Online courses directory (126)

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 .

Writing History is a survey of historical thought, philosophy, and historiography. This course will survey the questions, methods, and debates historians have engaged in over the years and around the world. The course will also address best practices to researching and writing history.

When learning a new language an important first step is to learn the rules of grammar that allow people express what they want to say and understand what others are saying in a coherent manner. An equally important second step is to practise using the rules of grammar to become proficient in communicating in the language. In this free online English language course you will get to practise using important rules of grammar that will greatly improve your ability to communicate in both spoken and written English. You will practise the use of tenses such as the present continuous, past perfect, past simple, present perfect continuous and past perfect continuous to improve your ability to communicate. You will also practise and learn how to use superlatives and comparatives, and practise using reported speech. This free online English language course will be of great interest to all learners who have studied previous English language courses on ALISON such as 'Fundamentals of English Grammar' and 'Introduction to Conversational English', and who now want to further practise and improve their ability to communicate confidently in English.<br />

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 .

Lyrics Training is a Web application that allows you to read and listen to the lyrics from music videos and can be used as a fun and interactive way for language teachers and trainers to introduce new vocabulary and grammar to their students in a classroom setting. This free online language learning course will introduce you to the features and functionality of Lyrics Training, you will learn how to choose a song in the language you are learning and listen to the lyrics of the song word by word. Lyrics Training allows students to fill in the lyrics as they go along, and the difficulty level they choose decides how many words in a sentence are missing and they must fill in. This online language learning tool is particularly useful for students of foreign languages who want a fun and entertaining way to learn the correct pronunciation of words and it will improve their listening skills as students must identify words from a song. This free language learning course will be of great interest to all language teachers and trainers who would like to learn more about Web 2.0 applications that can greatly improve the learning experience of their students, and to all learners who would like to learn about using Lyrics Training for a fun way of learning a new language.<br />

The Diploma in English Language and Literature gives you the opportunity to gain comprehensive knowledge and understanding of important aspects of English language and literature. It is ideal for people who have always wanted to study English language and literature in greater detail, as well as learners who are studying English as a second language.<br /><br />The English language modules cover the fundamentals of grammar, effective speaking, and writing skills.<br /><br />The English literature modules analyze literature with an emphasis on renowned authors and poets, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Arthur Miller and William Shakespeare.<br /><br />A qualification in this free online diploma course is the ideal way of demonstrating your proficiency in the English language.<br />

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 .

No matter what career you pursue, you must be able to communicate effectively and clearly if you want to be successful.  This course will enhance your ability to do so by sharpening your critical thinking and writing skills.  We will begin with a unit designed to change the way in which you think about writing.  First, you will learn to think of writing not as a solitary act but as a conversation between yourself and an audience.  In this light, writing becomes a dynamic, interactive, and creative rather than a rote practice.  You will also begin to value writing as a process an admittedly difficult one  rather than a product.  You will come to see that writing is an act of discovery rather than a recitation of prefabricated ideas. Because this course is designed specifically for students in a university setting, the second unit will focus on academic writing.  We will learn how to respond to an assignment or test question by using the “PWR-Writing” or “Power-Writing” Method (PWR: Pre-write…

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.

It's a fact that other social media like Facebook and Twitter have drawn some people away from blogging, but others have seized the opportunity to use a blog as the central point around which their other social media orbit. There's still nothing as effective as a blog in creating your brand, differentiating yourself from your competitors, and establishing your expertise and credibility with your target audience.

African American literature grew out of the oral tradition of storytelling and spirituals.  In this course, you will consider these verbal modes and their impact on the literary production of African American authors from the Colonial period to the current day.  Along with considering the content of literary works, you will examine the cultural, historical, and political contexts of the literature, as well as how the issues of gender, race, and class affect the production and meaning of these works. In this course, you will examine the development of African American literature in seven units: Oral Traditions; The Literature of Slavery; Reconstruction to the  New Negro Renaissance Movement; Harlem Renaissance; Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism; Black Arts; and the Contemporary Period.  This course begins with a unit that studies African American literature’s inception through oral tradition.  This unit will teach you about the beginnings of narrative and will ground your understanding in the develop…

The medieval period, or the Middle Ages, spans about a thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire, which occurred around 500 CE, and the beginning of the European Renaissance, which was a bit later in England around 1500 CE. The idea of a period called the Middle Ages was a product of later thinkers who contrasted the explosive creativity and cultural transformation of the Renaissance with the seemingly subdued work of earlier centuries. Many saw this earlier period as less intellectually and culturally valuable. It is worth noting that contemporary historians often refer to the Renaissance as the Early Modern. The ideas, values, and tastes of this period are more in alignment with our own, and it is easy to appreciate and identify with them more than with those of earlier times. Nonetheless, the Middle Ages produced artistic works that not only reveal the culture and thought of that age, but also link strongly with artistic representations from later ages, including our own. Many fundamental ideas…

