SUPPLY CHAIN LOGISTICS
Company/Organization: Rutgers / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Business, Business Management
Program description: Have you ever wondered how goods get delivered to us so quickly as soon as we order them? One word: Logistics! In this introductory Supply Chain Logistics course, I will take you on a journey to this fascinating backbone of global trade. We cover the three major building blocks of logistics networks: transportation, warehousing, and inventory. After completing this course, you will be able to differentiate the advantages and disadvantages of different modes of transportation. You will understand what goes into designing and setting up a warehousing facility. Finally, you will be able to select the options that enable you to develop logistics networks that minimize costs and deliver top customer service. This is an introductory course designed to provide you with a start on your learning journey in logistics. You do not need to have any background in logistics, but it would be beneficial if you had a basic understanding of business concepts. Join me and we will learn together about logistics!
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
MARKETING ANALYTICS
Company/Organization: University of Virginia / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Marketing, Business
Program description: Organizations large and small are inundated with data about consumer choices. But that wealth of information does not always translate into better decisions. Knowing how to interpret data is the challenge -- and marketers in particular are increasingly expected to use analytics to inform and justify their decisions.
Marketing analytics enables marketers to measure, manage and analyze marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer profound insights into customer preferences and trends, which can be further utilized for future marketing and business decisions.
This course gives you the tools to measure brand and customer assets, understand regression analysis, and design experiments as a way to evaluate and optimize marketing campaigns. You'll leave the course with a solid understanding of how to use marketing analytics to predict outcomes and systematically allocate resources.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
DESIGN THINKING FOR INNOVATION
Company/Organization: University of Virginia / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Business, Entrepreneurship, Management
Program description: Today innovation is everyone's business. Whether you are a manager in a global corporation, an entrepreneur starting up, in a government role, or a teacher in an elementary school, everyone is expected to get lean – to do better with less. And that is why we all need design thinking. At every level in every kind of organization, design thinking provides the tools you need to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities that are there – you're just not seeing them yet.
In this course, we provide an overview of design thinking and work with a model containing four key questions and several tools to help you understand design thinking as a problem solving approach. We also look at several stories from different organizations that used design thinking to uncover compelling solutions.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
MARKETING IN A DIGITAL WORLD
Company/Organization: University of Illinois / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Marketing, Business
Program description: This course examines how digital tools, such as the Internet, smartphones, and 3D printing, are revolutionizing the world of marketing by changing the roles and practices of both firms and consumers. Marketing in a Digital World is one of the most popular courses on Coursera with over 250,000 Learners and is rated by Class Central as one of the Top 50 MOOCs of All Time (https://www.class-central.com/report/top-moocs/).
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
FINANCIAL MARKETS
Company/Organization: Yale University / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Finance, Economics
Program description: An overview of the ideas, methods, and institutions that permit human society to manage risks and foster enterprise. Emphasis on financially-savvy leadership skills. Description of practices today and analysis of prospects for the future. Introduction to risk management and behavioral finance principles to understand the real-world functioning of securities, insurance, and banking industries. The ultimate goal of this course is using such industries effectively and towards a better society.
Open to: Anyone
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING
Company/Organization: pwc / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Data Analytics, Business
Program description: In this course you'll get an introduction to Data Analytics and its role in business decisions. You'll learn why data is important and how it has evolved. You'll be introduced to “Big Data” and how it is used. You'll also be introduced to a framework for conducting Data Analysis and what tools and techniques are commonly used. Finally, you'll have a chance to put your knowledge to work in a simulated business setting.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
FUNDAMENTALS OF PROJECT PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT
Company/Organization: University of Virginia / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Business
Program description: Projects are all around us. Virtually every organization runs projects, either formally or informally. We are engaged in projects at home and at work. Across settings, planning principles and execution methodologies can offer ways in which projects can be run more effectively and efficiently. Project management provides organizations (and individuals) with the language and the frameworks for scoping projects, sequencing activities, utilizing resources, and minimizing risks.
This is an introductory course on the key concepts of planning and executing projects. We will identify factors that lead to project success, and learn how to plan, analyze, and manage projects. Learners will be exposed to state-of-the-art methodologies and to considering the challenges of various types of projects.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
SUCCESSFUL NEGOTIATION: ESSENTIAL STRATEGIES AND SKILLS
Company/Organization: University of Michigan / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Business, Law
Program description: We all negotiate on a daily basis. On a personal level, we negotiate with friends, family, landlords, car sellers and employers, among others. Negotiation is also the key to business success. No business can survive without profitable contracts. Within a company, negotiation skills can lead to your career advancement.
