Free online courses are the best way to acquaint yourself with and accomplish the latest buildouts in various domains of knowledge. MIT, at its MOOC provider edX, offers you short-duration free online courses to expertise in trending fields of knowledge like Programming, Computational Thinking, Data Science, Cybersecurity, Entrepreneurship, Business Startups, Modern Finance, Engineering, Management, Nuclear Energy, Research Methodologies, Philosophy, and many more.
Whether you are a student, a professional, or an entrepreneur, staying all set with the current and upcoming approaches in science and technology ensures that you always lead others and be successful.
It is imperative, therefore, to ameliorate your skills to keep pace with time and be able to compete with others.
We never know when the opportunity will knock at our door; nevertheless, we can keep ourselves prepared to grab it.
Abraham Lincoln once remarked, “ Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
Abraham Lincoln
If you want to be successful in today’s rapidly changing society, you must update yourself with new trends and technologies in your work area. But you have constraints of time and money that come in your way of knowledge acquisition.
Solutions, however, are always around the corner. This is again an advantage of technology that you can access education from around the world while sitting at your home.
Moving ahead, you’ll unfold some handpicked trending short-duration free online courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA that you’ll find trending and brainstorming.
Avail of this great opportunity. Enroll now to stay ahead in your professional life.
1. MITx: Becoming an Entrepreneur
What you’ll explore:
Do you want to create a profitable business of your own? Here is all you need to know about it.
This course will take you to the business startups at MIT. Through the interviews of the companies’ founders, you explore their journey from a startup to a successful business establishment.
If you want to create a business-to-business (B2B) product or service, build a multi-sided marketplace, or enter a competitive market, Entrepreneurship 103 is the right course for you.
What you’ll accomplish:
- Choosing and designing a business model
- Pricing your product
- Building a sales process
- Measuring your cost of customer acquisition
- Estimating the lifetime value of your customer
- Understand the Decision-Making Unit
- Navigate the Decision-Making Process
Domain: Business and Management
Duration: 10 Weeks
2. Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science
What you’ll explore:
Here we’ll introduce you to different computational problems and you’ll acquire skills to solve them. You must have a little hand in programming with Python and should understand computational complexity.
You’ll be exposed to program writing to implement various concepts in the course. You may write a program to make a robot vacuum to clean a room or may create a model observing the population dynamics of viruses in a patient’s body and its drug treatment.
What you’ll accomplish:
- Advanced programming in Python 3
- Knapsack problem, Graphs, and graph optimization
- Dynamic programming
- Plotting with the pylab package
- Random walks
- Probability, Distributions
- Monte Carlo simulations
- Curve fitting
- Statistical fallacies
- Stochastic programming and statistical thinking
Domain: Computer Science
Duration: 9 Weeks
3. Minds and Machines
What you’ll explore:
- This course is an in-depth study of consciousness of mind and deals with some exploratory questions related to the very physical nature of human beings.
- Are you an “immaterial soul”, distinct from your brain and body?
- Alternatively, are you simply a material or physical animal, living in an entirely physical world?
- What is “consciousness” scientifically? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Can machines like computers think?
- This course explores these questions and others. It is a thorough, rigorous introduction to the philosophy of mind, exploring consciousness, reality, AI, and more.
What you’ll reach to:
- The basics of argumentation
- Some central arguments for and against the view that a sufficiently powerful computer can think (AI)
- Some central arguments for and against the view that the world is not as we perceive it to be
- The main theories of mental states and their relations to physical states
- What the “hard problem of consciousness” is.
Domain: Philosophy and Ethics
Duration: 12 Weeks
4. Cybersecurity for Critical Urban Infrastructure
What you’ll explore:
This is a downside of modern technology that the urban infrastructures have become prone to cyber-attacks. It takes a huge resource to resurrect the data once hacked. Your role, nevertheless, can be crucial here, if cybersecurity attracts you as a career.
If you’re a city official, a staff of a security agency, or a student seeking to specialize as a cybersecurity consultant, this course is the right destination for you. Here, you can qualify to become a cybersecurity expert.
Through case studies, explanatory videos, and role-play simulations you learn about different types of cyberattacks, vulnerable institutions, and how to check this social menace.
What you’ll learn:
- Questions you need to ask to prepare a vulnerability assessment.
- Ways to interact with public agency staff who might feel it is wrong to reveal evidence of a cyber attack.
- The rules of confidentiality that apply to studying cybersecurity breaches.
- The scale, scope, and impact of cyber attacks that are already happening.
Domain: Computer Science
Duration: 4 Weeks
5. Nuclear Energy: Science, Systems and Society
What you’ll explore:
Are you fascinated about what are nuclear fission and nuclear fusion processes, practically? How does a nuclear reactor work? What are the numerous useful applications of nuclear radiation?
