Online courses directory (548)

This course provides an opportunity for students to examine information seeking and use in geographic communities. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore: 1) selected community information needs & use situations (everyday life problem solving, community problem solving, citizenship, civic engagement and participation); 2) factors that influence community information use including the roles of community information organizations & institutions; 3) models of community information provision. The course starts with a brief historical introduction. Students will have opportunities to examine in more detail topics of especial interest to them. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 645 / SI 745 - Information Use in Communities, by Joan C. Durrance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Statistics is the science that turns data into information and information into knowledge. This class covers applied statistical methodology from an analysis-of-data viewpoint. Topics covered include frequency distributions; measures of location; mean, median, mode; measures of dispersion; variance; graphic presentation; elementary probability; populations and samples; sampling distributions; one sample univariate inference problems, and two sample problems; categorical data; regression and correlation; and analysis of variance. Use of computers in data analysis is also explored. This course contains the Winter 2013 Statistics 250 Workbook and Interactive Lecture Notes. Fall 2011 Statistics 250 materials (syllabus, lectures, and workbooks) are also available for download. Course Level: Undergraduate This Work, Statistics 250 - Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis, by Brenda Gunderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Course is the first in a two-part sequence exploring contemporary practices, challenges, and opportunities at the intersection of information technology and democratic governance. Whereas the second course focuses on challenges and innovations in democratic administration, this first course focuses on theories and practices of democratic politics and the shifting role of information technologies in supporting, transforming, and understanding these. The first half of the course seeks to ground contemporary discussion around IT and politics in various flavors of democratic and political theory. The second half builds on this foundation to explore ways in which information and information technologies have come to support, constrain, and otherwise inflect a range of contemporary democratic practices. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 532 / SI 732 - Digital Government 1: Information Technology and Democratic Politics, by Steven J. Jackson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This course is an upper division computer science course that studies the design of programming languages. While most of the industry uses either procedural or object-oriented programming languages, there are entire families of other languages with certain strengths and weaknesses that make them attractive to a variety of problem domains.  It is important to know about these less well-known yet powerful languages if you find yourself working in an area that could utilize their strengths.  In this course, we will discuss the entire programming language family, starting with an introduction to programming languages in general and a discussion of the features and functionality that make up the modern programming language.  From there, each unit will discuss a different family of programming languages, including Imperative, Object-Oriented, Functional, Scripting, and, Logical. For each language, you will learn about its computational model, syntax, semantics, and pragmatic considerations that shape the langua…

This course is designed to help students (primarily incoming college freshmen) develop the foundational computing and information literacy skills that they will need to succeed in other courses. The course is available for use in academic settings.

Can you make a cellphone change the world?

NextLab is a hands-on year-long design course in which students research, develop and deploy mobile technologies for the next billion mobile users in developing countries. Guided by real-world needs as observed by local partners, students work in multidisciplinary teams on term-long projects, closely collaborating with NGOs and communities at the local level, field practitioners, and experts in relevant fields.

Students are expected to leverage technical ingenuity in both mobile and internet technologies together with social insight in order to address social challenges in areas such as health, microfinance, entrepreneurship, education, and civic activism. Students with technically and socially viable prototypes may obtain funding for travel to their target communities, in order to obtain the first-hand feedback necessary to prepare their technologies for full fledged deployment into the real world (subject to guidelines and limitations).

The vaunted Information Revolution is more than Web surfing, Net games, and dotcoms. Indeed, it is the foundation for an economic and social transformation on a scale comparable to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. As a culture we have learned from earlier such transformations and it is important to recognize those lessons and chart a path toward intellectual and practical mastery of the emerging world of information. This course will provide the foundational knowledge necessary to begin to address the key issues associated with the Information Revolution. Issues will range from the theoretical (what is information and how do humans construct it?), to the cultural (is life on the screen a qualitatively different phenomenon from experiences with earlier distance-shrinking and knowledge-building technologies such as telephones?), to the practical (what are the basic architectures of computing and networks?). Successful completion of this "gateway" course will give you, the student, the conceptual tools necessary to understand the politics, economics, and culture of the Information Age, providing a foundation for later study in Information or any number of more traditional disciplines. Course Level: Undergraduate This Work, SI 110 - Introduction to Information Studies, by Robert Frost is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Though we may not recognize them in our everyday activities, databases are everywhere.  They are hidden behind your online banking profile, airline reservation systems, medical records, and even employment records.  This course will provide students with a general overview of databases, introducing you to database history, modern database systems, the different models used to design a database, and Structured Query Language (SQL), which is the standard language used to access and manipulate databases.   Many of the principles of database systems carry to other areas in computer science, especially operating systems.  Databases are often thought of as one of the core computer science topics, since many other areas in the discipline have been derived from this area.

This course is a continuation of the first-semester course titled CS101: Introduction to Computer Science I [1]. It will introduce you to a number of more advanced Computer Science topics, laying a strong foundation for future academic study in the discipline. We will begin with a comparison between Java - the programming language utilized last semester - and C++, another popular, industry-standard programming language. We will then discuss the fundamental building blocks of Object-Oriented Programming, reviewing what we learned last semester and familiarizing ourselves with some more advanced programming concepts. The remaining course units will be devoted to various advanced topics, including the Standard Template Library, Exceptions, Recursion, Searching and Sorting, and Template Classes. By the end of the class, you will have a solid understanding of Java and C++ programming, as well as a familiarity with the major issues that programmers routinely address in a professional setting. [1] http://www.saylor.

