Gamification via University of Pennsylvania: https://www.coursera.org/#course/gamification
Next session: 27 August 2012 (6 weeks long) Workload: 4-8 hours/week
About the Course: Gamification is the application of digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. Video games are the dominant entertainment form of our time because they are powerful tools for motivating behavior. Effective games leverage both psychology and technology, in ways that can be applied outside the immersive environments of games themselves. Gamification as a business practice has exploded over the past two years. Organizations are applying it in areas such as marketing, human resources, productivity enhancement, sustainability, training, health and wellness, innovation, and customer engagement. Game thinking means more than just dropping in badges and leaderboards; it requires a thoughtful understanding of motivation and design techniques. This course examines the mechanisms of gamification and provides an understanding of its effective use.
• Will I get a certificate after completing the course?
Yes. Students who successfully complete the course above a threshold score will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
• Who should take this course?
Anyone curious about gamification or games more generally. That might include: students in business, IT, design, engineering, games studies, or other related fields; employees at companies that could apply gamification to their business; technologists or entrepreneurs seeking to incorporate gamification into their projects; game designers wondering about business or social impact applications; investors wondering about the financial potential of the games industry; educators interested in gamification for learning; video game aficionados excited about the deeper potential of games; or anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of an exciting new field.
Introduction to Sustainability via University of Illinois: https://www.coursera.org/#course/sustain
Next session: 27 August 2012 (8 weeks long) Workload: 8-10 hours/week
About the Course: This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history.
This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).
Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Participants who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of completion from the School of Earth, Society and Environment.
Vaccines via University of Pennsylvania: https://www.coursera.org/#course/vaccines
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 2 hours/week
About the Course: This course will discuss issues regarding vaccines and vaccine safety: the history, science, benefits, and risks of vaccines, together with the controversies surrounding vaccines and answers to common questions that parents have about vaccines.
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 3-5 hours/week
About the Course: The impact of technology and networks on our lives, culture, and society continues to increase. The very fact that you can take this course from anywhere in the world requires a technological infrastructure that was designed, engineered, and built over the past sixty years. To function in an information-centric world, we need to understand the workings of network technology. This course will open up the Internet and show you how it was created, who created it and how it works. Along the way we will meet many of the innovators who developed the Internet and Web technologies that we use today.
What You Will Learn: After this course you will not take the Internet and Web for granted. You will be better informed about important technological issues currently facing society. You will realize that the Internet and Web are spaces for innovation and you will get a better understanding of how you might fit into that innovation. If you get excited about the material in this course, it is a great lead-in to taking a course in Web design, Web development, programming, or even network administration. At a minimum, you will be a much wiser network citizen.
Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World via University of Michigan: https://www.coursera.org/#course/fantasysf
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 8-12 hours/week
About the Course: Fantasy is a key term both in psychology and in the art and artifice of humanity. The things we make, including our stories, reflect, serve, and often shape our needs and desires. We see this everywhere from fairy tale to kiddie lit to myth; from "Cinderella" to Alice in Wonderland to Superman; from building a fort as a child to building ideal, planned cities as whole societies. Fantasy in ways both entertaining and practical serves our persistent needs and desires and illuminates the human mind. Fantasy expresses itself in many ways, from the comfort we feel in the godlike powers of a fairy godmother to the seductive unease we feel confronting Dracula. From a practical viewpoint, of all the fictional forms that fantasy takes, science fiction, from Frankenstein to Avatar, is the most important in our modern world because it is the only kind that explicitly recognizes the profound ways in which science and technology, those key products of the human mind, shape not only our world but our very hopes and fears. This course will explore Fantasy in general and Science Fiction in specific both as art and as insights into ourselves and our world.
Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
Listening to World Music via University of Pennsylvania: https://www.coursera.org/#course/worldmusic
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 5-7 hours/week
About the Course: With the click of a mouse, now more than ever we are able to access sounds made by people from all around the world. And yet, most of us don't listen to the wide diversity of music available to us, probably because it sounds so strange. This class will open up the world of music to you. We begin with a brief history of recording technology, the music industry and the place of world music in that narrative; you are introduced to keywords for talking about music cross-culturally; and then proceed to half a dozen musical cultures around the world. In each of these musical cultures, we examine the ways in which music works in those distant cultures, how it sounds, what it means, who may perform it; and then we ask ourselves where this music has traveled and entered into the Western popular culture as entertainment, political discourse, or artistic purpose.
