Sunday, January 6, 2013

Selected MIT, Harvard, Google Free Online MOOC Course List


Free English Language Certificate Courses
TEFL courses usually cost a lot of money. However that’s not always the case especially with the ones listed here. Given below are two TEFL certificate courses endorsed by Alex Case of  the Tefltastic blog. Alex has written a lot about fake TEFL ripoff courses that charge exorbitant prices but issue worthless certificates. So coming from him, you can surely trust the courses –

Cross Disciplinary Courses
Duke University - Think Again: How to Reason and Argue - Professors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ram Neta - If your current understanding of arguing and discussion stem from commenting on the internet, you need this course. Sinnott-Armstrong and Neta will show you how to use critical thinking skills to form rational, reasoned arguments to support or refute positions based on information and data, not confirmation bias and "my team is better than your team" thinking. You'll learn how to spot an argument, how to analyze it, the criteria for a good argument versus a bad one, and perhaps just as importantly—how to mess up an argument and the criteria for a flawed argument. By the end of the course, you'll be able to speak about and discuss issues that are important to you in a rational and intelligent way, or so we hope.
Udacity - How to Build a Startup (EP245) - Steve Blank Building a startup requires more than just a few million dollars from an angel investor and a semi-brilliant idea, and Steve Blank, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepenur who's seen both sides of the coin, can help you build a plan to get your idea off the ground. Blank walks through the process of building your idea, getting people engaged and involved with your ideas, turning those people into customers, and then using their feedback to both improve your product and market it to make your business stronger.
University of California, Irvine - Introduction to Project Management - This course won't help you become a PMP, but it will show you how to handle projects and massive initiatives from a high level, balancing competing priorities and needs, working with schedules, adjusting deadlines, and more. You'll learn the "triple constraint" or scope, time, and budget, and how to balance them, and come away with the class with not just an appreciation for the profession, but the tools to coordinate your own personal projects.
MIT - Technology in Transportation - Prof. Sanjay Sarma - From the steam engine to the combustion engine to the rocket, this course will show you how technology has shaped the way we move from place to place, and in turn, how the transportation industry has shaped technology and advancement. Topics including radar, GPS, GIS, aerodynamics, vehicle engineering, and more will be covered, and the materials are all available online.

 

Social Sciences, Classics, and Humanities

MIT - Foundations of World Culture I: World Civilizations and Texts - Dr. Ghenwa Hayek - This course will introduce you to some of the most brilliant text, literature, history, and old stories to ever exist, starting in ancient antiquity and bringing you up to the 17th century. Ancient civilizations you may never have heard of will come to light and you'll read some of their world-view defining literature, and other cultures you may have thought you were familiar with will surprise you. The course is complex, but if you take the time to go through it, it'll open your eyes to a world bigger than what's outside your front door.
Princeton University - History of the World Since 1300 - Jeremy Adelman - It's a lot of ground to cover, but the world has changed an incredible amount since 1300 AD, and this whirlwind course will take you through it, without just focusing on one continent and one people's history. You'll start with Chinggis Khan and the Mongol invasions, and then traverse the globe to Europe, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the Americas to see how major culture, political, and societal shifts took place, many at the same time.
Carnegie Mellon University - American English Speech - The goal here isn't to learn english, and you won't boost your vocabulary, but you will learn to enunciate, you'll learn the impact of the words you choose and the way you say them, and you'll learn the nuances of American English speech. You'll become familiar with the symbols that represent the sounds we make, and overall improve your own speech—assuming you speak American English. If you don't, by the end of the course, you'll have a new appreciation for the complexities of the language and its dialects.
MIT -Music and Technology: Live Electronics Performance Practices - Professor Christopher Ariza - Fans of electronic music, unite! This course will walk you through the beginnings of electronic music and musical instruments, from early analog devices to more modern synthesizers, including how musicians choose to include technology in their live performances.
Yale University - Roman Architecture - Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner - The Roman Empire was responsible for some of the world's greatest marvels of architecture and building design, and many of those examples still stand today across a wide swath of what was once one of the largest empires on Earth. Even today's architects struggle to match the complexity and precision of those old buildings, and in this course you'll learn what made Roman architecture so special, so inspirational to modern designers, and see beautiful examples of how good design and building can last the ages, from places where Rome reigned and far beyond.

