Build up your management skills through free courses from world-renowned universities through the Coursera platform. The following are some programmes which will be commencing soon:

 How to Change the World

 Wesleyan University (Verified Certificate). Commencing on 21 June 2014.

This course examines how we can develop “social goods” and use them to create networks of progressive change. Classes will explore the meaning of “social goods” and then address the following topics: Poverty and Philanthropy; Climate Change and Sustainability; Women, Education and Social Change; Social Networks, Education and Activism. Each week will be structured along the following questions: 1. What do we know?  2. Why should we care? 3. What can we do? At the end of the class students should have a clearer understanding of these global issues, and they should develop strategies for working with others to begin to address them. This seven-week course will require 3-5 hours of work per week. If you take up the Verified Certificate (US$49.00) version, you will usually have to complete some required work and receive a certificate upon completion of all the conditions.

 Globalization and You

University of Washington. Commencing on 24 June 2014.

Particular attention is paid to the ways market-led macro-economic reforms associated with globalization (such as free trade agreements and privatization initiatives) have come together with much more micro innovations in how personal behavior is organized by market forces (rethinking education as a personal investment practice, for example, or outsourcing dating to for-profit companies).  Mediating between these macro and micro scales of capitalist transformation are a wide array of other market-based mechanisms examined in the course.  From bond risk ratings to the market metrics shaping FICO scores, personalized medicine and online mapping, these market-mechanisms require close examination. Tracing their influence with an awareness of their material geographic variation and unevenness, the course offers an alternative to economistic assumptions about choice-maximizing behavior on a ‘level playing field’. It explores instead the complex uneven development dynamics of globalization in ways that allow you to see how your own personal perspectives on these dynamics are at once outcomes and enablers of economic and social change.  And, by doing so, the course aims in turn at enabling you to be a more engaged participant in the ongoing debates over the direction these dynamics should take.  Key words that are debated, defined and/or explained in the course include: globalization, interdependency, discourse, capitalism, neoliberalism, value, financialization, harmonization, competition, governance, governmentality, power, citizenship, choice, accountability, enclaving, geopolitics, biopolitics, biocapital and global health. This ten-week course will require 2-3 hours of work per week.

 e-Learning Ecologies

 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Commencing on 30 June 2014.

This course explores ‘seven affordances’ of e-learning ecologies which open out genuine possibilities for ‘New Learning’ – transformative, twenty-first century learning:

• Ubiquitous Learning
• Active Knowledge Making
• Multimodal Meaning
• Recursive Feedback
• Collaborative Intelligence
• Metacognition
• Differentiated Learning

These affordances, if recognized and harnessed, will prepare learners for success in  a world that is increasingly dominated by digital information flows, and tools for communication in the workplace, public spaces and personal life. This course offers a wide variety of examples of learning technologies and technology implementations that, to varying degrees, demonstrate these affordances in action. This eight-week course will require 1-10 hours of work per week.