Courses tagged with "Taking derivatives" (68)

This course will introduce you to United States history from the end of the Civil War in 1865 through the first decade of the twenty-first century. You will learn about the major political, economic, and social changes that took place in America during this nearly 150-year period. The course will be structured chronologically, with each unit focusing on a significant historical subject. The units will include representative primary-source documents that illustrate important overarching political, economic, and social themes, such as the growth and expansion of political representation and civil rights in America, industrial development and economic change, race and ethnicity in American society, and cultural change over time. These primary documents offer you insights into the thinking of people who directly witnessed and experienced these historical developments. By the end of the course, you will understand how the United States grew from a relatively weak and divided agricultural nation into a cohesive mil…

Scott McLean, formerly the Shadle-Edgecombe Endowed Faculty Chair at Arizona Western College, introduces the textbook used throughout this course by noting that “[E]ffective communication takes preparation, practice, and persistence.  There are many ways to learn communication skills; the school of experience, or ‘hard knocks,’ is one of them.  But in the business environment, a ‘knock’ (or lesson learned) may come at the expense of your credibility through a blown presentation to a client.” Effective communication skills are a prerequisite for succeeding in business.  Communication tools and activities connect people within and beyond the organization in order to establish the business’s place in the corporate community and the social community, and as a result, that communication needs to be consistent, effective, and customized for the business to prosper.  McLean’s textbook provides theories and practical information that represent the heart of this course, while additional resources a…

In this course, we will study the history of Western art, beginning with the first objects created by prehistoric humans around 20,000 years ago and ending with the art and architecture of the High Gothic period in fourteenth-century Europe.  The information presented in this course will provide you with the tools to recognize important works of art and historical styles, as well as to understand the historical context and cultural developments of Western art history through the end of the medieval period.  Introductory readings paired with detailed lectures will provide you with a well-rounded sense of the history, art, and culture of the West up through the medieval period. At the end of this course, you will be able to identify key works of art and artistic periods in Western history.  You will also be able to discuss the development of stylistic movements and relate those developments to important historical events.  Completion of this course will prepare you for ARTH111, which surveys the history o…

This course will introduce you to the history of the Atlantic slave trade from 1500 to 1900. You will learn about the slave trade, its causes, and its effects on Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The course will be structured chronologically and geographically; each unit with focus on a particular aspect of the Atlantic slave trade. Each unit will include representative primary-source documents that illustrate important overarching political, economic, and social themes, such as slavery and the slave trade within African societies, the growth of plantation societies in the New World, the advent of European slave dealing in western Africa, the simultaneous growth of European empires and the Atlantic slave trade, the nature of slave trading and the Middle Passage, and the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century. By the end of the course, you will understand how the Atlantic slave trade began as a fledgling enterprise of the English, Portuguese, and Spanish in the 1500s and why, by the mi…

PURPOSE OF COURSE…

Do you know what you’re watching? What you’re reading? You might think that what comes across your television or web browser, in your newspaper or magazine, or on your movie screen is pretty much the whole message; what you see is what you get. But the content we see, read, and hear is the product of complex forces − economic, governmental, historical, and technological. This course will explore those underlying forces and provide analytical tools to evaluate media critically. An overall goal is to become media literate, to gain an understanding of mass media as cultural industries that seek to influence our behavior and affect our values as a society. Unit 1 aims to define mass communication, mass media, and culture. It also will introduce the core concepts of media literacy and the concept of transmedia, the practice of integrating entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. Unit 2 will introduce selected theories that will help in analyzing mass communication and its effect…

This course will introduce you to cognitive psychology, or the study of the ways in which we come to know about the world around us and about one another.  While you may understand “cognition” as “thinking” or “thoughts,” we will here use the term to refer to almost any process that takes place within the human mind. Though cognitive psychology as a formal branch of study has only been around since the late 1960s, it has been studied for decades as an area of interest in psychological inquiry and has its roots in philosophy.  In the late 1880s, for example, Ebbinghaus conducted some of the very first scientifically based studies of cognition when he attempted to explain the mechanism of memory.  Memory, along with attention, perception, language, and decision making, are amongst the most prominent issues within the broad and diverse field of cognitive psychology.  While we could spend an entire semester exploring just one of these issues, this course will instead provide you with an overview…

Abnormal psychology is one of the most recognizable and intriguing subfields of study in psychology. Part of what makes this field so intriguing is that it challenges us to define what is normal and abnormal. Most experts in the field have settled on several criteria to define abnormal behavior; however, this definition and even the very existence of certain disorders still remain a source of debate. This course will help us to define abnormal and normal behaviors and to group these abnormal phenomena into disorders. These disorders are used to capture a particular type of abnormal psychological phenomena and to help us diagnose or make an educated decision regarding what disorder a patient/client may have. In order to distinguish between different disorders, clinicians often use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which identifies the specific criteria used when diagnosing patients/clients. This manual represents the industry standard for psychologists and psychiatrists, who often…