Online courses directory (147)

C is a powerful system programming language and is commonly used to programme operating systems such as Unix. One of the main advantages of programming in C is that it allows the programmer to write directly to memory. This means that key constructs such as pointers, constants and strings can be used within the memory in an efficient and machine-independent fashion. This free online computer programming course covers topics such as using pointers for direct memory access and manipulation in C, changing the memory address contained within a pointer and introduces constants and string literals. You will learn why pointers contain memory addresses of multi-byte variables, and how to visualise RAM in a new way. This free online computer programming course will be of great interest to IT and software professionals who would like to learn more about this powerful and efficient programming language, and to all learners who would like to learn more about the kind of programming language that is used to develop operating systems.<br />

This course will introduce you to the field of computer science and the fundamentals of computer programming. Introduction to Computer Science I is specifically designed for students with no prior programming experience, and taking this course does not require a background in Computer Science. This course will touch upon a variety of fundamental topics within the field of Computer Science and will use Java, a high-level, portable, and well-constructed computer programming language developed by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), to demonstrate those principles. We will begin with an overview of the course topics as well as a brief history of software development. We will cover basic object-oriented programming terminology and concepts such as objects, classes, inheritance, and polymorphism, as well as the fundamentals of Java, its primitive data types, relational operators, control statements, exception handling, and file input /output. By the end of the course, you should have a strong understanding of the fundam…

This course will provide an intensive introduction to the field of information technology and global development, in its historical, policy, and design dimensions. Part One offers a comprehensive overview of key historical and contemporary debates, problems, and issues in international development. Part Two explores crucial information policy issues in developing country contexts, ranging from technology transfer, research and innovation systems, and intellectual property to telecommunications, wireless, and other critical infrastructure development. Part Three explores the growing ICT4D project literature, with special reference to programs and applications in the health, education, finance, governance, agriculture, and rural development sectors. Through readings, discussions, and course assignments, students will gain critical research and professional skills in the analysis and design of information policies, programs, and projects in a range of developing country settings. Through geographically focused project and discussion groups, students will also develop specific regional or country-level knowledge and experience. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 657 / 757 - Information Technology and Global Development, by Steven J. Jackson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Ethics and Information Technology focuses on the ethical dilemmas that exist where human beings, information objects, and social computing technologies interact. The course explores emerging ethical models from historical and cross-cultural perspectives and then applies these models to a variety of new and emerging technologies that are inherently social in their construction and use. Initial examples of issues that the course covers in discrete modules include: the integrity of digital content in a networked world; identity and avatars; and interpersonal engagement through online games and virtual environments. Students explore the technological underpinnings of associated technology systems, experiment with individual and group interaction with technologies, and examine the mechanics of ethical and unethical behaviors. Course Level: Undergraduate This Work, SI 410 - Ethics and Information Technology, by Paul Conway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Software engineering is a discipline that allows us to apply engineering and computer science concepts in the development and maintenance of reliable, usable, and dependable software. The concept of software engineering was first discussed at the 1968 NATO Science Committee in Germany. Today, many practitioners still debate over the term software engineering, often arguing that this discipline does not meet the criteria of engineering; rather, it should be called software development. There are several areas to focus on within software engineering, such as design, development, testing, maintenance, and management. Software development outside of the classroom is a very complex process, mostly because real-world software is much larger and more complex. The purpose of this course is to present software engineering as a body of knowledge. The course is designed to present software engineering concepts and principles in parallel with the software development life cycle. The course will begin with an introducti…

When we use programming for problem-solving purposes, data must be stored in certain forms, or Data Structures, so that operations on that data will yield a specific type of output.  Imagine, for example, that a non-profit is having trouble staying afloat and needs an increase in donation.  It decides it wants to keep track of its donors in a program in order to figure out who is contributing and why.  You would first need to define the properties that would define those donors: name, address, amount donated, date of donation, and so on.  Then, when the non-profit wants to determine how to best reach out to their donors, it can create a model of the average donor that contributes to the non-profitsay, for example, based on size of gift and locationso that it can better determine who is most receptive to its mission.  In this case, size of gift and location are the “data” of the donor model.  If the non-profit were to use this model, it would be identifying real donors by first generating an abstract…