 

Science and Medicine

Duke University - Introduction to Astronomy - Professor Ronen Plesser - This course doesn't start for a while, but it's one of the best introductions to the machinations of the universe around us that you'll see. You'll definitely need to flex your mathematics muscles here - this is no all-observation course. You'll learn not just how celestial bodies move and operate, but also the equations and mathematics that explain how it all works.
Carnegie Mellon University - Anatomy & Physiology - Our bodies are probably some of the most glorious and complex tools we'll ever have the privilege of using, so why not take some time to learn how it works? This introductory course from CMU's Open Learning Initiative gives you the opportunity to learn how your body works, some of the complex systems at play and busily working even as you sit and read this, and concepts like homeostasis, the levels of organization from the cellular to the macro—including the way organs are built and interact, and more.
Yale University - EEB 122: Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior - Professor Stephen C. Stearns - If topics like evolutionary biology confuse you, or if you're looking for a way to challenge your own confirmation bias by learning more about biology and natural selection, this course is a great way to start. You'll walk through topics of transmission genetics, natural selection, adaptive behavior, sex (the evolution of and sexual selection), the importance of biodiversity, and even the evolutionary rationale between selfishness and altruism in a social context.
MIT - Physics and the Chemistry of the Terrestrial Planets - Professors Benjamin Weiss and Leigh Royden - Although a touch dated, this course will walk you through the basics of the composition of the planets in our solar system, including rocky bodies like Earth and Mars all the way out to the massive gas giants like Jupiter and Neptune. The course pays attention to how each planet formed and got its chemical composition, and what probes headed for those planets can expect to find there.
Yale University - GG 140: The Atmosphere, the Ocean, and Environmental Change - Professor Ronald B. Smith - Climate change, El Nino, the ozone layer—all of these topics are fair game in this introductory course about the Earth's climate, its history, its changes over the millennia, and how it's changing today. You'll learn the importance of separating weather from climate in the course while still understanding how weather can be a symptom of climate events, you'll learn whether those cyclical climate changes you've heard about are really true, and you'll have the opportunity to challenge your own beliefs on environmental science and climate change with facts and data to back them up in an environment led by a geophysicist.
Caltech - Drugs and the Brain - Professor Henry A. Lester - Bring your neuroscience pants to this class: Lester covers the issue of drug use for therapy, prevention, treatment, and recreation, all in one packed class full of information that won't require that you have a specific background, but a mind familiar to science and scientific thinking will do well here. By the end of the course, you'll have a new appreciation for the complexities of the brain and how chemical interactions can change everything about our body chemistry.


Computer Science and Technology

Google's Free Power Search Training- I expect this to benefit me because, as a writer, I rely on the search engines to help me research.
Harvard University - Computer Science 50x - Professor David J. Malan - When budding computer scientists and programmers find themselves at Harvard University, CS50 is the class they wind up in. It's demanding, but completely doable, especially for someone willing to buckle in and put in some effort to learn some broadly applicable programming skills. Whether you want to get a job as a developer and want to get some real skills under your belt, or you need to brush up on your codewriting technique, this open course will do the job.
Video lectures and additional content are available at CS50.net and CS50.tv.
MIT - 6.00x: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming - Professors John Guttag, Chris Terman, and Eric Grimson - MIT's beginner computer science course will teach you the basics. You'll need to brush off your mathematics skills for this course, since the instructors won't pull punches on the algebra and basic math required to grasp computer science concepts, but aside from that, you can go in bright-eyed and take away applicable skills. Best of all, you can follow along at your own pace.
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology - Android Development (iTunes U) - Professor David Fisher - while not strictly an online class, the CSSE490 Podcast series from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology will help you learn how to build Android applications from start to finish. Last term we helped you build apps for the iPhone or iPad, and this term, take some time to learn to develop for the other side, with self-paced skill-based lessons that will help you build your first Android app quickly, with supporting documentation on the web. Not a fan of iTunes? You can grab the videos at Fisher's YouTube channel or visit the course's website.
Stanford University - Human-Computer Interaction - Professor Scott Klemmer - Form matters, sometimes as much as function. In this HCI course, you'll learn how to design and build interfaces and systems that people actually want to use - something that a lot of developers often overlook. Building incredible function is important—often paramount—but if your interface is so poor that your tool is unusable and difficult to operate, you've got a dud on your hands. This course will teach you the basics of visual design, help you learn to poll individuals for design ideas, build paper prototypes, do field work, and test your designs with others. The end goal is for you to learn what it takes to incorporate intelligent design into any technology.
University of California, Berkeley - CS169.1x: Software as a Service - Professors Armando Fox and David Patterson - If webapps are more your fancy and you're interested in building the next big, scalable platform that will draw users to you to make use of your big idea, then this Berkeley course is for you. You'll use Agile techniques to build scalable platforms using Ruby on Rails, from design and development to testing and rollout. You'll learn how cloud applications work, publish your own, and more. You'll need some programming experience for this one though, so make sure you're ready!
University of Washington - Information Security and Risk Management in Context - Professor Barbara Endicott-Popovsky - Privacy, security, and confidentiality are more than buzzwords describing "keeping secrets," and in this course you'll learn modern techniques used to secure networks, protect individual privacy, and how businesses and technology professionals alike are addressing modern security issues, even as more businesses get hacked and there's more momentum to put important data—like healthcare records and other sensitive information—on the internet.

