Online courses directory (447)

This course will examine current conditions and trends in water and sanitation services in low and middle income countries. Within it we will take a critical look at the underlying political, economic, social, and technical reasons why almost a billion people lack access to improved water supplies and almost 2 billion still do not have improved sanitation services.

For adults with an interest in the study of human behaviour – especially those who have often considered studying psychology but who have yet to begin.

Learn about women’s roles in the U.S. civil rights struggles of the 1890s to the 1990s.

You cannot properly understand current world events without understanding the history of the 20th Century. This topic takes us on a journey from the end of Imperialism through two world wars and the Cold War and brings us to our modern world. Empires before World War I. German and Italian Empires in 1914. Alliances leading to World War I. Language and religion of the former Yugoslavia. Assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip. The Great War begins. Causes of World War I. Blockades, u-boats and sinking of the Lusitania. Zimmermann Telegram. United States enters World War I. Wilson's war message to Congress -- April 2, 1917. 1917 speech by Senator George Norris in opposition to American entry. WWI Blockades and America. Schlieffen Plan and the First Battle of the Marne. Comparing the Eastern and Western Fronts in WWI. World War I Eastern Front. Battles of Verdun, Somme and the Hindenburg Line. Closing stages of World War I. Technology in World War I. Eastern and Western Fronts of World War I. Serbian and Macedonian Fronts. Serbian losses in World War I. Italy backs out of Triple Alliance. Italian front in World War I. Japan in World War I. Secondary fronts of WWI. Theodor Herzl and the birth of political Zionism. Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia Campaigns. Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration. Arabia after World War I. The Middle East during and after WWI. Gallipoli Campaign and ANZAC Day. Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia Campaigns. Armenian massacres before World War I. Young Turks and the Armenians. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish War for Independence. Ottoman Empire and birth of Turkey . Deaths in World War I. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles. More detail on the Treaty of Versailles and Germany. Arabia after World War I. WWI Aftermath. World War I. Initial rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler and the Nazis come to power. Night of the Long Knives. Nazi Aggression and Appeasement. Rise of Hitler. Fascism and Mussolini. Mussolini becomes Prime Minister. Mussolini becomes absolute dictator (Il Duce). Mussolini aligns with Hitler. Fascism and Mussolini. Overview of Chinese History 1911 - 1949. Communism. Korean War Overview. Bay of Pigs Invasion. Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam War. Allende and Pinochet in Chile. Pattern of US Cold War Interventions. Empires before World War I. German and Italian Empires in 1914. Alliances leading to World War I. Language and religion of the former Yugoslavia. Assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip. The Great War begins. Causes of World War I. Blockades, u-boats and sinking of the Lusitania. Zimmermann Telegram. United States enters World War I. Wilson's war message to Congress -- April 2, 1917. 1917 speech by Senator George Norris in opposition to American entry. WWI Blockades and America. Schlieffen Plan and the First Battle of the Marne. Comparing the Eastern and Western Fronts in WWI. World War I Eastern Front. Battles of Verdun, Somme and the Hindenburg Line. Closing stages of World War I. Technology in World War I. Eastern and Western Fronts of World War I. Serbian and Macedonian Fronts. Serbian losses in World War I. Italy backs out of Triple Alliance. Italian front in World War I. Japan in World War I. Secondary fronts of WWI. Theodor Herzl and the birth of political Zionism. Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia Campaigns. Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration. Arabia after World War I. The Middle East during and after WWI. Gallipoli Campaign and ANZAC Day. Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia Campaigns. Armenian massacres before World War I. Young Turks and the Armenians. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish War for Independence. Ottoman Empire and birth of Turkey . Deaths in World War I. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles. More detail on the Treaty of Versailles and Germany. Arabia after World War I. WWI Aftermath. World War I. Initial rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler and the Nazis come to power. Night of the Long Knives. Nazi Aggression and Appeasement. Rise of Hitler. Fascism and Mussolini. Mussolini becomes Prime Minister. Mussolini becomes absolute dictator (Il Duce). Mussolini aligns with Hitler. Fascism and Mussolini. Overview of Chinese History 1911 - 1949. Communism. Korean War Overview. Bay of Pigs Invasion. Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam War. Allende and Pinochet in Chile. Pattern of US Cold War Interventions.

Sumerian Art: Standard of Ur. Ptolemaic: Rosetta Stone. Ancient Rome. Ara Pacis. Sutton Hoo Ship Burial. Charlemagne: An Introduction (1 of 2). Charlemagne and the Carolingian Revival (part 2 of 2). Coronation Mantle. Sumerian Art: Standard of Ur. Ptolemaic: Rosetta Stone. Ancient Rome. Ara Pacis. Sutton Hoo Ship Burial. Charlemagne: An Introduction (1 of 2). Charlemagne and the Carolingian Revival (part 2 of 2). Coronation Mantle.

