Courses tagged with "KIx" (159)

This course studies the national literature of the United States since the early 19th century. It considers a range of texts - including, novels, essays, and poetry - and their efforts to define the notion of American identity. Readings usually include works by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Toni Morrison.

Build your earth science vocabulary and learn about cycles of matter and types of sedimentary rocks through the Education Portal course Earth Science 101: Earth Science. Our series of video lessons and accompanying self-assessment quizzes can help you boost your scientific knowledge ahead of the Excelsior Earth Science exam . This course was designed by experienced educators and examines both science basics, like experimental design and systems of measurement, and more advanced topics, such as analysis of rock deformation and theories of continental drift.

This course prepares you to read more deeply and write more clearly about works of literature. Through an engaging collection of videos, authentic readings, and support material from a variety of sources, you will learn to appreciate literature from different genres. This course will focus on reading, interpreting and writing about fiction and gothic literature.

You will broaden your vocabulary while you sharpen your academic and creative writing skills. Interaction with other students will help you to refine your thinking about the reading and writing as well. You will learn to write under time pressure, and have the opportunity to complete practice assignments that are similar to those you will find on the AP examination.

There are no prerequisites; you don’t have to take the AP exam to join the course. If you want to learn about literature and writing, this course is for you.

This course prepares you to read more deeply and write more clearly about works of literature. Through an engaging collection of videos, authentic readings, and support material from a variety of sources, you will learn to appreciate literature from different genres. You will learn about different genres of poetry and the history of some of our greatest poets.

You will broaden your vocabulary while you sharpen your academic and creative writing skills. Interaction with other students will help you to refine your thinking about the reading and writing as well. You will learn to write under time pressure, and have the opportunity to complete practice assignments that are similar to those you will find on the AP examination.

There are no prerequisites; you don’t have to take the AP exam to join the course. If you want to learn about poetry, literature and writing, this course is for you.

This course prepares you to read more deeply and write more clearly about works of literature. . This course will focus on great pieces of drama and how we read and interpret them. We will discuss the works of William Shakespeare and Edmond Rostand. Through an engaging collection of videos, authentic readings, and support material from a variety of sources, you will learn to appreciate literature from different genres.

You will broaden your vocabulary while you sharpen your academic and creative writing skills. Interaction with other students will help you to refine your thinking about the reading and writing as well. You will learn to write under time pressure, and have the opportunity to complete practice assignments that are similar to those you will find on the AP examination.

There are no prerequisites; you don’t have to take the AP exam to join the course. If you want to learn about literature and writing, this course is for you.

Do you want to take the AP Spanish exam, but your school doesn’t offer a Spanish language course? Are you looking for a way to get more practice with and exposure to the AP Spanish exam in general? Then this interactive online course from Boston University Spanish instructors is for you.

This course, conducted entirely in Spanish, will prepare you to do all the tasks on the AP exam, such as:

• Interpret authentic written and audio texts
• Speak Spanish both conversationally and be able to give formal presentations
• Write correspondence and persuasive essays
• Think productively about Hispanic cultures and compare them to your own culture
• Understand and discuss issues pertaining to all of the themes covered in the AP Spanish exam, including contemporary life, families and communities, personal and public identity, science and technology, beauty and aesthetics, as well as global challenges
• Consider the intersection of these themes as well as connections to your own lives

Enroll in this course to prepare for the AP Spanish Language exam and refine your linguistic skills in the process. ¡Bienvenidos!

AP is a trademark registered and/or owned by the College Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, this product.

What is a "life" when it's written down? How does memory inform the present? Why are memoirs so popular? This course will address these questions and others, considering the relationship between biography, autobiography, and memoir and between personal and social themes. We will closely examine some recent memoirs: Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Students will write two brief papers: a critical essay and an experiment in memoir.

As a "Sampling," this class offers 6 units, with a strong emphasis on close reading, group discussion, focused writing, and research and presentation skills.

Zizhi Tongjian is one of the earliest Chinese historiographies spanning nearly 300 volumes and covering 1,300 years of history. Literally meaning “Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance,” Zizhi Tongjian is an annalistic-style history featuring the subjects of politics and the military as the main thread of narration. The collection has been cherished by scholars over numerous dynasties for its historical value and insight into governance, peace and stability.

This guided reading course will help learners deepen their understanding of Chinese history, in addition to applying Zizhi Tongjian’s ancient wisdom to modern-day governance. Because Zizhi TongJian is a rich, expansive text, this course is intended to remove colloquial barriers and help students gain a deeper understanding of Chinese history from Emperor Qin to Caocao and Emperor Taizong.
 
