welfare?” or “what strategy is better for improving welfare – nudging or education?” If you’ve been fascinated with the buzz surrounding behavioral economics but are not sure how to actually use it, this course is for you.

Several leading scholars, policy makers, business people, authors and commentators will briefly join our debate and discussion sections. These guest lecturers include Professor Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard University), Professor John Lynch (University of Colorado), Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy Group), Owain Service (Behavioural Insights Team, UK Cabinet Office), Shankar Vedantam (NPR Columnist and Author – The Hidden Brain), Professors Andrew Ching, Avi Goldfarb, Nina Mazar, and Claire Tsai, Min Zhao (University of Toronto) and many others!

Behavioral medicine is the science of changing our behavior, so we as individuals can stay healthy and happy as long as we can. In this course on Behavioral Medicine, you will learn about basic behavioral medicine concepts and explore how they can be applied to help people who need to change specific lifestyle behaviors to attain better health. Working with virtual patient interactions will give you a chance to test behavioral medicine interventions. You will also learn self¬-help tools based on behavioral medicine, for whatever you need to change in your own life. In this updated version of the course, you will also explore innovations in how to deliver the tools of behavioral medicine to patients in primary care and psychiatry, and what kind of content digital tools might need to include.

To help people who need to improve their health by changing their behaviors, you will learn about Motivational Interviewing (MI), a counseling style that stimulates behavior change. You will have an opportunity to test basic techniques in MI with a “virtual bartender” who has sleep problems that he is trying to solve by drinking alcohol. The following sections will focus on coping with stress, improving sleep, increasing physical activity and everyday behaviors like hand washing, safer sex and minimizing risky alcohol use.

To complete this course, you will need to spend a total of about 30-40 hours. This time covers course videos, follow-up questions to help you remember what you have learned, course reading (mostly open access scientific articles) and homework tasks. Part of the work is for you to do on your own, and part will be together with other participants in the course community.

This course is offered in collaboration with EIT Health.

Project management plays a key role in supporting a business’s success. In this project management course, you will learn what’s required from an organization for projects to excel.

You will learn how to turn project management principles and theory into practice. The course will cover:

• project management methods and best practices
• project portfolio management
• the project management office
• Six Sigma
• corporate culture and organizational behavior
• project management leadership

The course will utilize case studies and examples from companies to help students sharpen their project management skills to recognize and implement an environment that supports success.

First, we will cover the basic organizational and leadership elements required to provide a successful environment for all projects to succeed.

Second, we will cover the necessary organizational support structures and methods that enable project management and project managers to deliver results to the business and to the customers they serve.

Finally, we will explore the challenges of specific types of projects such as projects in crisis, global projects and managing a portfolio.

This course is part of the RIT Project Management MicroMasters Program that is designed to teach the importance of the organizational and leadership characteristics for the success of projects. In order to qualify for the MicroMasters Credential, you will need to earn a verified certificate in each of the three courses as well as pass a capstone exam.

This course will start with the nuclear structure of atoms and discuss the creation of hydrogen in the big bang universe and the fusion of hydrogen to make heavier elements in stars. Three pillars of the big bang cosmology will be elaborated.

Ch. 1 “Atomic Nucleus” Rutherford’s 1908 Nobel Lecture will be used to discuss identification of the alpha particle as a possible building block of elements such as carbon and oxygen. The discovery of the proton as the ultimate building block of all nuclei will also be covered.

Ch. 2 “Origin of Elements” The modern view of the big bang synthesis of light elements and the stellar synthesis of heavy elements will be discussed. The 1978 Nobel Lecture by Penzias, titled “The Origin of Elements”, will be the primary source material.

Ch. 3 “Cosmic Background Radiation” How big bang cosmology was established by the discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 will be discussed using Wilson’s 1978 Nobel Lecture.

Ch. 4 “Expansion of the Universe” How the foundation for big bang cosmology was laid out by the works of Leavitt, Slipher, and Hubble is the subject of this chapter. Hubble’s 1929 paper in PNAS about Hubble’s law will be the primary resource.

