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Recently revised and updated! Effective teamwork and group communication are essential for your professional and personal success. In this course you will learn to: make better decisions, be more creative and innovative, manage conflict and work with difficult group members, negotiate for preferred outcomes, improve group communication in virtual environments, develop a better overall understanding of human interaction, and work more effectively as a team. Our goal is to help you understand these important dynamics of group communication and learn how to put them into practice to improve your overall teamwork.

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5360, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Programmable Logic has become more and more common as a core technology used to build electronic systems. By integrating soft-core or hardcore processors, these devices have become complete systems on a chip, steadily displacing general purpose processors and ASICs. In particular, high performance systems are now almost always implemented with FPGAs. This course will give you the foundation for FPGA design in Embedded Systems along with practical design skills. You will learn what an FPGA is and how this technology was developed, how to select the best FPGA architecture for a given application, how to use state of the art software tools for FPGA development, and solve critical digital design problems using FPGAs. You use FPGA development tools to complete several example designs, including a custom processor. If you are thinking of a career in Electronics Design or an engineer looking at a career change, this is a great course to enhance your career opportunities. Hardware Requirements: You must have access to computer resources to run the development tools, a PC running either Windows 7, 8, or 10 or a recent Linux OS which must be RHEL 6.5 or CentOS Linux 6.5 or later. Either Linux OS could be run as a virtual machine under Windows 8 or 10. The tools do not run on Apple Mac computers. Whatever the OS, t

Social and emotional learning, or SEL, programs have flourished in schools during the last decade. While this growth has been impressive, inadequate attention has been paid to teachers’ social and emotional learning. In this course Dan Liston and Randy Testa introduce you to various rationales for why teacher SEL is needed as well as examine and reflect on various emotions in teaching and learning. This course is a part of the 5-course Specialization “The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL)”. Interested in earning 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization?? If so check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first module of this course for additional information. We want to note that the courses in this Specialization were designed with a three-credit university course load in mind. As a participant you may notice a bit more reading content and a little less video/lecture content. Completing and passing the SEL Specialization allows the participant to apply for 3 graduate credits toward teacher re-certification and professional enhancement. We want to ensure the quality and high standards of a University of Colorado learning experience. Interested in earning 3 graduate credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Specialization? Check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first week of this course for more information.

Social and emotional learning, or SEL, programs have flourished in schools during the last decade. In this course the instructor (Emily Price) introduces you to the history and framings of social and emotional learning preK-12 curricula, as well as various elementary, middle, and high school SEL programs and associated research. This course is a part of the 5-course Specialization “The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL)”. Interested in earning 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization? If so check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first module of this course for additional information. We want to note that the courses in this Specialization were designed with a three-credit university course load in mind. As a participant you may notice a bit more reading content and a little less video/lecture content. Completing and passing the SEL Specialization allows the participant to apply for 3 graduate credits toward teacher re-certification and professional enhancement. We want to ensure the quality and high standards of a University of Colorado learning experience. Interested in earning 3 graduate credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Specialization? Check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first week of this course for more information.

Social and emotional learning, or SEL, programs have flourished in schools during the last decade. In this course the instructors (Emily Price and Ben Kirshner) introduce and help you examine community based and youth-empowerment approaches to social and emotional learning. Some of these approaches address the impact of social and political systems, such as immigration and structural racism, on children’s social and emotional experiences. This course is a part of the 5-course Specialization “The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL)”. Interested in earning 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization? If so check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first module of this course for additional information. We want to note that the courses in this Specialization were designed with a three-credit university course load in mind. As a participant you may notice a bit more reading content and a little less video/lecture content. Completing and passing the SEL Specialization allows the participant to apply for 3 graduate credits toward teacher re-certification and professional enhancement. We want to ensure the quality and high standards of a University of Colorado learning experience. Interested in earning 3 graduate credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Specialization? Check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first week of this course for more information.

Social and emotional learning, or SEL, student programs have flourished in schools during the last decade. Unfortunately inadequate attention has been paid to teachers’ social and emotional learning. In this course the instructors (Randy Testa and Dan Liston) introduce and examine distinct and established teacher SEL programs, as well as some alternative possibilities. This course is a part of the 5-course Specialization “The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL)”. Interested in earning 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization? If so check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first module of this course for additional information. We want to note that the courses in this Specialization were designed with a three-credit university course load in mind. As a participant you may notice a bit more reading content and a little less video/lecture content. Completing and passing the SEL Specialization allows the participant to apply for 3 graduate credits toward teacher re-certification and professional enhancement. We want to ensure the quality and high standards of a University of Colorado learning experience. Interested in earning 3 graduate credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for The Teacher and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Specialization? Check out "How you can earn 3 university credits from the University of Colorado-Boulder for this specialization" reading in the first week of this course for more information.