This course focuses on traditional nature writing and the environmentalist essay. Students will keep a Web log as a journal. Writings are drawn from the tradition of nature writing and from contemporary forms of the environmentalist essay.

In this course we will read essays, novels, memoirs, and graphic texts, and view documentary and experimental films and videos which explore race from the standpoint of the multiracial. Examining the varied work of multiracial authors and filmmakers such as Danzy Senna, Ruth Ozeki, Kip Fulbeck, James McBride and others, we will focus not on how multiracial people are seen or imagined by the dominant culture, but instead on how they represent themselves. How do these authors approach issues of family, community, nation, language and history? What can their work tell us about the complex interconnections between race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship? Is there a relationship between their experiences of multiraciality and a willingness to experiment with form and genre? In addressing these and other questions, we will endeavor to think and write more critically and creatively about race as a social category and a lived experience.

MIT students bring rich cultural backgrounds to their college experience. This course explores the splits, costs, confusions, insights, and opportunities of living in two traditions, perhaps without feeling completely at home in either. Course readings include accounts of growing up Asian-American, Hispanic, Native American, and South-East Asian-American, and of mixed race. The texts include selections from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kesaya E. Noda's "Growing Up Asian in America," Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Gary Soto's "Like Mexicans," Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, the movies Smoke Signals and Mississippi Masala, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, and others. We will also use students' writings as ways to investigate our multiple identities, exploring the constraints and contributions of cultural and ethnic traditions. Students need not carry two passports in order to enroll; an interest in reading and writing about being shaped by multiple influences suffices.

In this era of globalization, many of us have multi- or bi-cultural, multilingual or bilingual backgrounds, and even if we don't have such a background, we need urgently to understand the experiences of people who do. You will very likely work outside the United States at some point in your future; you will almost certainly work with people who speak more than one language, whose ancestry or origins are in a country other than the U.S., who have crossed borders of nation, language, culture, class to amalgamate into the large and diverse culture that is America. In this class we will read the personal narratives of bilingual and bicultural writers, some of whom have struggled to assimilate, others of whom have celebrated their own contributions to a culture of diversity. You will write four personal essays of your own for the class, each of which will receive workshop discussion in class and response from me; you will then revise the essays to polish them for possible publication. One of your essays will be an investigative one, where you will focus on a subject of your choice, investigate it thoroughly, and then write with authority about it. The process of the class will encourage you to both improve your writing significantly and gain a greater understanding of experiences of people who are in some way like you as well as those who are in some way different.

The reading and writing for this course will focus on what it means to construct a sense of self and a life narrative in relation to the larger social world of family and friends, education, media, work, and community. Readings will include nonfiction and fiction works by authors such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Andre Dubus, Anne Frank, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Walker. Students will explore the craft of storytelling and the multiple ways in which one can employ the tools of fiction in crafting creative nonfiction and fiction narratives.

This course is an examination of the formal structural and textual variety in poetry. Students engage in extensive practice in the making of poems and the analysis of both students' manuscripts and 20th-century poetry. The course attempts to make relevant the traditional elements of poetry and their contemporary alternatives. There are weekly writing assignments, including some exercises in prosody.

This course is an introduction to the short story. Students will write stories and short descriptive sketches. Students will read great short stories and participate in class discussions of students' writing and the assigned stories in their historical and social contexts.

This is a course focused on the literary genre of the essay, that wide-ranging, elastic, and currently very popular form that attracts not only nonfiction writers but also fiction writers, poets, scientists, physicians, and others to write in the form, and readers of every stripe to read it. Some say we are living in era in which the essay is enjoying a renaissance; certainly essays, both short and long, are at present easier to get published than are short stories or novels, and essays are featured regularly and prominently in the mainstream press (both magazines and newspapers) and on the New York Times bestseller books list. But the essay has a history, too, a long one, which goes back at least to the sixteenth-century French writer Montaigne, generally considered the progenitor of the form. It will be our task, and I hope our pleasure, to investigate the possibilities of the essay together this semester, both by reading and by writing.

Environmentalists have traditionally relied upon the power of their prose to transform the thoughts and behavior of their contemporaries. In this class, we will do our best to follow in their footsteps. We will consider the strategies of popular science writers, lesser-known geologists, biologists, and hydrologists, and famous environmentalists. Students will have a chance to try out several ways of characterizing and explaining natural environments. Weekly writing exercises will help students develop and explore material for the longer papers.

This course focuses on the period between roughly 1550-1850. American ideas of race had taken on a certain shape by the middle of the nineteenth century, consolidated by legislation, economics, and the institution of chattel slavery. But both race and identity meant very different things three hundred years earlier, both in their dictionary definitions and in their social consequences. How did people constitute their identities in early America, and how did they speak about these identities? Texts will include travel writing, captivity narratives, orations, letters, and poems, by Native American, English, Anglo-American, African, and Afro-American writers.