Organizations use their data to support and influence decisions and build data-intensive products and services, such as recommendation, prediction, and diagnostic systems. The collection of skills required by organizations to support these functions has been grouped under the term ‘data science’.

This statistics and data analysis course will attempt to articulate the expected output of data scientists and then teach students how to use PySpark (part of Spark) to deliver against these expectations. The course assignments include log mining, textual entity recognition, and collaborative filtering exercises that teach students how to manipulate data sets using parallel processing with PySpark.

This course covers advanced undergraduate-level material. It requires a programming background and experience with Python (or the ability to learn it quickly). All exercises will use PySpark (the Python API for Spark), and previous experience with Spark equivalent to Introduction to Apache Spark, is required.

Gain essential skills in today’s digital age to store, process and analyse data to inform business decisions.

In this course, part of the Big Data MicroMasters program, you will develop your knowledge of big data analytics and enhance your programming and mathematical skills. You will learn to use essential analytic tools such as Hadoop, R and MOA (Massive Online Analysis).

Topics covered in this course include:

• cloud-based big data analysis;
• predictive analytics, including probabilistic and statistical models;
• application of large-scale data analysis;
• analysis of problem space and data needs;
• understanding of ethical and social concerns of data mining.

By the end of this course, you will be able to approach large-scale data science problems with creativity and initiative.

In data science, data is called “big” if it cannot fit into the memory of a single standard laptop or workstation.

The analysis of big datasets requires using a cluster of tens, hundreds or thousands of computers. Effectively using such clusters requires the use of distributed files systems, such as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and corresponding computational models, such as Hadoop, MapReduce and Spark.

In this course, part of the Data Science MicroMasters program, you will learn what the bottlenecks are in massive parallel computation and how to use spark to minimize these bottlenecks.

You will learn how to perform supervised an unsupervised machine learning on massive datasets using the Machine Learning Library (MLlib).

In this course, as in the other ones in this MicroMasters program, you will gain hands-on experience using PySpark within the Jupyter notebooks environment.

Online and software-based learning tools have been used increasingly in education. This movement has resulted in an explosion of data, which can now be used to improve educational effectiveness and support basic research on learning.

In this course, you will learn how and when to use key methods for educational data mining and learning analytics on this data. You will examine the methods being developed by researchers in the educational data mining, learning analytics, learning-at-scale, student modeling, and artificial intelligence communities. You’ll also gain experience with standard data mining methods frequently applied to educational data. You will learn how to apply these methods and when to apply them, as well as their strengths and weaknesses for different applications.

The course will discuss how to use each method to answer education research questions, and to drive intervention and improvement in educational software and systems. Methods will be covered at a theoretical level, and in terms of learning how to apply them using software tools like RapidMiner. We will also discuss validity and generalizability; establishing how trustworthy and applicable the analysis results.

Social physics is a big data science that models how networks of people behave and uses these network models to create actionable intelligence. It is a quantitative science that can accurately predict patterns of human behavior and guide how to influence those patterns to (for instance) increase decision making accuracy or productivity within an organization. Included in this course is a survey of methods for increasing communication quality within an organization, approaches to providing greater protection for personal privacy, and general strategies for increasing resistance to cyber attack.

The Big Data Capstone Project will allow you to apply the techniques and theory you have gained from the four courses in this Big Data MicroMasters program to a medium-scale data science project.

Working with organisations and stakeholders of your choice on a real-world dataset, you will further develop your data science skills and knowledge.

This project will give you the opportunity to deepen your learning by giving you valuable experience in evaluating, selecting and applying relevant data science techniques, principles and theory to a data science problem.

This project will see you plan and execute a reasonably substantial project and demonstrate autonomy, initiative and accountability.

You’ll need to reflect on the nature of your data and identify any social and ethical concerns and identify appropriate ethical frameworks for data management.

By communicating the knowledge, skills and ideas you have gained to other learners through online collaborative technologies, you will learn valuable communication skills, important for any career. You’ll also deliver a written oral presentation of your project design, plan, methodologies, and outcomes.