Digital learning

Published On: December 22, 2016 11:07 PM NPT By: The Week Bureau


You don’t always have to take classes and attend lectures to learn something new. You can now do that sitting comfortably in your bed. And there are a few courses you can take undertake that can help you advance your knowledge as well as your career. These are websites that offer a wide variety of courses over a period of time that are taught by professionals. Some of these courses even certify you by verifying you through the webcam when you take the lessons in order for you to have proof that you have taken these classes. You can use these certificates to for job applications and even for university credits.

For the business minded 

Alison.com offers a diploma is Business Management and Entrepreneurship that gives you an opportunity to extensively explore the key subjects in business management. These key subjects include accounting, corporate management and project and operations management. This course is ideal for people who want to expand their knowledge of business management and entrepreneurship and will enhance your career prospects. Through this course, you will learn how large scale organizations are managed and what the structures and objectives involved are. The duration of the course is 15 to 20 hours and you need to be above 18 to take the course. In order to qualify for the official diploma you need to complete all the modules and score 80% or more in each of the assignments. Although the course is free, you will however have to purchase your diploma certificate. 

For the career oriented 

Have you finished your studies and have no idea what about what you true calling really is? Have you been wondering how to motivate yourself at work and how to be your most productive self? If any one of your answer to these questions is yes then you should check out the course “Psychology at work” offered by Coursera.org. Created by the University of Western Australia, in order to pass this six week course, you need to complete and pass all the graded assignments. This course will teach you to use psychology to understand and improve your work life. This is the most basic level of organizational psychology and is recommended only for beginners. This course will also encourage self reflection and will help you understand your own attributes and characteristics to help you understand your strengths and drawbacks.   

Early step towards an international law degree

Do you want to get a masters degree in international law but for some reason you haven’t been able to apply to colleges yet? With the International Law MicroMasters Program provided by edx.og, you’ll master the language and institutions of international law. The MicroMasters Program will give you a clear understanding of the ways by which international law exist as a legal order as well as domestic governance, war and the economy. You’ll learn to decode international news from a legal perspective and to understand the legal rules at play in specific professional fields of international relations like diplomacy, humanitarian aid, NGOs etc. This MicroMasters Credential is worth 20 credits out of the 60 credits needed to complete the advanced masters program. 

For programming geeks

C++ is a general purpose programming language that supports various computer programming models such as object-oriented programming and generic programming. It is a challenging and a high performance language that will help you understand the programming concepts and its algorithms. By learning C++, you can create applications that will run on a wide variety of hardware platforms such as personal computers running Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X. The course provided by edx.org includes C++ Syntax, the language fundamentals, how to create functions on C++ and helps prepare you for the intermediate and advanced C++ topics in the follow-up courses. You can also get a verified certificate for this course for a fee. 

For lovers of language 

With the continuous economic and political rise of China, it has become important to have the basic knowledge of Mandarin Chinese language which is spoken by more than a billion people within China and the growing Chinese Diasporas. “Introduction to the Chinese language – first contact” offered by Alison.com introduces you to the basics of spoken Mandarin Chinese. The course begins with a basic overview of the language with its dialects and briefly looks at pronunciation with the use of pinyin. Pinyin is the transcription of Chinese sounds into the roman alphabets we are accustomed to. With this course you will learn how to greet people and introduce yourself. The words and phrases you learn are presented through Pinyin, English, Chinese script and audio in order to facilitate learning. 

For the stargazers

Introduction to solar systems and astronomy, a credit transferable course offered by edx.og is a introductory four credit hour lecture and laboratory course that explores the origins, contents, structure and evolution of the Milky Way as well as the planetary systems beyond our own. It also covers the history of astronomy, the properties of light and instruments, and the study of the solar systems and the nearby stars. The topics covered in the course include the Lowell Observatory, the Discovery Channel Telescope, and the Meteor Crater which is the world’s best-preserved site of meteorite impact on Earth. Students who are on a gap year and plan on taking up astronomy for a semester can start their course early. The length of this course is eight weeks and you need to put in 24 hours a week of effort into it. Though the course is available for free, you can pay for the verified certificate of the course in order to transfer your credit.

For the creative ones

With android phones steadily taking over the world, learning how to build an android app can become a very good career move. Even without a prior programming experience, the Androids Basics Nanodegree offered by udacity.com, which is co-created by Google, can help accelerate your journey towards becoming an android developer. The only skills you need to possess are basic computer skills like locating and opening files, and downloading and running programs. The only other requirement for this degree is that you should be highly motivated. You can start your Nanodegree program for free but you will have to pay tuition fee after that. It is a six months course and all the teachers on udacity are experts on the subject matter and teach in an engaging and interactive way.   


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