Stan­ley Fish, the well-known lit­er­ary the­o­rist and legal schol­ar, now has a short online course called “Rhetoric and Real­i­ty” that’s being offered through AIA Acad­e­my. The course (which requires a user­name and pass­word) cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

Argu­ments are woven through­out our pub­lic and pri­vate lives. What deter­mines which win the day? Renowned lit­er­ary and legal the­o­rist Stan­ley Fish leads us through lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics and the domes­tic to reveal the pow­er — and inevitabil­i­ty — of rhetoric.

From the court­room to the bed­room, argu­ments are woven through­out our pri­vate and pub­lic lives: they are how we decide what’s right, what’s true and what we should do. With exam­ples rang­ing from Milton’s Par­adise Lost to the legal­iza­tion of same sex mar­riage and Don­ald Trump, Fish shows us how the rules of engage­ment shift between con­texts — and how rhetoric is the key to suc­cess in all of them.

Draw­ing from his best­selling book Win­ning Argu­ments, Fish makes the con­tro­ver­sial claim that facts are mere­ly opin­ions that have been made to stick — and what makes them stick is noth­ing more than suc­cess­ful­ly deployed argu­ments.

Take the course to learn:

–What Milton’s Par­adise Lost teach­es us about the pow­er of rhetoric and the first ever domes­tic quar­rel
–The tech­niques Shakespeare’s Mark Antho­ny uses to pro­voke his audi­ence to vio­lence
–What char­ac­ter­izes Don­ald Trump’s rhetor­i­cal style – and how it breaks all the rules
–How the case for same sex mar­riage was real­ly won through a cul­tur­al shift rather than care­ful legal argu­ment
–The tricks cli­mate change deniers use to sow doubt
–The Five Key Truths about domes­tic quar­rels – and why self-help guides to mar­i­tal har­mo­ny almost nev­er work

“Rhetoric and Real­i­ty” will be added to our big list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

IAI Acad­e­my Now Offers Free Cours­es: From “The Mean­ing of Life” to “A Brief Guide to Every­thing”

Take Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es from The Insti­tute of Art and Ideas: From “The Mean­ing of Life” to “Hei­deg­ger Meets Van Gogh”

George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writ­ing Clear and Tight Prose

Back in 2012, Cours­era start­ed offer­ing MOOCS (Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es) to the world at large. And they’ve since amassed some 28 mil­lion reg­is­tered users, a cat­a­logue of 2,000 cours­es, and reams of data about what peo­ple want to learn. In the wan­ing days of Decem­ber, Cours­era pub­lished a list of their 1o most pop­u­lar cours­es of 2017. (Find below, and enroll in any of these cours­es for free.) From this list, it drew some larg­er con­clu­sions about trends in edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­o­gy.

The list shows, writes Nikhil Sin­ha, Cours­er­a’s Chief Con­tent Offi­cer, that “cut­ting-edge tech skills con­tin­ue to be the most sought after in online edu­ca­tion.” Arti­fi­cial intelligence–encompassing Machine Learn­ing, Neur­al Net­works and Deep Learn­ing–topped the list of cours­es. Mean­while “Blockchain has also burst onto the scene, putting Princeton’s Bit­coin and Cryp­tocur­ren­cy course at num­ber five on the list.” But, Sin­ha adds, it’s “not just tech­nol­o­gy skills that are trend­ing.” The “basic learn­ing and infor­ma­tion-reten­tion skills taught in our pop­u­lar Learn­ing How to Learn course are extreme­ly sought-after by peo­ple of all ages.” The same applies to the prob­lem-solv­ing skills taught by Stan­ford’s Intro­duc­tion to Math­e­mat­i­cal Think­ing.

You can review the Top 10 list below, and enroll in any of those reg­u­lar­ly-offered cours­es.