资治通鉴》是北宋司马光主持编纂的著名编年体史书、传统史籍“通鉴体”门类的开山之作。该书以政治、军事为记述主线，上起公元前403年，下迄公元 959年，以294卷、300多万字的篇幅，系统展现一千三百多年间华夏大地波澜壮阔的历史画卷。该书问世以来，不但以其不可替代的史料价值为历代学者所 重视，更以其资政育人、总结历代治乱兴衰之道的根本动机与高卓史识为后世所称道，呈现出超越时空的巨大生命力。然而《资治通鉴》篇幅浩瀚、内容复杂，加以 历史文献自身的时代特点，非文史专业出身的广大青年学生难以通读并领会其要旨。“《资治通鉴》导读”课程作为一门人文通识课程，目的即在于消除专业壁垒， 引导同学近距离感受这部中国伟大史学著作的魅力。课程主讲张国刚教授潜心研读《资治通鉴》数十年，通过精心选取其中的经典人物言行与历史场景，钩沉发覆、 条分缕析，以现代思维总结文化精髓，以生动语言阐发历史智慧，尤其侧重其中修身、齐家、治国的现实意义，以及中西文化之间的历史性比较。通过“《资治通 鉴》导读”课程的学习，同学们不但可对战国至五代之间中国历史发展演化的基本脉络产生较为全面的把握，还可领悟到如何从传统文化汲取现实营养的基本方法， 为将来进一步学习中国文化开辟道路。

Le christianisme s’oppose-t-il à la raison philosophique ? Ce questionnement d’ordre général peut trouver une première réponse dans l’étude historique de la confrontation entre christianisme et philosophie dans l’Antiquité. Cette confrontation a joué un rôle très important dans la constitution de la doctrine chrétienne. Elle prend la forme d’une polémique entre les chrétiens et les philosophes, mais également d’un rapprochement, les chrétiens reprenant à la philosophie un grand nombre de concepts et de modes de raisonnement pour penser, exprimer et défendre leur foi. On verra ce qui oppose le christianisme et la philosophie comme deux voies d’accès concurrentes à la vérité, avant d’envisager différents aspects de la dette du christianisme à l’égard de la philosophie antique. On se demandera pour finir quel a été le rôle du christianisme dans l’histoire de la philosophie en tant que telle.

Ce cours constitue une introduction au christianisme des origines ainsi qu’au monde intellectuel de l’Empire romain. Il permettra de comprendre comment se sont constitués les aspects centraux de la doctrine chrétienne. On évoquera aussi dans ce cadre les modalités pratiques de la production et de la transmission des idées dans l’Antiquité (papyrus, manuscrits) avec l’intervention de plusieurs spécialistes.  

Roman Literature of the Golden Age of Augustus Caesar, produced during the transition from Republican to Imperial forms of government, was to have a profound and defining influence on Western European and American societies. These writings ultimately established lasting models of aesthetic refinement, philosophical aspiration, and political ambition that continue to shape modern cultures. This class will be exploring the Golden Age of Latin Literature from an historical perspective in order to provide an intensive examination of the cultural contexts in which these monumental works of classical art were first produced. Readings will emphasize the transition from a Republican form of government to an Empire under the rule of Augustus Caesar and the diversity of responses among individual authors to the profound structural changes that Roman society was undergoing at this time. Particular attention will be devoted to the reorganization of society and the self through textuality, the changing dimensions of the public and the private, the roles of class and gender, and the relationship between art and pleasure. Writings covering a wide variety of literary genres will include the works of Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, with additional readings from Cassius Dio for background.

This course looks at comedy in drama, novels, and films from Classical Greece to the twentieth century. Focusing on examples from Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Wilde, Chaplin, and Billy Wilder, along with theoretical contexts, the class examines comedy as a transgressive mode with revolutionary social and political implications. This is a Communications Intensive (CI) class with emphasis on discussion, and frequent, short essays.

This course is designed around analyzing what’s so funny and why is it that we laugh when we do. How is comedy characterized on the fictional page, the screen, and the stage? And what might the comic teach us about the self and culture(s), especially when we come to understand its patterns of transgression as confounding social norms through jokes and laughter? Tracking a history of comedy, beginning with the first Greek humorists, Aristophanes and Plautus, we will traverse genres, periods and cultures to reflect on various types of humor: satire, farce, slapstick, love, tragedy, parody, and screwball.

