Free Online Courses

Course / Program Name: Conquering The Comma

Hosted by / Sponsored by: Purdue OWL

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: Of all of the different types of punctuation to get your head around as a writer, commas are widely regarded as being the one that can cause the most problems.

This free online course by Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) aims to provide a full and in-depth explanation of when a comma should be used, how it should be used and most importantly, why it should be used.

Offered through a PowerPoint presentation, once you have completed this course you should have a full understanding of comma usage and when and where a comma should be used to help you produce writing of a higher standard.

Course / Program Name: Music Since 1960

Hosted by / Sponsored by: MIT OpenCourseWare

Course of Study: Arts and Humanities

Course Link: Take this course

The undergraduate course combines musical samplings and textbook readings,  beginning with a prelude from 1900-1960 and tracing multiple movements from 1960—the point of shift in 20^th century Western musical history. Post-60s music reflects the convergence of constantly changing cultural and technical influences. The stricter experimentation earlier in the century with mathematical serialism, atonal forms and indeterminate jazz  now emerges to an eclectic mix of post serial, neotonal, minimalist, new age and globalized Western traditional movements. Classical, rock, jazz, electronic, multicultural music and all their hybrids are explored. An assignment guideline is provided for independent analysis of live performances.

Several readings from this Spring 2006 MIT course are recommended, along with two required textbooks:

Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945 by Paul Griffiths

Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and 5 Generations of American Experimental Composers by William Duckworth

Unit Topics:
Prelude: 1900-1960
Unit One: Order and Entropy
Unit Two: Mavericks
Unit Three: New Sounds, New Technologies
Unit Four: Quotation and Polystyle
Unit Five: The Minimalist Impulse
Unit Six: The Persistence of Tonality
Unit Seven: Agora

Course / Program Name: Recruit and Hire the Best

Hosted by / Sponsored by: About.com

Course of Study: Finding and hiring the best workers for your company

Course Link: http://humanresources.about.com/c/ec/1.htm

This course provides tested and current recruitment techniques in interviewing and employee selection.

Here are just some of what you’ll learn:

• Unique methods of locating possible employees.
• Ways to utilize a team in recruiting.
• The reasoning behind why productive job descriptions make logical sense for the first step in recruiting.
• Ten top recruiting ideas.
• Methods for screening possible employees.
• Discussion of eight hiring mistakes some employees make, ranging from the application to the interview.
• How to ask the right questions during interviews.

You’ll improve your workforce through a documented hiring practice that:

• Defines the expected accomplishments from those you hire.
• Develops a job overview that specifically pinpoints performance expectations.
• Develops the biggest group of job-ready candidates possible.
• Creates a well-rounded employee selection method, developed to hire the best staff.
• How to do thorough background checks.

• Helps you make employment offers that make you into a prime employer.

Classes commence each week. You will get your weekly study materials the very morning you sign up, and this will be delivered to your email address. You can go at your chosen pace, although you will get emails each week.

This Recruit and Hire the Best is free. It will only cost the time you put into learning.

Please keep the following in mind:

You may not change your email address after the class has begun. Therefore, be certain you have an email address that will be valid for a minimum of seven weeks. The teacher cannot reply to “anti-spam” during the class period. If you have a spam blocking program, please turn it off in order to get the class materials. It is also suggested that you do homework during this class, even though it will not be given any grades. If you need questions answered, place these in the HR Community Connection forum.

Course / Program Name: Babel: Arabic

Hosted by / Sponsored by: I-Cias.com

Course of Study: Arabic

Course Link: Take this course

Description: Here is a course that teaches grammar, how to write basic sentences and words and how to count in Arabic. The lessons use sounds in mp3 to aid you in learning the Arabic language, so you have a clear understanding of proper pronunciation. Since there are many dialects in the language, the site makes a note that the lessons follow the Standard Modern Arabic, or MSA, without the dialects

With a total of ten lessons to choose from, you may start at beginner’s level if you are brand new to Arabic, or you can go to the more advanced levels if you want something more challenging, or just want to refresh your memory.  The site suggests that anyone new to Arabic start at the very beginning, before learning any Arabic writing. Be sure to check your computer settings to access the mp3 files for the lessons.

Course / Program Name: The Creative Spark

Hosted by / Sponsored by: MIT

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: Produced and delivered by Professor Karen Boiko, the primary aim of this course is to provide all learners with a full and practical understanding of both what their purpose as a writer is, as well as who they are writing for.

The course is intended to be delivered over 25 individual sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours and covering everything from small group work to video observations and essay workshops to free writing.

Aimed at those at an undergraduate level, this free online writing course should prove to be a fantastic aid when looking for your true creativity as a writer.