This course gives students a background in theory and practice surrounding online interaction environments. For the purpose of this course, a community is defined as a group of people who sustain interaction over time. The group may be held together by a common identity, a collective purpose, or merely by the individual utility gained from the interactions. An online interaction environment is an electronic forum, accessed through computers or other electronic devices, in which community members can conduct some or all of their interactions. The term eCommunity is used as shorthand, both for communities that conduct all of their interactions online and for communities that use online interaction to supplement face-to-face interactions. Two main threads weave through the course, based on the two main texts. One thread is concerned with the practical issues of design and use of online tools to support communities, and how choices that must be made in design can impact the function and style of the resulting community. The second thread focuses on the sociological theory that provides a frame to better understand communities in general. These theoretical pieces provide a lens for better understanding the implications of choices made on the more practical level. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 529 - eCommunities: Analysis and Design of Online Interaction Environments, by Paul Resnick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Records are the corporate and cultural memory that provide proof of actions and decisions, build a knowledge-base for reflection and learning, and form a perspective on today's society that we will pass on to future generations. As organizations create and maintain more of their records electronically, they are struggling to develop effective policies, systems, and practices to capture, maintain, and preserve electronic records. This course examines the ways in which new information technologies challenge organizations' capacities to define, identify, control, manage, and preserve electronic records. Students learn how different organizational, technological, regulatory, and cultural factors affect the strategies, practices, and tools that organizations can employ to manage electronic records. Problems of long-term preservation and continuing access to electronic records are analyzed and addressed. Addresses electronic records management issues in a wide variety of settings, including archives and manuscript repositories. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 655 - Management of Electronic Records, by David A. Wallace, Margaret Hedstrom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

The Internet has become one of the most important components of our life. We browse the Web, check e-mails, make VoIP phone calls, and have video conferences via computers. All of these applications are made possible by networking computers together, and this complex network of computers is usually referred to as the Internet. This course is designed to give you a clear understanding of how networks, from in-home local area networks, or LANS, to the massive and global Internet, are built and how they allow us to use computers to share information and communicate with one another. Unit 1 introduces you to an explanation of what computer networks are as well as to some basic terminology fundamental to understanding computer networks. You will also familiarize yourself with the concept of layers, which compose the framework around which networks are built. Next, Unit 2 explains the concept of protocols. A computer communication (or network) protocol defines rules and conventions for communication between netwo…

This course introduces students to the ideas and practices surrounding teaching, learning and research at a world class research university like the University of Michigan, and the emerging role in these practices of Open Educational Resources, including open content such as opencourseware, open access initiatives, open publishing of research and learning materials as found in open journals, databases and e-prints, open textbooks, related open software efforts such as open learning systems, and emerging open teaching experiments. The course will ground the students in how teaching, learning and research is done at the university level, and then survey relevant OER efforts, looking at their history, development, potential futures, and the underlying motivations for their progressive adoption by various members of the community of scholars. more... This course uses an open textbook Open Educational Resources at the University of Michigan. The articles in the open textbook (wikibook) were written by the School of Information Graduate students in the class. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 521 - Special Topics: Open Educational Resources and the University of Michigan, by Joseph Hardin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

User dependency on the Internet increases every day; nowadays, everyday tasks like paying bills, communicating with others, and applying for jobs are all routinely carried out via the Internet.  While the Internet represents a huge network, it is meaningless without the applications that it supports.  These applications enable user interaction and facilitate everyday activities.  In this course, we will learn about the design and implementation of network-based applications, focusing on Object-Oriented Programming and programming techniques both at the application layer and the transport layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack.  Additional concepts covered include text transport (moving text from one computer to another over the network), data transport, object transport, remote function calls, and, finally, class transport.  You will approach these concepts from an Object-Oriented point of view, learning to implement design patterns in your code in order to ensure software reusability (a highly desirable fea…

Technology continues to evolve and provide us with increasingly powerful mobile devices.  As a result, applications that can run on a browser must also be written such that they are compatible with mobile devices, the majority of which are now web-enabled.  Meanwhile, there is an increasing demand for native applications that can be downloaded to and run on mobile devices.  This course will address these trends, teaching you to think about the unique design and deployment issues that must be taken into consideration when developing applications for mobile devices. This course will expand upon what has been covered in CS305: Web Development [1].  We will specifically look at the tools used to design mobile applications.  We will learn about mobile platforms, mobile browsers, native applications, and best practices in terms of test usability. [1] http://www.saylor.org/courses/cs305/…

This is a standard course in "game theory," designed with the School of Information MSI students as the primary audience. This course is the pre-requisite for several ICD courses. To be well-prepared for management, policy and analysis in the information professions you need to first have a solid grounding in game theory and its applications to problem solving. Thus, the primary objective is to teach you a set of useful theories and how to apply them to solve problems. The emphasis is on method and application. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 563 - Game Theory, by Yan Chen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Because we have compiler programs, software developers often take the process of compilation for granted.  However, as a software developer, you should cultivate a solid understanding of how compilers work in order to develop the strongest code possible and fully understand its underlying language.  In addition, the compilation process comprises techniques that are applicable to the development of many software applications.  As such, this course will introduce you to the compilation process, present foundational topics on formal languages and outline each of the essential compiler steps: scanning, parsing, translation and semantic analysis, code generation, and optimization.  By the end of the class, you will have a strong understanding of what it means to compile a program, what happens in the process of translating a higher-level language into a lower-level language, and the applicability of the steps of the compilation process to other applications.