I hope that you will join the hundreds of thousands of learners who have made “Successful Negotiation” one of the most popular and highly-rated MOOCs worldwide. In the course, you’ll learn about and practice the four steps to a successful negotiation:
(1) Prepare: Plan Your Negotiation Strategy
(2) Negotiate: Use Key Tactics for Success
(3) Close: Create a Contract
(4) Perform and Evaluate: The End Game
Open to: Anyone
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
YOU CAN INNOVATE: USER INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Company/Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology / edX
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Entrepreneurship, Social Sciences
Program description: Innovation happens everywhere. More often than not, it is about ordinary people solving real problems. Imagine, this could be you. This course will teach you to look at the world through the lens of problem discovery and problem solving. You will explore problems that you see in your life and in the world and evaluate their potential for entrepreneurial innovation. You will iterate toward solutions that are just right. As you do that, you will become a user innovator.
Examples of user innovation and its entrepreneurial potential are infinite. A surfer created the GoPro to take "selfies" while surfing. A student came up with Dropbox after losing the flash drive. Two entrepreneurs created a tool for themselves to track software bugs, giving rise to Atlassian.
Taught by Eric von Hippel, the founding scholar of user innovation, and Erdin Beshimov, the founder of MIT Bootcamps, this course will guide you through a step-by-step process for ideating a user innovation and shaping its entrepreneurial possibilities. Importantly, through immersive case studies, this course will introduce you to effective strategies of entrepreneurial bootstrapping, so that you can succeed even when you do not have many resources.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website and here is MIT's edX website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEUR
Company/Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology / edX
Program begins: On going, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Entrepreneurship, Business
Program description: Curious about entrepreneurship, but not sure where to start? Becoming an Entrepreneur is designed in partnership with MIT to guide people of all ages and backgrounds through the process of founding a company. With enrollment in the hundreds of thousands, this course is as engaging and accessible as it is informative. Becoming an Entrepreneur will provide you with inspiration to explore an entrepreneurial path and tools to overcome the initial challenges of building a business.
From developing new business ideas and doing market research to designing and testing your offering and pitching, this course follows LaunchX’s successful approach to entrepreneurship that leverages MIT’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship, lean methodologies, and design thinking. There will be a combination of short videos and activities that will challenge you to get you away from your computer screen and into the community to make a real impact.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
ENABLING ENTREPRENEURS TO SHAPE A BETTER WORLD
Company/Organization: Social Entrepreneurship Akademie / edX
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Entrepreneurship, Business
Program description: Join us on this journey that provides you with the latest tools and the mindset to discover the entrepreneur within yourself. By combining lectures from world-renowned speakers like Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Alexander Osterwalder and Hedda Pahlson-Moller with insights from serial social entrepreneurs, we delve into the world of social entrepreneurship. Topics range from business modeling and design thinking to impact creation and social innovation.
This course will lead you through your own impact journey where you will get a full perspective of the world of social entrepreneurship and give you the essential insights to boost your entrepreneurial intention and become a real change maker. This course will connect you with like-minded people all around the world in order to create a community with different backgrounds, personalities, and perspectives. You will have the opportunity to interact with your peers through a dynamic learning structure that will encourage discussion and idea sharing on a weekly basis.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website and Social Entrepreneurship Akademie's website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
SO YOU WANT TO BE A BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER
Company/Organization: UC San Diego / edX
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Biomedical Engineering
Program description: Want to become a biomedical engineer but not sure where to focus or how to get there? This engineering course will give you an overview of this wildly popular and vast field, as you learn about more than two dozen areas of focus and get a peek at some of the cool and exciting advances going on at top institutions. Along the way, you’ll meet more than three dozen biomedical engineers—from top names in the field to those just starting their careers.
Through exercises, you’ll get to think like a BME and experience the various areas to see which fits your interests and talents. Finally, once you have a better sense of where you’d like to focus, our educational and career advice will help show you how to get there.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website and UC San Diego's edX website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll”
INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
Company/Organization: Yale University / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Psychology
Program description: What are people most afraid of? What do our dreams mean? Are we natural-born racists? What makes us happy? What are the causes and cures of mental illness? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, persuasion, emotions, and social behavior. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.
