Home of the Blue Devils, Duke University has about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students and a world-class faculty helping to expand the frontiers of knowledge. The university has a strong commitment to applying knowledge in service to society, both near its North Carolina campus and around the world.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeWelcome to the course where you learn to launch a new business in the energy, finance, real estate, design, engineering, or environmental sectors, while also helping you create positive environmental and human health impacts around the world.We will integrate tools, trends, and tips from the field of entrepreneurship as a career path for making a difference and generating wealth in the renewable energy and green building sectors.This is not a course about theory. Instead, we focus on real world application, step-by-step advice, and case studies.After completing this course, students will be able to:- Define key business opportunities, challenges, and potential solutions in the renewable energy and green building sectors.- Analyze a successful business in renewable energy or green building.- Identify 2 to 3 problems you might solve with either renewable energy or green building products or services. - Plan for engaging with investors who might finance a new business.- Take real world first steps towards launching a new business or corporate initiative, by applying the 1-page business idea summary template and the Business Model Canvas to generating and refining your own new business ideas.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeFrom entrepreneurs to executives, this Specialization provides an opportunity for you to learn how to advance business innovation in your company and gain insights from leading faculty in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.In the first course, you will learn how to valuate entrepreneurial ventures—including high-growth startups—using Excel spreadsheet models. You will also learn how to discern between the tradeoffs of different financing strategies: loan investments, venture capital, angel investing, and crowdfunding.The second course will teach you how to manage a startup’s financing strategy, where you will learn how to build capitalization tables (or “cap tables”) in Excel. Cap tables will help you explore different financing strategies for your startup company and determine which financing decisions are best for your entrepreneurial venture.The third course transitions to an analysis of blockchain technologies, where you will learn how to identify opportunities to disrupt and innovate business models using blockchain as well as avoid poorly executed applications of blockchain to business.The fourth course will teach you how to use R programming to calculate the return of a stock portfolio as well as quantify the market risk of that portfolio.This Specialization is also an excellent opportunity for professionals interested in Fuqua’s master’s programs to get an inside look into Fuqua’s faculty expertise and courses.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeThe capstone project will be an analysis using R that answers a specific scientific/business question provided by the course team. A large and complex dataset will be provided to learners and the analysis will require the application of a variety of methods and techniques introduced in the previous courses, including exploratory data analysis through data visualization and numerical summaries, statistical inference, and modeling as well as interpretations of these results in the context of the data and the research question. The analysis will implement both frequentist and Bayesian techniques and discuss in context of the data how these two approaches are similar and different, and what these differences mean for conclusions that can be drawn from the data. A sampling of the final projects will be featured on the Duke Statistical Science department website.Note: Only learners who have passed the four previous courses in the specialization are eligible to take the Capstone.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeThis specialization develops strong programming fundamentals for learners who want to solve complex problems by writing computer programs. Through four courses, you will learn to develop algorithms in a systematic way and read and write the C code to implement them. This will prepare you to pursue a career in software development or other computational fields.Successful completion of this Specialization will be considered by admissions as a demonstration of your skill and enhance your master’s application to Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeBeing a successful FinTech firm requires more than just great technology; it also requires an understanding of the laws and regulations applicable to your business. This course will provide you with that understanding. You will learn about the critical legal, regulatory, and policy issues associated with cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings, online lending, new payments and wealth management technologies, and financial account aggregators.In addition, you will learn how regulatory agencies in the U.S. are continually adjusting to the emergence of new financial technologies and how one specific agency has proposed a path for FinTech firms to become regulated banks. You will also learn the basics of how banks are regulated in the U.S.If you are unfamiliar with how these new financial technologies work, fear not. We will begin each new course section with a high-level overview of the underlying technology.While the course is principally focused on the U.S. FinTech industry, we cannot possibly cover every relevant legal and regulatory issue. Therefore, this course should not be construed as legal advice. Rather, the goal of the course is to familiarize you with the key legal and regulatory challenges FinTech firms in various sectors face, as well as the critical policy debates that are occurring in Washington D.C. and state capitals across the country.