Online courses directory (190)

This Research Methods Lab course is part two of the Research Methods series. You should not attempt this course without having first completed the Research Methods course (PSYCH202A [1]). This Lab extends beyond the basics of research methodology and the logic of experimental design, concepts you learned in PSYCH202A [2].  You will learn to put these concepts into practice while conducting laboratory experiments. While we may not explicitly apply all of the concepts introduced in the Research Methods lecture course, remember that each of them will remain relevant during the evaluation and review phases of your research. This course intends to acquaint the student with a variety of different research techniques.  Students will participate in every stage of experimentation, from creation and editing to evaluation and review.   As such, this course will not only review relevant concepts from the Research Methods lecture, but will also broach a number of practical matters, including the standard organizatio…

Organic Chemistry of Macromolecules covers the preparation, reactions, and properties of high molecular weight polymeric materials of both natural and synthetic origin. As a part of this course, U-M students collaboratively created and edited Wikipedia articles. Course Level: Graduate This Work, Chemistry 538 - Organic Chemistry of Macromolecules, by Anne McNeil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

In this second semester course, we will cover a wide-ranging field of topics, learning everything from the equation that made Einstein famous to why you can’t replace a dead car battery with a household battery. In General Chemistry I (CHEM101 [1]), we studied the basic tools you need to explore different fields in chemistry, such as stoichiometry and thermodynamics.  This second-semester course will cover several of the tools needed to study chemistry at a more advanced level.  We will identify the factors that affect the speed of a reaction, learn how an atom bomb works on a chemical level, and discover how chemistry powers a light bulb.  Topics in advanced organic and inorganic chemistry courses will build upon what you learn in this class.  We will end with discussion of organic chemistry, a topic that is as important to biology as it is to chemistry. [1] http:///courses/chem101/…

Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes and compounds, such as cellular makeup, that bring about life in organisms.  It is a combination of multiple science fields; you can think of it as general and cell biology coupled with organic and general chemistry.  Although living organisms are very complex, from a molecular view, the material that constitutes “life” can be broken down into remarkably simple molecules, much like the breakdown of our English language to the English alphabet.  Although there exists thousands upon thousands of molecules, they all breakdown into four core components: nucleic acids, amino acids, lipids, and carbohydrates.  As we can make hundreds of thousands of words from just 26 letters, we can make thousands of different biomolecules from those 4 components.  For example, the human genome, containing the necessary information to create a human being, is really just one very long strand of 4 different nucleotides. This course is structured around that approach, so…

Remember that organic chemistry is the discipline that studies the properties and reactions of organic, carbon-based compounds.  This course is intended to be taken after the first two semesters of organic chemistry.  Many of the topics within this outline have been covered in the first two semesters of organic chemistry; however, this course will explore these topics in much greater depth.  It is important to make sure that you have a good grasp of the concepts from earlier organic chemistry courses before moving on to this course. We begin by studying a unit on ylides, benzyne, and free radicals.  Many free radicals affect life processes.  For example, oxygen-derived radicals may be overproduced in cells, such as white blood cells that try to defend against infection in a living organism.  In the first unit, you will learn about free radicals, including oxygen-containing compounds.  Afterward we move into a comprehensive examination of stereochemistry, as well as the kinetics of substitution and el…

This course covers specialized and somewhat advanced topics in the fields of cellular biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics. It does not cover organismal biology or taxonomy. The course is carefully planned to provide the background that biology students will need for advanced biology classes. Non-biology majors will also find this course useful as it explains many of the concepts and techniques currently discussed in the popular press. This course is built around six key concepts that provide unifying explanations for how and why structures are formed and processes occur throughout your study of biology. Because it is not possible to cover the breadth of modern molecular biology in one semester, an understanding of these key concepts will provide a basis for extension of your knowledge to biological systems beyond the specifics covered in this course. One of the major goals of the course therefore is for you to not only learn the definitions of the concepts but also learn to recognize when they are operating the process being studied.

Organic chemistry is a branch of chemistry that focuses on a single element: carbon!  Carbon bonds strongly with other carbon atoms and with other elements, forming numerous chain and ring structures.  As a result, there are millions of distinct carbon compounds known and classified.  The vast majority of the molecules that contain carbon are considered organic molecules, with few debatable exceptions such as carbon nanotubes, diamonds, carbonate ions, and carbon dioxide.  Carbon is central to the existence of life as it is an essential component of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), sugars, lipids, and proteins.  A well-rounded student of science must take courses in organic chemistry to understand its application to various topics, such as the study of polymers (plastics and other materials), hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals, molecular biology, biochemistry, and other life sciences. In the first semester of organic chemistry, you will learn the basic concepts needed to understand the three-dimensional structu…

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.

