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

The Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving, Part 1 course is designed for students who want to supplement, expand, optimize, and improve the effectiveness of their Excel spreadsheet skills by leveraging the powerful programming, automation, and customization capabilities available through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This course is the first in a three-part series and specialization that focuses on applying computational methods in Excel/VBA to problem solving. In this course (Part 1), you will: 1) create macros to automate procedures in Excel; 2) define your own user-defined functions; 3) create basic subroutines to interact with the user; 4) learn the basic programming structures in VBA; and 5) automate Excel's Goal Seek and Solver tools and use numerical methods to create "live solutions" to goal setting and optimization problems. Are you new to computer programming? The highly intuitive and visual nature of VBA is perfect for teaching and learning - what a fun way to learn to program! No prior programming knowledge or advanced math skills are required, but experienced programmers will gain new and creative strategies for solving spreadsheet problems. Once you have mastered the basics of VBA, each module introduces fundamental and common problems inspired by situations you might encounter in the real world. To pass each module, you will be required to take a comprehension test and complete a problem-solving assignment. This course is unique in that the weekly assignments are completed on the job (i.e. on your own computer in Excel), giving you valuable hands-on training.

The Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving Part 2 course builds on the knowledge and skills acquired in the Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving Part 1 course and is designed for those who seek to complement, extend, optimize, and improve the effectiveness of their Excel spreadsheet skills by leveraging the powerful programming, automation, and customization capabilities available through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). In Part 2 of the course, students will: 1) learn how to work with arrays and import/export arrays from/to Excel using VBA code; 2) learn how to work with text strings, write data to .txt files, and import information from .txt files; 3) automate the import, modification, and merging of information from multiple worksheets into a central worksheet, as well as the import of information from multiple workbooks into a central workbook; and 4) gain experience creating professional-quality custom forms to interact with the user, perform complex calculations, and manipulate data in a spreadsheet. Students with a basic understanding of VBA code and programming structures can skip Part 1 and use the Part 1 demos as a reference. Each module will introduce basic and common problems inspired by situations you might encounter in the real world. To pass each module, you will need to pass a comprehension test and a problem-solving assignment. This course is unique in that the weekly assignments are done in Application Mode (i.e., on your own computer in Excel), giving you valuable hands-on training.

In this course, learners will complete several VBA projects. It is highly recommended that learners first take "Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving, Part 1" and "Excel/VBA for Creative Problem Solving, Part 2". This course builds off of skills learned in those two courses. This is a project-based course. Therefore, the projects are quite open-ended and there are multiple ways to solve the problems. Through the use of Peer Review, other learners will grade learners' projects based on a grading rubric.

This course may also be counted toward ECEA 5601 in the CU Boulder Master of Science in Electrical Engineering program. Optical instruments are what we use to see the world, from corrective eyeglasses to medical endoscopes, cell phone cameras, and orbital telescopes. This course will teach you how to design such optical systems using simple mathematical and graphical techniques. The first-order optical design discussed in the previous course is useful for the initial design of an imaging optical system, but does not predict the energetics and resolution of the system. This course examines intensity propagation for Gaussian beams and incoherent sources. It also introduces the mathematical foundation needed to design an optical system with the desired field of view and resolution. You will also learn how to analyze these characteristics of your optical system using the industry-standard design tool, OpticStudio from Zemax.

The Embedded Systems and Hardware Architecture program is your first foray into understanding embedded systems architectures and writing software to work with that hardware. You will gain experience writing low-level firmware to directly interface with the hardware using highly efficient, readable, and portable design techniques. We will now move from the Host Linux Machine, where we created and ran code in a simulated environment, to an integrated development environment where you will create and deploy code directly to your ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. Course assignments include writing firmware to interface with and configure both the underlying ARM architecture and the MSP432 microcontroller platform. The course concludes with a project in which you will design a circular buffer data structure. To complete the tasks in this course, you will need a Texas Instruments LaunchPad with an MSP432 microcontroller. In subsequent courses in the specialization, you will continue to use this hardware tool to develop even more interesting firmware.

This course may also be counted toward ECEA 5602 toward CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering program. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyeglasses to medical endoscopes, cell phone cameras, and orbital telescopes. This course expands on what you’ve learned about designing first-order paraxial systems and optical resolution and efficiency by introducing you to real-world lenses and their imperfections. We’ll begin by describing how different wavelengths propagate through systems, then move on to the aberrations that occur in high-angle nonparaxial systems and how to correct for these problems. The course concludes with a discussion of optical components beyond lenses and an excellent example of a high-performance optical system: the human eye. The mathematical tools needed to analyze high-performance systems are complex, so in this course we’ll rely more heavily on Zemax’s OpticStudio. This will allow students to analyze systems that are too complex for the simple analysis presented so far in this course set.