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeNerves, the heart, and the brain are electrical. How do these things work? This course presents fundamental principles, described quantitatively.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeEver wonder how Netflix decides what movies to recommend for you? Or how Amazon recommends books? We can get a feel for how it works by building a simplified recommender of our own!In this capstone, you will show off your problem solving and Java programming skills by creating recommender systems. You will work with data for movies, including ratings, but the principles involved can easily be adapted to books, restaurants, and more. You will write a program to answer questions about the data, including which items should be recommended to a user based on their ratings of several movies. Given input files on users ratings and movie titles, you will be able to:1. Read in and parse data into lists and maps;2. Calculate average ratings;3. Calculate how similar a given rater is to another user based on ratings; and4. Recommend movies to a given user based on ratings. 5. Display recommended movies for a given user on a webpage.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeThe course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeIn this course, you will learn what an argument is. The definition of argument will enable you to identify when speakers are giving arguments and when they are not. Next, you will learn how to break an argument into its essential parts, how to put them in order to reveal their connections, and how to fill in gaps in an argument by adding suppressed premises. By the end of this course, you will be better able to understand and appreciate arguments that you and other people present.Suggested Readings:Students who want more detailed explanations or additional exercises or who want to explore these topics in more depth should consult Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, Ninth Edition, Concise, Chapters 1-5, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin.Course Format:Each week will be divided into multiple video segments that can be viewed separately or in groups. There will be short ungraded quizzes after each segment (to check comprehension) and a longer graded quiz at the end of the course.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeThis is an introductory course for students with limited background in chemistry; basic concepts such as atomic and molecular structure, solutions, phases of matter, and quantitative problem solving will be emphasized with the goal of preparing students for further study in chemistry.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeIntroduction to Genetics and Evolution is a college-level class being offered simultaneously to new students at Duke University. The course gives interested people a very basic overview of some principles behind these very fundamental areas of biology.We often hear about new "genome sequences," commercial kits that can tell you about your ancestry (including pre-human) from your DNA or disease predispositions, debates about the truth of evolution, why animals behave the way they do, and how people found "genetic evidence for natural selection."This course provides the basic biology you need to understand all of these issues better, tries to clarify some misconceptions, and tries to prepare students for future, more advanced coursework in Biology (and especially evolutionary genetics).No prior coursework is assumed.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeBuild on the software engineering skills you learned in “Java Programming: Solving Problems with Software” by learning new data structures. Use these data structures to build more complex programs that use Java’s object-oriented features. At the end of the course you will write an encryption program and a program to break your encryption algorithm.After completing this course, you will be able to:1. Read and write data from/to files;2. Solve problems involving data files;3. Perform quantitative analyses of data (e.g., finding maximums, minimums, averages); 4. Store and manipulate data in an array or ArrayList;5. Combine multiple classes to solve larger problems;6. Use iterables and collections (including maps) in Java.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeWe make thousands of decisions every day. Do I cross the road now, or wait for the oncoming truck to pass? Should I eat fries or a salad for lunch? How much should I tip the cab driver? We usually make these decisions with almost no thought, using what psychologists call “heuristics” – rules of thumb that enable us to navigate our lives. Without these mental shortcuts, we would be paralyzed by the multitude of daily choices. But in certain circumstances, these shortcuts lead to predictable errors – predictable, that is, if we know what to watch out for. Did you know, for example, that we are naturally biased towards selling investments that are doing well for us, but holding on to those that are doing poorly? Or that we often select sub-optimal insurance payment plans, and routinely purchase insurance that we don’t even need? And why do so many of us fail to enroll in our employer’s corporate retirement plans, even when the employer offers to match our contributions?Behavioral finance is the study of these and dozens of other financial decision-making errors that can be avoided, if we are familiar with the biases that cause them. In this course, we examine these predictable errors, and discover where we are most susceptible to them. This course is intended to guide participants towards better financial choices. Learn how to improve your spending, saving, and investing decisions for the future.
Class Central TipsLearn How to Sign up to Coursera courses for free1600+ Coursera Courses That Are Still Completely FreeIn this second course of the Python, Bash and SQL Essentials for Data Engineering Specialization, you will learn the fundamentals of Linux necessary to perform data engineering tasks. Additionally, you will explore how to use both Bash and zsh configurations, and develop the syntax needed to interact and control Linux. These skills will allow you to manage and manipulate databases in a Bash environment.