Open to: Anyone, beginner level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the course’s website and click “enroll.”
DATA SCIENCE: R BASICS
Company/Organization: Harvard University / edX
Program begins: multiple start dates are available
Best for a student with an interest in: Data Science, Statistics, Math
Program description: This course will introduce you to the basics of R programming. You can better retain R when you learn it to solve a specific problem, so you'll use a real-world dataset about crime in the United States. You will learn the R skills needed to answer essential questions about differences in crime across the different states.
We'll cover R's functions and data types, then tackle how to operate on vectors and when to use advanced functions like sorting. You'll learn how to apply general programming features like "if-else," and "for loop" commands, and how to wrangle, analyze and visualize data.
Rather than covering every R skill you might need, you'll build a strong foundation to prepare you for the more in-depth courses later in the series, where we cover concepts like probability, inference, regression, and machine learning. We help you develop a skill set that includes R programming, data wrangling with dplyr, data visualization with ggplot2, file organization with UNIX/Linux, version control with git and GitHub, and reproducible document preparation with RStudio.
The demand for skilled data science practitioners is rapidly growing, and this series prepares you to tackle real-world data analysis challenges.
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website and here is Harvard’s edX website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the website and click “enroll.”
MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE
Company/Organization: Harvard University / edX
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Literature, English
Program description: This literature course explores how great writers refract their world and how their works are transformed when they intervene in our global cultural landscape today.
No national literature has ever grown up in isolation from the cultures around it; from the earliest periods, great works of literature have probed the tensions, conflicts, and connections among neighboring cultures and often more distant regions as well.
Focusing particularly on works of literature that take the experience of the wider world as their theme, this course will explore the varied artistic modes in which great writers have situated themselves in the world, helping us to understand the deep roots of today's intertwined global cultures.
Open to: Grades 9-12
Public posting: Here is the course’s website and here is Harvard’s edX website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the website and click “enroll.”
THE SCIENCE OF WELL-BEING
(Note: This is the world-famous Yale “Happiness Class”!)
Company/Organization: Yale University / Coursera
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Psychology, Public Health, Sociology
Program description: In this course you will engage in a series of challenges designed to increase your own happiness and build more productive habits. As preparation for these tasks, Professor Laurie Santos reveals misconceptions about happiness, annoying features of the mind that lead us to think the way we do, and the research that can help us change. You will ultimately be prepared to successfully incorporate a specific wellness activity into your life.
Open to: Anyone
Public posting: Here is the course’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit program’s website and click “enroll.”
INTRODUCTION TO ANIMAL ETHICS
Company/Organization: Kyoto University / edX
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Biology, Zoology, Psychology, Philosophy, Animal Science
Program description: Why do many of us who eat pigs condemn those who eat dogs? Is there any difference between lab mice and companion hamsters that justify the use of the former for drug tests? Our attitude toward animals is full of seeming inconsistencies and unexplained conventions. Animal ethics is the field that tries to make sense of human-animal relationships using insights from philosophical ethics, and this course is an introduction to the field.
This course has several distinctive characteristics from other animal ethics education materials. First, this course uses situations of animals in Japan as illustrative cases, which makes this course as a means to learn something about Japanese culture. Second, it also uses Manga to think about actual situations.
By listening to the lectures and thinking through the issues presented, you will acquire the ability to think more clearly and systematically about human-animal relationships.
Topics include:
Training of companion animals
Neutering of companion animals
Animal experimentation for cosmetics
Eating farm animals
Environmental enrichment in zoos
Open to: Anyone, introductory level
Public posting: Here is the course’s website and here is Kyoto’s edX website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the website and click “enroll”
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Company/Organization: Stanford University / edX
Program begins: Ongoing, self-paced
Best for a student with an interest in: Social Sciences, Law, International Studies, Public Health, Women’s Studies
Program description: This self-paced course provides an overview of women's health and human rights, beginning in infancy and childhood, then moving through adolescence, reproductive years and aging. We consider economic, social, political and human rights factors, and the challenges women face in maintaining health and managing their lives in the face of societal pressures and obstacles.
Open to: Grades 9-12
Public posting: Here is the course’s website and here is StanfordOnline’s website
Cost: Free!
To enroll: Visit the website and click “enroll”