Even in ancient times, scholars believed that diseases could be spread by organisms too small to be seen by the naked eye. Before we discovered that bacteria cells were the real culprits, many attributed disease to other sources. Now that scientists have definitively identified the microscopic causes of various infectious diseases, microbiology, or the study of microscopic-sized organisms, has become an increasingly important field in biology and in the larger biomedical community. Most microbes are harmless. Some of them are essential for life on Earth, e.g. through their ability to fix nitrogen. Biotechnology, which is truly the industry of our times, takes advantage of microbes for the production of a variety of complex substances, and it also mass-produces natural and engineered microbes for human use. This course will cover a range of diverse areas of microbiology, including virology, bacteriology, and applied microbiology. This course will focus on the medical aspects of microbiology, as medical res…

This course is designed to introduce you to the study of Calculus.  You will learn concrete applications of how calculus is used and, more importantly, why it works.  Calculus is not a new discipline; it has been around since the days of Archimedes.  However, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, two 17th-century European mathematicians concurrently working on the same intellectual discovery hundreds of miles apart, were responsible for developing the field as we know it today.  This brings us to our first question, what is today's Calculus?  In its simplest terms, calculus is the study of functions, rates of change, and continuity.  While you may have cultivated a basic understanding of functions in previous math courses, in this course you will come to a more advanced understanding of their complexity, learning to take a closer look at their behaviors and nuances. In this course, we will address three major topics: limits, derivatives, and integrals, as well as study their respective foundations and a…

Sensation and perception are the processes by which we absorb information from environmental stimuli and convert it into data that our brains and bodies use to modify behavior. This course will introduce you to these two closely related, though distinct, processes. We will begin with sensation, the physical process by which we use our sense organs (i.e. tongues for taste or noses for smell) to respond to the environmental stimuli around us. Perception, on the other hand, refers to our interpretation of stimuli. It occurs through cognitive processing and enables us to use information in order to change our behavior. While these processes may seem simple, they are just the opposite: large portions of the brain are devoted to the seemingly straightforward processes of seeing and hearing, and entire sensory organs have developed in order to facilitate them. Further, while the brain is constantly using the information it gathers to make decisions, we are entirely unaware of this activity. Unbelievably, studying il…

Ecology is the study of interactions between organisms and between organisms and their environments.  Population ecology is the subfield of ecology that identifies those ecological factorsin the community or in the ecosystemthat regulate a population’s size. Ecosystems and communities involve complex interactions that have evolved over long periods of time.  The species that are present and the interactions we see between them are the result of evolution under the unique environmental pressures that exist in a given environment.  These interactions may be delicately intertwined, such that the loss of a single species from a community could mean the collapse of the entire community in a domino effect.  Thus, biologists are concerned with the preservation of biodiversity in ecosystemsretaining as many different species in the ecosystem as possible so the intricate relationships among species are preserved. In recent years, we have seen a decrease in the biodiversity of ecosystems.  Human activities a…

This Research Methods course is part one of the two-part Research Methods series, which also includes the Research Methods Lab course. Research is the foundation on which any solid science is built. This course will introduce you to research methodologies frequently used in the social sciences and especially those used in the field of psychology. It is important that you are able to not only identify the techniques used by others but also employ them yourself. The course is designed to provide you with the foundation you will need to apply certain techniques in the search for your own answers. The course will begin with an overview of how research, and its appropriate methodology, came about in science and, more specifically, psychology. We will then go over the ABCs of conducting research, learning how to define “variables” and why they are important. While this course will also touch upon statistics and their importance, it will not require a comprehensive knowledge of the subject. The course will concl…

You probably have a general understanding of how your body works. But do you fully comprehend how all of the intricate functions and systems of the human body work together to keep you healthy? This course will provide that insight. By approaching the study of the body in an organized way, you will be able to connect what you learn about anatomy and physiology to what you already know about your own body. By taking this course, you will begin to think and speak in the language of the domain while integrating the knowledge you gain about anatomy to support explanations of physiological phenomenon. The course focuses on a few themes that, when taken together, provide a full view of what the human body is capable of and of the exciting processes going on inside of it. The themes are: Structure and function of the body, and the connection between the two. Homeostasis, the body’s natural tendency to maintain a stable internal environment. Levels of Organization, the major levels of organization in the human organism from the chemical and cellular levels to the tissues, organs and organ systems. Integration of Systems, concerning which systems are subsets of larger systems, and how they function together in harmony and conflict. Developed with best practices in applied learning theory, this course offers an active learning experience for any student in the form of pre-tests, ample practice opportunities, 3D interactive images, walkthrough videos, and other special tools and applications that will increase your comprehension of anatomy and physiology. Ultimately, your understanding of the material offered in this course will provide you with a solid foundation to explore careers in the health and fitness industries.