This course introduces the physics behind nuclear reactions, unfolds the present state of the art in nuclear reactor technology, and explores the promises and challenges in envisioning nuclear energy as a low-carbon future fuel.
Additionally, you have complemented with a virtual tour of the MIT Reactor and a chance to explore background radiation in your backyard.
What you’ll learn:
- On course completion, you’ll be able to critically assess the following questions:
- “What are common and not-so-common sources of radiation, and should I be concerned?”
- “Can nuclear energy help to solve the climate change problem?”
- “Is nuclear energy cost-competitive?”
- “Do I want a nuclear power plant in my backyard?”
- “What is the basic idea behind fusion energy and how viable are proposed paths to develop fusion reactors?”
- “How much radiation exists around me?”
- “What are the challenges and opportunities in quantum computation and quantum technology?”
Domain: Science
Duration: 11 Weeks
6. Management in Engineering: Accounting and Planning
What you’ll explore:
- This course is for those who want to join technology companies. Here you develop the managerial ability necessary to secure a position in an engineering enterprise.
- A technology graduate with business skills is highly in-demand, today.
- As part of the Principles of Manufacturing MicroMasters program, this course aims to teach learners key principles and practices used in engineering management.
- Here, you begin with learning basic business functional knowledge–financial accounting, sales, marketing, operations, and topics related to entrepreneurship and progress through acquiring management skills and tools in engineering.
What you’ll accomplish:
- Fundamental business knowledge across finance, sales, and marketing
- Construct financial statements and perform ratio analyses
- Apply analytical tools to business decisions
- Develop a technical strategy that can be applied across multiple industries
Domain: Engineering
Duration: 8 Weeks
7. Foundations of Modern Finance
What you’ll explore:
This course, as a part of the MicroMasters® Program in Finance, will prepare you to qualify for positions like financial analyst, financial advisor, vice president for finance, chief financial officer, and more.
The course provides a mathematically rigorous framework to understand financial markets delivered with data-driven insights from MIT professors.
The course is excellent preparation for anyone planning to take the CFA exams.
What you’ll learn:
- Valuation of fixed-income securities and common stocks
- Risk analysis, the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT), and the Efficient Market Hypothesis
- Introduction to corporate finance and capital budgeting
- Valuation of derivative securities
- Portfolio theory and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)
- Corporate financial decisions
- Real options, capital structure, payout policy, corporate bonds; and
- Interaction between investment and financing decisions
Domain: Economics and Finance
Domain: 12 Weeks
8. Site Planning Online
What you’ll explore:
The population outburst has necessitated modern infrastructure to be sensible and sustainable. We’re in need of constructing well-planned, environment-friendly, and economically-efficient buildings.
If you seek out design and architecture as a career, then go for this foundation course in site planning. Site planning is a prominent part of all urban planning and architecture programs.
You explore important issues in site planning through the perspectives and approaches of leading practitioners and academia.
You’ll acquire substantive knowledge and design skills essential for site organization and will be able to apply what you have learned.
What you’ll learn:
- How to analyze a site and imagine the possibilities for its use.
- How to create a program and a plan for a site.
- How to make choices about site infrastructure.
- Examples of well-planned sites.
Domain: Designs and Architecture
Duration: 10 Weeks
9. The Iterative Innovation Process
What you’ll explore:
Do you think you’re innovative? Or, you have ideas but don’t know how to materialize them. Don’t give up, we’ll train you through the iterative process of innovation.
Innovation is bringing ideas and technology together to invent something new and profitable.
We’ll teach you how to think like an innovator and win over the impending issues of technological uncertainty, market compatibility, and implementation.
You learn by building models of the iterative innovation process by taking real-life situations. The course will eventually empower you with a refined perspective to innovate.
What you’ll learn:
- The iterative innovation process
- The interconnection of Markets, Implementation, and Technology
- How to research and develop a Technology, Market, and Implementation universe for an innovative idea
- How to research and assess areas of uncertainty
Domain: Business and Management
Duration: 8 Weeks
10. Qualitative Research Methods: Conversational Interviewing
What you’ll explore:
If you’re a research scholar and want to explore conversational interviewing as a part of the qualitative research method, then this course can illuminate you sufficiently.
Conversational interviews can provide you a rich and authentic data to validate your research work.
This short course focuses on teaching you to conduct a conversational interview for gathering data for research.
In addition to that, we’ll discuss the nature of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and how they complement each other.
Through Professor Silbey’s preferred method, you learn how to construct an interview protocol to conduct productive interviews.
What you’ll learn:
- How to prepare an interview protocol, and how to conduct an interview.
- How to assess validity in qualitative research.
Domain: Humanities
Duration: 3 Weeks
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by
PK
SkillShouter Team