Effective writing skills are important for you to succeed in your studies at the collegiate level, as well as for your future career. This course is designed to improve your writing ability, which is necessary for entrance into English Composition 1, as well as for your ongoing success in other academic subjects. Pre-College English coursework focuses on active reading and analytic writing, with emphasis on organization, unity, coherence, and adequate development; an introduction to the expository essay; and a review of the rules and conventions of standard written English. In Unit 1, you will learn the basics of active reading and how active reading is paramount in your success as a student and beyond. You will also learn how to identify the main idea in a piece of literature, and how to create a topic sentence that conveys the main idea in your own writing. You will discover the benefits of prewriting, and will learn prewriting techniques that can be used at the onset of any writing project. In Unit 2, you…

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s shocking pronouncement in the late 1800s that “God is dead” and that “we have killed him” to Vladimir Nabokov’s convention-challenging fiction, the Modern periodspanning roughly the end of the 19th century to the presentoffered a range of provocative and often cynical cultural and literary productions.  In this course, we will work to develop a more nuanced understanding of the scope of cultural and literary expression in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries and a working definition of what the vacuous-sounding term “modernism” might mean.  We will attend to broad socio-historical happenings, from the birth of modernism in the late 19th century to the radical violence of the World Wars and the tragedy of the Holocaust and arrive at the post-modern moment, our post-colonial and technologically and economically globalized village.  While offering this historical context, the course focuses on the cultural and literary movements from the “art for…

Scholars tend to label the period between the Renaissance and the modern era as the long 18th and 19th centuries, meaning that they span from around 1680 - 1830 and 1775 - 1910, respectively, and that so many literary movements and cultural changes took place during these interim years that a narrower title is difficult to come by. In this course, we will examine these formative cultural and literary developments chronologically, dividing the course into four roughly sequential periods: The Enlightenment and Restoration Literature; The Rise of the Novel; Romanticism; and the Victorian Period. We will identify and contextualize the principal characteristics of each of these movements/periods, reading representative texts and examining their relationship to those texts that preceded or were contemporaneous with them. As such, this course foregrounds the movement, the changes, and the continuities from the neoclassicism of authors such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope through the emergence of the novel in th…

This is an intensive 6-week course where students will learn effective skills and techniques for writing effective web content that will hold the reader's attention. This course will cover everything from understanding how visitors read a web page and writing techniques to measuring the results of your improved writing. This course is ideal for students beginning to dabble in the art of online writing to the more advanced web writer looking to polish their skills.

In this course, we will study the poetry of John Milton, focusing not only on the texts themselves, but also on the various contexts that are relevant to Milton’s oeuvre, from the tumultuous political and religious period in which Milton lived to the literary network with which his texts interact. We will also take a close look at the man behind Paradise Lost, a man who brazenly announced, relatively early in his poetic career, that he would pen a great epic in the classical tradition. Who was John Milton, and how did he manage to accomplish this goal? Though Milton has gone in and out of literary favor since his death in 1674 (Romantic poets greatly valued his formal techniques as well as his figuration of Hell, while Modernists like T.S. Eliot scowled at his bookish, Puritan austerity), there is no question that Milton’s works shaped the face and the future of English poetry, as well as contemporary books, film, and culture. By the end of this course, you will possess a comprehensive understanding of Mi…

As most famously defined by F. O. Matthiessen in his groundbreaking book, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), the “American Renaissance” demarcates a period of tremendous literary activity between the 1830s and 1860s that marked the cultivation, for the first time, of a distinctively American literature.  For Matthiessen and many other critics, its key figuresRalph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melvillesought to define and explore the new American identity, carving out new modes of expression and self-identification.  In the years since Matthiessen’s important work and especially in the past several decades, this characterization of the literary period has been challenged on several fronts, for overstating the innovations of these few authors, for the exclusion of women, African-American, and more popular authors from its account of the United States during a period of social and cultural upheaval an…

The decades between roughly 1890 and 1960 witnessed unprecedented efforts to create new art, new values, and a new culture in Europe and the United States to distance itself from the more socially acceptable works of late Victorian poets and artists. During this time, Western writers, artists, and intellectuals questioned the accepted aesthetic norms and produced radically experimental works of art and new understandings of what it means to live in modern times. The first half of the 20th century also witnessed the most devastating conflicts in Western history the two World Wars and the Holocaust and these events accelerated and profoundly influenced cultural changes. Modernist poetry one of the most interesting cultural developments emerged during this time. While it is true that modernist poetic developments sprang up in unlikely and seemingly spontaneous ways, we will attempt to progress through this course in a roughly chronological manner. This is because, in many ways, even modern poetry retains a…

This course will introduce you to the history and practice of English as a scholarly discipline with the goal of preparing you for your future endeavors as an English major. It has been designed to familiarize you with the various tools that scholars have devised in order to facilitate the study of literary expression in English, from critical frameworks to close reading techniques. After an introductory unit outlining basic approaches to literary analysis, we will embark upon a genre study, devoting each of the four remaining units to a different genre of writing: poetry, the novel, drama, the rhetorical essay, and the critical essay. In each of these units, we will review a general history of the genre, read a representative sample or set of samples, learn genre-specific critical terms and theories, and apply what you have learned to essays of your own. By the end of this course, you will have developed strategies that will enable you to understand, analyze, and critically respond to works in any genre at a…