Social and emotional learning, or SEL, programs have flourished in schools during the last decade. These programs vary widely but most share a concern for five individual, student competencies: self awareness; self-management; social awareness; relationship skills; and finally responsible decision making. It is important for teachers and parents to know about and understand these programs. While lots of SEL programs emphasize K-12 student social and emotional learning, only a very few programs exist to promote, and help teachers explore their own emotional well-being. In this Specialization our central premise is this: To facilitate students’ social and emotional learning, a teacher must know the student as a person. This means that the teacher must strive to know her or him self. In order to help students achieve a degree of well-being, teachers need to be aware of their own well-being. In our Specialization, “The Teacher and SEL” the instructors (Randy Testa and Dan Liston, as well as Emily Price and Ben Kirshner) examine kindergarten through high school SEL programs, looking at both established programs and less well-known community-based and youth empowerment approaches. Along with this examination of K-12 SEL programs, we bring a much needed emphasis on the teachers’ well being. Applied Learning Project Students will utilize course knowledge and skills to create either a ‘Teacher Implementation Plan’ focused on developing student or teacher SELprograms, or a cinema project examining student & teacher SEL implications in educationally oriented films.

Join us for an action-oriented online teacher professional development course! This course will teach participants how to identify and implement a local service-learning campaign using the Roots & Shoots program model. The service learning curriculum equips participants with teacher resources to discover the differences between service-learning and community service, and apply the Roots & Shoots model to help youth have a voice in identifying and addressing needs in their community. At Roots & Shoots, our goal is to develop compassionate leaders to make the world a better place for people, other animals and the environment. Help us achieve that goal! Complete the course and mentor young people to lead change in their communities using community mapping, collaborating with stakeholders, and designing practical solutions in the form of campaigns. Connect young people to Dr. Jane Goodall’s message of hope while facilitating a sense of empowerment that comes from helping others!

This Specialization is for learners wishing to dramatically change the way that they use Excel spreadsheets by unleashing the power to automate and optimize spreadsheets using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The first two courses will teach learners the basics of VBA through the use of dozens of educational screencasts and a series of quizzes and in-application programming assignments. Finally, in Part 3 of the course, learners will complete 3 "real world" and somewhat open ended projects, which are graded through peer review. Applied Learning Project Learners will complete one easy project (chosen from two potential projects), one intermediate project (chosen from two potential projects), and a third, required Monte Carlo simulation project (intermediate in difficulty). Projects include: Real-Time Currency Converter, Geography Toolbox, Ultimate Organizer, Regression Toolbox, Monte Carlo Simulation, and Grade Manager.

This course provides instruction and strategies to support you in developing a course that is inclusive to students with a wide range of abilities, including students with disabilities. We cover effective practices to increase inclusion and avoid some of the common accessibility issues that can arise in an online course. In particular, Basics of Inclusive Design Online covers course organization, the accessibility of Microsoft Office and PDF documents, making course instruction pages accessible, captioning of videos, making images accessible, and designing for learning differences. We also discuss how inclusive course materials can help all students, including students without disabilities. This course will appeal to those who want both a broad overview of the range of accessibility considerations and also a step-by-step guide of how to check documents for accessibility, caption a video, or prepare course content for non-visual users.

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5600, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. When you finish this course, you will be able to design, to first order, such optical systems with simple mathematical and graphical techniques. This first order design will allow you to develop the foundation needed to begin all optical design as well as the intuition needed to quickly address the feasibility of complicated designs during brainstorming meetings. You will learn how to enter these designs into an industry-standard design tool, OpticStudio by Zemax, to analyze and improve performance with powerful automatic optimization methods.

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5602, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. This course extends what you have learned about first-order, paraxial system design and optical resolution and efficiency with the introduction to real lenses and their imperfections. We begin with a description of how different wavelengths propagate through systems, then move on to aberrations that appear with high angle, non-paraxial systems and how to correct for those problems. The course wraps up with a discussion of optical components beyond lenses and an excellent example of a high-performance optical system – the human eye. The mathematical tools required for analysis of high-performance systems are complicated enough that this course will rely more heavily on OpticStudio by Zemax. This will allow students to analyze systems that are too complicated for the simple analysis thus far introduced in this set of courses.