Next session: 27 August 2012 (6 weeks long) Workload: 4-8 hours/week
About the Course: Gamification is the application of digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. Video games are the dominant entertainment form of our time because they are powerful tools for motivating behavior. Effective games leverage both psychology and technology, in ways that can be applied outside the immersive environments of games themselves. Gamification as a business practice has exploded over the past two years. Organizations are applying it in areas such as marketing, human resources, productivity enhancement, sustainability, training, health and wellness, innovation, and customer engagement. Game thinking means more than just dropping in badges and leaderboards; it requires a thoughtful understanding of motivation and design techniques. This course examines the mechanisms of gamification and provides an understanding of its effective use.
• Will I get a certificate after completing the course?
Yes. Students who successfully complete the course above a threshold score will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
• Who should take this course?
Anyone curious about gamification or games more generally. That might include: students in business, IT, design, engineering, games studies, or other related fields; employees at companies that could apply gamification to their business; technologists or entrepreneurs seeking to incorporate gamification into their projects; game designers wondering about business or social impact applications; investors wondering about the financial potential of the games industry; educators interested in gamification for learning; video game aficionados excited about the deeper potential of games; or anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of an exciting new field.
Introduction to Sustainability via University of Illinois: https://www.coursera.org/#course/sustain
Next session: 27 August 2012 (8 weeks long) Workload: 8-10 hours/week
About the Course: This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history.
This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).
Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Participants who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of completion from the School of Earth, Society and Environment.
Vaccines via University of Pennsylvania: https://www.coursera.org/#course/vaccines
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 2 hours/week
About the Course: This course will discuss issues regarding vaccines and vaccine safety: the history, science, benefits, and risks of vaccines, together with the controversies surrounding vaccines and answers to common questions that parents have about vaccines.
- Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 3-5 hours/week
About the Course: The impact of technology and networks on our lives, culture, and society continues to increase. The very fact that you can take this course from anywhere in the world requires a technological infrastructure that was designed, engineered, and built over the past sixty years. To function in an information-centric world, we need to understand the workings of network technology. This course will open up the Internet and show you how it was created, who created it and how it works. Along the way we will meet many of the innovators who developed the Internet and Web technologies that we use today.
What You Will Learn: After this course you will not take the Internet and Web for granted. You will be better informed about important technological issues currently facing society. You will realize that the Internet and Web are spaces for innovation and you will get a better understanding of how you might fit into that innovation. If you get excited about the material in this course, it is a great lead-in to taking a course in Web design, Web development, programming, or even network administration. At a minimum, you will be a much wiser network citizen.
Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World via University of Michigan: https://www.coursera.org/#course/fantasysf
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 8-12 hours/week
About the Course: Fantasy is a key term both in psychology and in the art and artifice of humanity. The things we make, including our stories, reflect, serve, and often shape our needs and desires. We see this everywhere from fairy tale to kiddie lit to myth; from "Cinderella" to Alice in Wonderland to Superman; from building a fort as a child to building ideal, planned cities as whole societies. Fantasy in ways both entertaining and practical serves our persistent needs and desires and illuminates the human mind. Fantasy expresses itself in many ways, from the comfort we feel in the godlike powers of a fairy godmother to the seductive unease we feel confronting Dracula. From a practical viewpoint, of all the fictional forms that fantasy takes, science fiction, from Frankenstein to Avatar, is the most important in our modern world because it is the only kind that explicitly recognizes the profound ways in which science and technology, those key products of the human mind, shape not only our world but our very hopes and fears. This course will explore Fantasy in general and Science Fiction in specific both as art and as insights into ourselves and our world.
Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
Listening to World Music via University of Pennsylvania: https://www.coursera.org/#course/worldmusic
Ongoing Enrollment Workload: 5-7 hours/week
About the Course: With the click of a mouse, now more than ever we are able to access sounds made by people from all around the world. And yet, most of us don't listen to the wide diversity of music available to us, probably because it sounds so strange. This class will open up the world of music to you. We begin with a brief history of recording technology, the music industry and the place of world music in that narrative; you are introduced to keywords for talking about music cross-culturally; and then proceed to half a dozen musical cultures around the world. In each of these musical cultures, we examine the ways in which music works in those distant cultures, how it sounds, what it means, who may perform it; and then we ask ourselves where this music has traveled and entered into the Western popular culture as entertainment, political discourse, or artistic purpose.
- Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.