Digital imaging technologies are replacing the microfilm camera and photocopier as the primary mechanisms for reproducing print and graphic resources. Digitization practices do not necessarily accomplish preservation goals; only a portion of digitization programs in cultural heritage institutions produce preservation-quality results. In 2004, the Association of Research Libraries issued a position paper that supported the creation of preservation-quality digital images, citing the abundance of available standards and best practices. This course concentrates on the state-of-the-art of standards, techniques, metadata, and project requirements for the production of preservation-quality digital images. The course will consider such standards and practices within the larger context of the representation of information through technological remediation. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 675 - Digitization for Preservation, by Paul Conway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

CS405 introduces the field of artificial intelligence (AI).  Materials on AI programming, logic, search, game playing, machine learning, natural language understanding, and robotics introduce the student to AI methods, tools, and techniques, their application to computational problems, and their contribution to understanding intelligence.  Because each of these topics could be a course unto itself, the material is introductory and not complete.  Each unit presents the problem a topic addresses, current progress, and approaches to the problem.  The readings include and cite more materials that are referenced in this course, and students are encouraged to use these resources to pursue topics of interest after this course.

Introduction to the design and implementation of applications for handheld systems, such as smartphones and tablets, running the Android Platform.

This course provides an overview of the purposes and uses of outcome-based evaluation approaches and methods, and provides an opportunity to conduct a focused outcome evaluation of a user-focused service in a library, a nonprofit organization, an archive, a museum or other service-focused organization. Objectives are to: - Learn about approaches to outcome-based evaluation - Identify and use context-centered methods for evaluating public information services - Examine the role of evaluation in developing more effective information services - Gain skill in identifying appropriate data collection and analysis methods - Gain an understanding of recent developments in measurement and evaluation - Read assigned readings and appropriate focused readings - Plan and carry out a focused outcome-based evaluation project Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 623 - Outcome-Based Evaluation of Programs and Services, by Joan C. Durrance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Course prepares you to advise clients or your own organization on the design of contracts and screening policies when one of the parties has an information advantage over the other. For example, students study the design of patent licenses (the licensor knows more about the market), the design of social systems to reduce spam (the spam sender knows more about the content before the recipient decides whether to read), and the design of performance contracts for professional services (e.g., consultants, contract programmers, etc., when the contractor knows more than the employer about her level of effort). This course follows SI 646. Prerequisite(s): SI 562 & 563 or equivalent course in intermediate microeconomics. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 680 - Contracting and Signaling, by Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This course brings together students and faculty who are engaged in diverse community and public interest work to hear from a wide range of fascinating guests and to engage in discussion around their expertise and experiences. Readings include those recommended by guests and a highly focused group of context-setting community informatics articles. Students learn the roots of community informatics

This course serves as an introduction to the basic principles that govern all aspects of our networked lives. We will learn about companies like Google and technologies like the Internet in a way that requires no mathematics beyond basic algebra.

In the last half of the 20th century, the role of computation in the sciences grew rapidly, driven by advances in silicon-based processors, fiber-optic networks, a host of numerical algorithms, and sets of standard protocols for processing and exchanging data. Much of this digital technology now permeates everyday life. Building on these and emerging technologies, the 21st century is poised to unleash a new, data-intensive paradigm of scientific discovery that will dramatically enhance the scope and scale of data capture, curation, and analysis. In this new (4th) paradigm, cures for cancer might be found by the collective investigations of agents computing "in the cloud.

Information practice demands knowledge of all aspects of management and service delivery. This course introduces selected theories, principles and techniques of contemporary management science, and organizational behavior and their application to libraries and information services. Students develop skills in planning, organizing, personnel management, financial management, leading, marketing, stakeholder management, and coordinating functions in libraries and information services. Students also have the opportunity to think critically about, and reflect upon, contemporary management practice in information organizations. Information professionals find that no matter whether they choose a career as a single entrepreneur, solo librarian, archivist, or whether they join a large organization, they become managers -- of themselves, of clients or staff, and sometimes of substantial systems and services. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 626 - Management of Libraries and Information Services, by Tiffany Veinot is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Programming is a way of organizing a task so that it is replicable by something elsea computer. If you have ever given someone directions, or written down a recipe, you have some experience with programming. Learning more about programming will help you develop the skills of thinking systematically about a task and breaking it down into manageable pieces, which can be applied in many disciplines. This class contextualizes the task of programming by focusing on media, such as images, audio, and interactive systems. By doing so, we hope to put programming in a relevant context. For example, iteration is a programming concept that is essential to creating negative and grayscale images. You will learn algorithms for blending two images together and how to hierarchical relationships are used to organize elements of a user interface. This introductory course has no particular prerequisites and is primarily designed for non-computer science students.

Solve problems using Mathematics, Computer Science and more!. Introduction. The Discovery. Clue #1. Clue #2. Clue #3. Crypto Checkpoint 1. Clue #4. Checkpoint. Crypto Checkpoint 2. Crypto Checkpoint 3. What's Next?. Introduction. The Discovery. Clue #1. Clue #2. Clue #3. Crypto Checkpoint 1. Clue #4. Checkpoint. Crypto Checkpoint 2. Crypto Checkpoint 3. What's Next?.