This course can also be counted toward ECEA 5385 toward CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering program. Designing the industrial infrastructure of tomorrow is a serious challenge. This course goes beyond the hype around consumer IoT and highlights a much larger space for potential application and growth in embedded systems: the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), also known as Industry 4.0. Cisco’s CEO said, “Overall, IoT is a $19 trillion market. IIoT is a significant subset, including digital oil fields, advanced manufacturing, grid automation, and smart cities.” This is the first part of the specialization. The primary goal of this specialization is to take a close look at the emerging markets, technology trends, application areas, and skills needed by engineering students or working engineers exploring IIoT career opportunities. The course structure is intentionally broad and shallow: We will cover a variety of topics, but will not go into extreme depth in any one topic area, thereby providing a broad overview of the vast IIoT landscape. There is one exception: We will cover security in depth, as it is the most important topic for the development of all IoT products. In this course, students will learn: What Industry 4.0 is and what factors have driven the emergence of IIoT Key skills that need to be developed to work in the IIoT What platforms are, as well as market information for software and services What are the most common application areas (e.g. manufacturing and oil and gas) What are the major operating systems used in IIoT systems About network and wireless communication protocols used in IIoT systems * About computer security; encryption techniques and secure methods for ensuring data integrity and authentication

This course may also be credited toward ECEA 5730 in the CU Boulder Electrical Engineering Master of Science program. This course will provide you with a solid foundation in lithium-ion cell terminology and function, as well as the battery management system requirements needed for the remainder of the specialization. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to: - List the major functions provided by a battery management system and state their purpose - Match battery terminology with a list of definitions - Identify the major components of a lithium-ion cell and their purpose - Understand how a battery management system "measures" current, temperature, and insulation, and how it controls contactors - Identify the electronic components that can provide protection and state the minimum set of protection required - Calculate the stored energy in a battery pack - List the manufacturing steps involved in the various types of lithium-ion cells and the possible failure modes

This course can also be credited toward ECEA 5731, part of the CU Boulder Master of Electrical Engineering program. In this course, you will learn the purpose of each component in the equivalent circuit model of a lithium-ion battery cell, how to determine their parameter values ​​from laboratory test data, and how to use them to model the cell's behavior under various load profiles. By the end of the course, you will be able to: - Determine the purpose of each component in an equivalent circuit model - Calculate approximate parameter values ​​for a circuit model using simple lab test data - Determine the coulombic efficiency of a cell using lab test data - Use the provided Octave/MATLAB script to calculate the open circuit voltage relationship for a cell using lab test datause the provided Octave/MATLAB script to calculate optimized dynamic parameter values ​​in the model - Model an electric vehicle to obtain range estimates and identify drivetrain components - Model batteries to understand and predict behavior when parameter values ​​vary from cell to cell

This course can also be credited toward ECEA 5732, part of CU Boulder's Electrical Engineering Master of Science program. In this course, you will learn how to apply various state-of-charge estimation methods and evaluate their relative merits. By the end of the course, you will be able to: - Implement simple voltage- and current-based state-of-charge estimation methods and understand their limitations - Explain the purpose of each step in solving a sequential probabilistic inference - Run the provided Octave/MATLAB script for a linear Kalman filter and evaluate the results - Run the provided Octave/MATLAB script to estimate state-of-charge using an extended Kalman filter on lab test data and evaluate the results - Run the provided Octave/MATLAB script to estimate state-of-charge using a sigma-point Kalman filter on lab test data and evaluate the results - Implement a method to detect and discard erroneous voltage sensor measurements

This course teaches you the simple principles that expert managers use to improve and motivate employee performance. You never have to shy away from telling an employee "the truth" again, because the seven techniques we teach won't make employees defensive or intimidating. As a manager, or if you want to become one, you'll learn specifically what feedback is, how negative feedback carries more weight than positive feedback, and how positive feedback can improve behaviors like creativity or teamwork. Giving feedback is a skill that develops over time. We provide a process that you can use to improve your feedback skills and give it with confidence. You will find that there is a scientific basis for many of the observations and insights about feedback - such as that it is difficult to give it well, that people don't like it, and more. This course will give you peace of mind as you learn how to overcome these difficulties. We hope you enjoy becoming a better manager!