Course / Program Name: New Media Studies

Hosted by / Sponsored by: MIT OpenCourseWare

Course of Study: Arts and Humanities

Course Link: Take this course

Course Description: The theme of this intensive undergraduate/graduate course is literacy and new media. The “myth of literacy” is examined in the many complex contexts of media—from ancient Greek oral and written media to modern interactive technical media. Through theoretical readings and numerous media applications, students question assumptions about language, texts and contradictory definitions of literacy within social systems.

The course directly engages students in a long list of modalities and concepts—including online social networking, fan communities, video gaming, blogging, appropriation and remixing, multitasking, digital photography, animation and podcasting, transmedia navigation, performance, distributed cognition and collective intelligence.

The 25-lecture course includes notes and a comprehensive reading list, including many direct links to resources. Readings include Plato, Goody and Watt, Scribner and Cole, Graff, Brandt, Heath, Lemke, Gee, Alvermann, Jenkins, Hobbs, Pratt, Leander, Dyson, Levy, Kress, and Lankshear and Knobel.

Course / Program Name: Powerful Performance Management

Hosted by / Sponsored by: About.com

Course of Study: Performance appraisals and/or annual reviews

Course Link: http://humanresources.about.com/c/ec/14.htm

Managers will likely tell you that they enjoy annual reviews and appraisals least of all, when it comes to rating their duties. With performance management, however, focus is taken off the annual review or appraisal,  and placed instead on the big picture of performance management and development issues. This system includes employee performance, cross-training, training, distribution of challenging assignments, and regular feedback.

Those that take this e-course will study the following topic over the course’s four weeks:

How performance management is defined.

• The reasoning behind why performance appraisals are disliked and ineffective.
• How to apply performance management to assist employees in succeeding and improving.
• How to provide performance feedback.
• How to create attainable goals that can be measured as part of a performance development planning session.
• How to make performance management system participation effective.
• How to put into place 360 degree or multi-rater feedback within the performance management system.

You’ll also learn how to apply performance management in developing a high-performing workforce using a documented performance system. This system moves you form putting together a job description through the nuts-and-bolts performance development meeting, in addition to a strongly suggested followup after the session.

Classes commence each week. You’ll get weekly study guides aligned with the mornings you signed up for the course to have it sent to your email address. You can go at your own speed, although emails will continue to arrive every week.

This Powerful Performance Management e-course is free. The only thing you pay is the time you put into it.

Please keep these factors in mind: You cannot change your email address mid-course,  so be sure you have an email address you plan to stick with.

The course administrator cannot reply to anti-spam messages, so if you’re using a spam blocking program, be sure and turn it off for this course. The administrator also cannot reply to emails saying a particular phone number must be called to prove one is signed up.

If you’d like feedback, enter these questions into the discussion forum at HR Community Connection in the e-course folder.

Course / Program Name: German Course for Beginners

Hosted by / Sponsored by: Deutsch-Lernen.com

Course of Study: German

Course Link: Take this course

Description: Learning another language should be simple and fun and something you enjoy. Deutsch-Lernen.com may be just what you’re looking for if you want an interactive beginner’s course in German. You can become familiar with words and grammar through different levels of exercises and practice tests. It’s simple and you can practice any time you want.

The course starts with ten lessons where you begin to build your knowledge of the rules of the German syntax. The site includes study tips to help you use what you’ve learned and as you improve, you can progress to the advanced lessons, which are divided into twenty-four different lessons and each lesson includes three practice exercises. There’s also a category in orthography, where you may want to learn about different and interesting facts of the German language. You can laugh at the jokes, as long as you know how to read them.

Course / Program Name: Finding Information in Arts and History

Hosted by / Sponsored by: The Open University

Course of Study: Arts and Humanities

Course Link: Take This Course

Learn and practice online research skills for academic, work-related or personal study of the Arts and History. With exercises and links, this introductory course guides you through the logic of advanced  search strategies for search engines and specialized directories—as you learn to better assess sources and quality of Arts information on websites, databases, electronic journals and podcasts. Examine effective ways for organizing your material, referencing your work and producing bibliographies.

The most recent tools for networking information, such as RSS, blogs and mailing lists are explored. You will also investigate social bookmarking and the possibilities of folksonomy–the Internet open platform method of accessing information based upon user-driven tagging, rather than on predefined, top-down classifications.

Course / Program Name: Basic Grammar Skills

Hosted by / Sponsored by: Suite101

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: This course, offered by Suite101, has been produced with novice writers in mind and aims to educate them in all aspects of basic writing.   Offering information on everything from nouns and pronouns to apostrophes and punctuation marks, the course takes a full and extensive look at various different necessary pieces of knowledge that are needed for writing.

Divided up into 4 separate lessons, each with several of their own sub-topics, whilst this free online writing course may be aimed at beginner writers, there is without doubt some very useful information for those writers who have a natural writing talent but no major theoretical knowledge.