1. Machine Learn­ing: A primer from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty on get­ting com­put­ers to act with­out being explic­it­ly pro­grammed.
2. Neur­al Net­works and Deep Learn­ing: Build­ing on the course above, this course will teach you to feed a com­put­er sys­tem a lot of data, which it can then use to make deci­sions about oth­er data.
3. Learn­ing How to Learn: Pow­er­ful Men­tal Tools to Help You Mas­ter Tough Sub­jects: The most pop­u­lar MOOC ever, this course devel­oped by Dr. Bar­bara Oak­ley gives you access to the invalu­able learn­ing tech­niques used by experts in art, music, lit­er­a­ture, math, sci­ence, sports, and many oth­er dis­ci­plines.
4. Intro­duc­tion to Math­e­mat­i­cal Think­ing: Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty will teach you a style of think­ing that will help you think out­side the box and solve real prob­lems in the every­day world.
5. Bit­coin and Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies: From Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty comes a course that explains what is spe­cial about Bit­coin, and how it works at a tech­ni­cal lev­el.
6. Pro­gram­ming for Every­body (Get­ting Start­ed with Python): The Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan offers a course every­one should take–a primer on the basics of pro­gram­ming com­put­ers, using Python.
7. Algo­rithms, Part I: Prince­ton’s course cov­ers “essen­tial infor­ma­tion that every seri­ous pro­gram­mer needs to know about algo­rithms and data struc­tures, with empha­sis on appli­ca­tions and sci­en­tif­ic per­for­mance analy­sis of Java imple­men­ta­tions.”
8. Eng­lish for Career Devel­op­ment: Cre­at­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, this course is for non-native Eng­lish speak­ers “inter­est­ed in advanc­ing their careers in the glob­al mar­ket­place.” Along the way, you’ll learn about the job search, appli­ca­tion, and inter­view process in the U.S., and also explore your own glob­al career path.
9. Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing:  The Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to gives you the chance to “learn about arti­fi­cial neur­al net­works and how they’re being used for machine learn­ing, as applied to speech and object recog­ni­tion, image seg­men­ta­tion, mod­el­ing lan­guage and human motion, etc.”
10. Finan­cial Mar­kets: Cre­at­ed by Yale’s Robert Shiller (win­ner of the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ics), this course offers an overview of the finan­cial mar­kets, which allow human soci­ety to man­age risks and fos­ter enter­prise. It includes an intro­duc­tion to risk man­age­ment and behav­ioral finance prin­ci­ples under­ly­ing the secu­ri­ties, insur­ance, and bank­ing indus­tries.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn­ing How to Learn: The Most Pop­u­lar MOOC of All Time

New Deep Learn­ing Cours­es Released on Cours­era, with Hope of Teach­ing Mil­lions the Basics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Cours­era Part­ners with Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties to Offer Master’s Degrees at a More Afford­able Price

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

If you’re look­ing for a last minute gift for a thought­ful per­son in your life, here’s one option to con­sid­er. Mas­ter­Class lets you elec­tron­i­cal­ly pur­chase online courses and give them as gifts to fam­i­ly mem­bers and friends. For $90, you could give the gift of a sin­gle course. (The recip­i­ent gets to choose which par­tic­u­lar course they want to take.) Or, for $180, you can give the recip­i­ent a year-long pass to every course in the Mas­ter­Class cat­a­logue. You can get start­ed with the gift-giv­ing process here. And find a list of avail­able cours­es below.

• Annie Lei­bovitz Teach­es Pho­tog­ra­phy
• Gor­don Ram­say Teach­es Cook­ing
• Frank Gehry Teach­es Archi­tec­ture & Design
• Samuel Jack­son Teach­es Act­ing
• Judy Blume Teach­es Writ­ing
• Steve Mar­tin Teach­es Com­e­dy
• Jane Goodall Teach­es Con­ser­va­tion
• Her­bie Han­cock Teach­es Jazz
• Gar­ry Kas­parov Teach­es Chess
• Wern­er Her­zog Teach­es Film­mak­ing
• Aaron Sorkin Teach­es Screen­writ­ing
• David Mamet Teach­es Dra­mat­ic Writ­ing
• James Pat­ter­son Teach­es Writ­ing
• Hans Zim­mer Teach­es Film Scor­ing
• Thomas Keller Teach­es Cook­ing Tech­niques
• Stephen Cur­ry Teach­es Shoot­ing, Ball-Han­dling, Scor­ing
• Christi­na Aguil­era Teach­es Singing
• Deadmau5 Teach­es Elec­tron­ic Music Pro­duc­tion
• Shon­da Rhimes Teach­es Writ­ing for Tele­vi­sion
• Marc Jacobs Teach­es Fash­ion Design
• Ush­er Teach­es the Art of Per­for­mance
• Ser­e­na Williams Teach­es Ten­nis
• Reba McEn­tire Teach­es Coun­try Music

See the full cat­a­log here.

Note: Mas­ter­Classs and Open Cul­ture have a part­ner­ship. If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course, it ben­e­fits not just you and Mas­ter­Class. It ben­e­fits Open Cul­ture too. So con­sid­er it win-win-win.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!