This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. Topics include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, and issues in publication and peer review.

This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience—specifically, prose that is both critical and personal, that features your ideas, your perspective, and your voice to engage readers. The focus of our reading and your writing will be American popular culture, broadly defined. That is, you will write essays that critically engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of pieces that address current issues in popular culture. These readings will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write. The end result of our collaborative work will be a new edition, the seventh, of Culture Shock!, an online magazine of writings on American popular culture, which we will post on the Web for the worldwide reading public to enjoy.

"What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world."
- Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook

If you are what you eat, what are you? Food is at once the stuff of life and a potent symbol; it binds us to the earth, to our families, and to our cultures. In this class, we explore many of the fascinating issues that surround food as both material fact and personal and cultural symbol. We read essays by Toni Morrison, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, and others on such topics as family meals, eating as an "agricultural act" (Berry), slow food, and food's ability to awaken us to "our own powers of enjoyment" (M. F. K. Fisher). We will also read Pollan's most recent book, In Defense of Food, and discuss the issues it raises as well as its rhetorical strategies. Assigned essays will grow out of memories and the texts we read, and may include personal narrative as well as essays that depend on research. Revision of essays and workshop review of writing in progress are an important part of the class. Each student will make one oral presentation in this class.

This course provides the opportunity for students-as readers, viewers, writers and speakers-to engage with social and ethical issues they care deeply about. Over the course of the semester, through discussing the writing of classic and contemporary authors, we will explore different perspectives on a range of social issues such as free speech, poverty and homelessness, mental illness, capital punishment and racial and gender inequality. In addition, we will analyze selected documentary and feature films and photographs that represent or dramatize social problems or issues. In assigned essays, students will have the opportunity to write about social and ethical issues of their own choice. This course aims to help students to grow significantly in their ability to understand and grapple with arguments, to integrate secondary print and visual sources and to craft well-reasoned and elegant essays. Students will also keep a reading journal and give oral presentations. In class we will discuss assigned texts, explore strategies for successful academic writing, freewrite and respond to one another's essays.

This course is presented in Mandarin.

《世界文化地理》是介绍世界文化地理的格局、形成、发展过程，培养学 生用地理学的眼光去观察和分析世界上文化现象的发生、发展与空间分布特点。 《世界文化地理》是北京大学最受本科生同学欢迎的通选课之一。课程内容信息量很大，包罗万象，把世界地理同世界历史、文化、艺术等融合在一起。任课教师带 领学生用地理空间的观点、时间变化的角度，去观察和分析世界上的文化现象。课程内容兼具科学性和趣味性，每年吸引了大量学生选课。  《世界文化地理》具体内容包括：世界文化地理的基本研究方法，世界文化区的划分，世界人口分布与人口迁移，农业的起源、传播与区域差异，城市的起源与扩 散，城市形态的区域差异与特点，世界主要语言、宗教、人种的空间分布及其相互关系，地理大发现与世界殖民体系的形成，世界地缘政治与世界地理系统的空间结 构特点，全球经济议题化、城市化现象及其伴随的政治、经济、社会问题，等等。  《世界文化地理》的授课内容兼及自然地理和文化地理两大方面，课程综合吸收国内外相关的最新教材和研究论著的内容，采取地图、照片、图表等表现形式，力图 生动浅显地展示世界文化地理格局的基本空间差异和变化过程，注意专题介绍与综合分析相结合，空间差异分析与世界变化分析相结合，重视培养大学生的两种能 力：运用地理学的、空间的眼光来观察、分析世界上文化现象的能力和从时间的角度来看待世界上文化现象发展变化过程的能力。  课程有期中和期末两次考试，最终有期末成绩。

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Cultural Geography of the World is one of the most popular undergraduate courses at Peking University. It is an inclusive, general introductory course, combining natural and cultural geography with history and art. Through the lens of humanism and independent thinking, learners will be encouraged to observe and analyze cultural phenomena from spatial and time perspectives. This course has 12 chapters: The basic research method of world cultural geography; The division of world culture areas; The world's population distribution and migration of population; Origin of agriculture; Diffusion and regional differences; The origin and spread of the city; Regional differences and characteristics of urban morphology; The spatial distribution of the major languages, religions, ethnicities in the world and their relationship; The great geographical discovery and the formation of the world colonial system; World geopolitics and the spatial structures of the world geography system; Global economic integration; Urbanization and its political, economic, social impacts. Using relevant domestic and foreign textbooks, publications, maps, photos, and charts to show the difference and the changing progress of spatial patterns of the cultures, learners will be asked to observe and analyze cultural phenomena with geographic and spatial vision and to consider the development and changing process of the cultural phenomena in light of time sequence. The course will include a midterm and final exam.

The course is one of the PKU-DeTao MOOCs, which is a joint effort by Peking University and DeTao Masters Academy.