 

Finance and Economics

SmallBizU/Kutztown University of Pennsylvania - Finding Money to Start a Business - If you have an idea that you want to get off the ground, but finding the cash to do so is the problem, this 3-hour course will help you figure out where you can raise money, how to go about doing it, and some other important things an entrepeneur should consider when looking for the cash to make his or her idea reality.
University of California, Irvine - Fundamentals of Personal Financial Planning - You have your budget, but it's tenuous. You're not sure whether or not you should be paying down your debt or saving for the future or both or what. If you feel a little overwhelmed by your personal finance needs, this course will help you master not just the basics of financial planning, but cut through the fog of confusion and options to help you decide which approach is best for you and your life situation.
Investopedia - The Complete Guide to Retirement Planning for 20-Somethings | 30-Somethings | 40-Somethings | 50-Somethings - Denise Appleby - Wherever you are in life, it's not too late to start saving for retirement. The tactics, however, to best maximize your returns and live comfortably, vary depending on your age, so this series of courses is broken down into age groups with advice best suited to each. Choose your adventure, and get started planning for your future—whether it's with funds, stocks, bonds, or good old fashioned interest-bearing CDs and IRAs.
Investopedia - Budgeting Basics - Amy Fontinelle - Budgeting sounds easy, and it's something everyone should do, but if you're having a hard time making your budget work, or having a hard time sticking to your budget, it might be time to look at how you did it or start from scratch. This course from Investopedia may not be professor-driven, but it's a great set of instructions that you can follow along with in your spare time to help you get your expenditures under control and start saving money.
Yale University - ECON 252: Financial Markets - Professor Robert J. Shiller - If the way the stock market, commodities markets, and bonds both puzzle and interest you, this course will help demystify how global financial markets work, and give you some insight into what you can expect when economists on the news say things like "erratic" and "psychology driven." The course explains what risk is in a financial setting, how financial institutions manage risk, regulate themselves (or require outside regulation), how monetary policy set by agencies and governments affect the market, and more. The course is available via YouTube or iTunes U at the link above.

 

Mathematics

Stanford University - Introduction to Mathematical Thinking - Professor Keith Devlin - Mathematicians have a certain "way" about them, and this class you'll learn to approach problems with the same mindset. Break down the problems you're confronted with into manageable components, see how they interrelate, and approach them individually. This isn't about how you deal with math problems in school: the skills you'll learn in this six week course will be applicable far more broadly to problems you may never have encountered before.
La Trobe University - The Algebra of Everything (iTunes U) - Professor Marcel Jackson - If you've promptly forgotten all of the algebra you may have learned in school because it just "wasn't applicable," think twice. This course will brush off those skills and show you how there's algebra—and mathematics—everywhere around us, and show you how you can put those algebraic skills to good use.
Udacity - Intro to Statistics (ST101) - Professor Sebastian Thrun - We're assaulted with statistics on a daily basis, usually used to support or refute points of view or opinions—so much so that many people just ignore statistics entirely, but that's the last thing you should do. This course helps you learn to use statistics for decision-making, whether it's a matter of probability or whether it's looking at the flip side of a societal debate and using the statistics of the matter to see through to the truth. You don't need a math background for this course, but by the end of it you'll be familiar with terms like regression, correlation (and the correlation vs. causation question), standard deviation, and more.


The Open University - Laying Down the Law (iTunes U) - Does prison actually work to reform criminals? Do individuals have the right to choose when and under what circumstances they die? This course tackles all of these topics and more, with guest lecturers sitting in for every session discussing a new topic, all centered on the core question: does the traditional rule of law as we understand it work to preserve the stability of society, or does it need to change?
Liberty University - Introduction to Forensics (iTunes U) - If you've ever wondered how investigators find DNA at crime scenes, test for and record fingerprints, or in general investigate a crime scene with the intent of finding whatever microscopic evidence a criminal may have left behind, this course offers real-world insight from experts. Trust us, it's better than watching CSI. 

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