This introductory course defines biology and its relationship to other sciences. We examine the overarching theories of life from biological research and also explore the fundamental concepts and principles of the study of living organisms and their interaction with the environment. We will examine how life is organized into hierarchical levels; how living organisms use and produce energy; how life grows, develops, and reproduces; how life responds to the environment to maintain internal stability; and how life evolves and adapts to the environment. This course is a part of our Community College (CC-OLI) series. Courses in this series are particularly well-suited to the needs of introductory community college courses, but are open for use by any instructor or student.

This is a complete course in chemical stoichiometry, which is a set of tools chemists use to count molecules and determine the amounts of substances consumed and produced by reactions. The course is set in a scenario that shows how stoichiometry calculations are used in real-world situations. The list of topics (see below) is similar to that of a high school chemistry course, although with a greater focus on reactions occurring in solution and on the use of the ideas to design and carry out experiments. Note: Our chemistry courses are about to be improved and expanded! Thanks to upcoming support from the NSF, a project to further improve online chemistry education will result in new and improved materials delivered through OLI. New materials will be available from 2012 through 2014!

In this course, you will look at the properties behind the basic concepts of probability and statistics and focus on applications of statistical knowledge.  You will learn about how statistics and probability work together.  The subject of statistics involves the study of methods for collecting, summarizing, and interpreting data.  Statistics formalizes the process of making decisions, and this course is designed to help you use statistical literacy to make better decisions.  Note that this course has applications for the natural sciences, economics, computer science, finance, psychology, sociology, criminology, and many other fields. We read data in articles and reports every day.  After finishing this course, you should be comfortable evaluating an author's use of data.  You will be able to extract information from articles and display that information effectively.  You will also be able to understand the basics of how to draw statistical conclusions. This course will begin with descriptive statistic…

Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes and compounds, such as cellular makeup, that bring about life in organisms.  It is a combination of multiple science fields; you can think of it as general and cell biology coupled with organic and general chemistry.  Although living organisms are very complex, from a molecular view, the material that constitutes “life” can be broken down into remarkably simple molecules, much like the breakdown of our English language to the English alphabet.  Although there exists thousands upon thousands of molecules, they all breakdown into four core components: nucleic acids, amino acids, lipids, and carbohydrates.  As we can make hundreds of thousands of words from just 26 letters, we can make thousands of different biomolecules from those 4 components.  For example, the human genome, containing the necessary information to create a human being, is really just one very long strand of 4 different nucleotides. This course is structured around that approach, so…

The advent of computers transformed science.  Large, complicated datasets that once took researchers years to manually analyze could suddenly be analyzed within a week using computer software.  Nowadays, scientists can use computers to produce several hypotheses as to how a particular phenomenon works, create computer models using the parameters of each hypothesis, input data, and see which hypothetical model produces an output that most closely mirrors reality. Computational biology refers to the use of computers to automate data analysis or model hypotheses in the field of biology.  With computational biology, researchers apply mathematics to biological phenomena, use computer programming and algorithms to artificially create or model the phenomena, and draw from statistics in order to interpret the findings.  In this course, you will learn the basic principles and procedures of computational biology.  You will also learn various ways in which you can apply computational biology to molecular and cell…

In BIO101 [1], you were introduced to biology on a microscopic scale when you learned about the functions of molecules, genes, and cells.  In this course, you will learn about biological changes that happen on a very large scale, across entire populations of organisms and over the course of millions of years, in the form of evolution and ecology.  Evolution, the process by which different species of organisms have developed and diversified from earlier forms, has been a central theme in the field of biology ever since Darwin first published his theories about it.  Mounting evidence from many different branches of science all point to the fact that species have experienced a gradual but definite physical change.  In this course, we will learn about evolution and theories that stem from evolution. We will also learn about ecology, the study of the interactions between different types of organisms and their surroundings.  Changes in surroundings will force organisms to adapt and changeoften in terms of th…