If you invest in financial markets, you may want to predict the price of a stock in six months from now on the basis of company performance measures and other economic factors. As a college student, you may be interested in knowing the dependence of the mean starting salary of a college graduate, based on your GPA. These are just some examples that highlight how statistics are used in our modern society. To figure out the desired information for each example, you need data to analyze. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the subject of statistics as a science of data. There is data abound in this information age; how to extract useful knowledge and gain a sound understanding in complex data sets has been more of a challenge. In this course, we will focus on the fundamentals of statistics, which may be broadly described as the techniques to collect, clarify, summarize, organize, analyze, and interpret numerical information. This course will begin with a brief overview of the discipline of stat…

This course focuses on the fundamentals of computer algorithms, emphasizing methods useful in practice.  We look into the algorithm analysis as a way to understand behavior of computer programs as a function of its input size.  Using the big-O notation, we classify algorithms by their efficiency.  We look into basic algorithm strategies and approaches to problem solving.  Some of these approaches include the divide and conquer method, dynamic programming, and greedy programming paradigms.  Sorting and searching algorithms are discussed in detail as they form part of a solution to a large number of problems solved using computers.  We also provide an introduction to the graph theory and graph algorithms as they are also used in many computer-based applications today.  We conclude the course with a look into a special class of problems called the NP-complete problems.

This seminar provides students an opportunity to do in-depth research into an information policy topic of their interest. Students will gain an understanding of current United States Government Policy in areas involved with information and information technology. Policies are forming and changing daily. In order to keep up with these changes the class includes guest lecturers who are studying or actually creating policies in the information area. The first part of the course consists of the student selecting and defining a topic. The second part of the course involves the presentation and discussion of the topic. As an advanced graduate course there is an expectation that the final paper will be, with suitable editing, publishable in a journal. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 550 - Seminar on Information Policy, by Victor Rosenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

An ongoing development effort in collaboration with the Software Engineering Institute’s CERT [1], this course focuses on common security issues in C and C++ development. With security expert Robert Seacord serving as lead content author, the course addresses a key need in professional education for software developers. Topics to be covered include the secure and insecure use of integers, arrays, strings, dynamic memory, formatted input/output functions, and file I/O. Continued development is being funded by partnerships with industry. [1] http://www.cert.org/

This course will present advanced topics in Artificial Intelligence (AI).  We will begin by defining the term “software agent” and discussing how software agents differ from programs in general.  We will then take a look at those problems in the field of AI that tend to receive the most attention.  Different researchers approach these problems differently.  In this course, we will focus on how to build and search graph data structures needed to create software agents, an approach that you will find useful for solving many problems in AI.  We will also learn to “break down” larger problems into a number of more specific, manageable sub-problems. In the latter portion of this course, we will review the study of logic and conceptualize the differences between propositional logic, first-order logic, fuzzy logic, and default logic.  After learning about statistical tools commonly used in AI and about the basic symbol system used to represent knowledge, we will focus on artificial neural network and…

As data collection and information networks expand (and stories of security breaches and the misuse of personal information abound), data security and privacy issues are increasingly central parts of the information policy landscape. Legislators, regulators, businesses, and other institutions of all kinds are under increasing pressure to draft and implement effective laws, regulations, and security and privacy programs under rapidly changing technological, business, and legal conditions. A strong need is arising for individuals with the training and skills to work in this unsettled and evolving environment. This course examines security issues related to the safeguarding of sensitive personal and corporate information against inadvertent disclosure; policy and societal questions concerning the value of security and privacy regulations, the real-world effects of data breaches on individuals and businesses, and the balancing of interests among individuals, government, and enterprises; current and proposed laws and regulations that govern data security and privacy; private-sector regulatory efforts and self-help measures; emerging technologies that may affect security and privacy concerns; and issues related to the development of enterprise data security programs, policies, and procedures that take into account the requirements of all relevant constituencies, e.g., technical, business, and legal. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 510 - Special Topics: Data Security and Privacy: Legal, Policy and Enterprise Issues, by Don Blumenthal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.