Central to our era is the gradual movement of all the world's regions toward a uniform standard of economic and political development. In this class we will read a variety of recent narratives that partake of, dissent from, or contribute to this story, ranging from novels and poems to World Bank and IMF statements and National Geographic reports. We will seek to understand the many motives and voices – sometimes congruent, sometimes clashing – that are currently engaged in producing accounts of people in the developing world: their hardships, laughter, and courage, and how they help themselves and are helped by outsiders who may or may not have philanthropic motives. Readings will include literature by J. G. Ballard, Jamaica Kincaid, Rohinton Mistry, and John le Carré, as well as policy documents, newspaper and magazine articles, and the Web sites of a variety of trade and development commissions and organizations.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

This overview course is designed to show new students how to take a course on edx.org. You will learn how to navigate the edX platform and complete your first course! From there, we will help you get started choosing the course that best fits your interests, needs, and dreams.

When John Locke declared (in the 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding) that knowledge was derived solely from experience, he raised the possibility that human understanding and identity were not the products of God's will or of immutable laws of nature so much as of one's personal history and background. If on the one hand Locke's theory led some to pronounce that individuals could determine the course of their own lives, however, the idea that we are the products of our experience just as readily supported the conviction that we are nothing more than machines acting out lives whose destinies we do not control. This course will track the formulation of that problem, and a variety of responses to it, in the literature of the "long eighteenth century." Readings will range widely across genre, from lyric poetry and the novel to diary entries, philosophical prose, and political essays, including texts by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Astell, David Hume, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Hays, and Mary Shelley. Topics to be discussed include the construction of gender identities; the individual in society; imagination and the poet's work. There will be two essays, one 5-6 pages and one 8-10 pages in length, and required presentations.

Love letters generated by a computer. An online poem two hundred trillion stanzas long. A mystery novel in the form of a wiki. The story of Inanimate Alice, told through videos and instant messages. An ocean buoy tweeting remixes of Moby Dick. Welcome to the weird world of electronic literature—digitally born poetic, narrative, and aesthetic works read on computers, tablets, and phones. Experimental, evocative, and sometimes simply puzzling, electronic literature challenges our assumptions about reading, writing, authorship, and meaning.

Yet e-lit, as it is often called, has also profoundly influenced mainstream culture. Literature, film, comics, apps, and video games have all learned lessons from electronic literature. This course will trace the rise of electronic literature and explore both historic and contemporary works of e-lit. We’ll begin with electronic literature’s roots in avant-garde art and Cold War technology, and follow e-lit through the birth of the personal computer into the era of the Web and smartphone. At every step along the way the expressive power of new media—the way digital media enables and shapes different modes of creative and cultural expression—will be of particular interest to us.

Courses offered via edX.org are not eligible for academic credit from Davidson College. A passing score in a DavidsonX course(s) will only be eligible for a verified certificate generated by edX.org.

This subject offers a broad survey of texts (both literary and philosophical) drawn from the Western tradition and selected to trace the growth of ideas about nature and the natural environment of mankind. The term nature in this context has to do with the varying ways in which the physical world has been conceived as the habitation of mankind, a source of imperatives for the collective organization and conduct of human life. In this sense, nature is less the object of complex scientific investigation than the object of individual experience and direct observation. Using the term "nature" in this sense, we can say that modern reference to "the environment" owes much to three ideas about the relation of mankind to nature. In the first of these, which harks back to ancient medical theories and notions about weather, geographical nature was seen as a neutral agency affecting or transforming agent of mankind's character and institutions. In the second, which derives from religious and classical sources in the Western tradition, the earth was designed as a fit environment for mankind or, at the least, as adequately suited for its abode, and civic or political life was taken to be consonant with the natural world. In the third, which also makes its appearance in the ancient world but becomes important only much later, nature and mankind are regarded as antagonists, and one must conquer the other or be subjugated by it.

Great managers are made, not born. Learn about the qualities and skills of great managers in this Business 101 course. Instructor Sherri Hartzell holds both an MBA and Ed.D., so she's an excellent choice to teach you about principles of management.

Start by learning about the different levels of management in organizations and then dive into how good managers lead to great employees. Students of business, budding entrepreneurs and independent online learners alike can benefit from these short, engaging video lessons and interactive online quizzes. Business 101: Principles of Management can prepare you to earn real, widely transferable college credit by taking the Principles of Management CLEP exam or the Excelsior Principles of Management exam .