So you want to sell online courses. Put your ideas online in an LMS course, and people will eventually find it. I mean there’s Google, right? And you’re such a great subject matter expert that people will line up and pay to drink from the fountain of your knowledge. What could possibly go wrong?
History isn’t dead. It’s living, present-day events that just happened to occur at a different time. Studying ancient civilizations is one of the most fascinating insights into our own times, because at one point these were current events, with the same human motivations behind them. Ancient history is almost like a roll call of the seven deadly sins: greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, avarice, envy and wrath. These tendencies are, for better or worse (mostly worse), hard-wired into the human brain and are just as prevalent today as ever.
Imagine a time when only certain people were allowed to wear purple. That time was the Elizabethan period, when your clothes defined who you were infinitely more than today. If you were a peasant or commoner then earth tones were your bag, and a penchant for purple could get your neck stretched. This was decreed by English laws known as the Sumptuary Laws. Only royalty were allowed to wear purple, for a variety of reasons including an association with Roman Emperors’ purple togas and the fact that the dye of that colour was incredibly expensive.
A new video lecture course has emerged which brings a fresh angle on the ancient and classical worlds, delivered by a lecturer whose enthusiasm for her subject shines through and brings ‘dead’ history to life. If you are looking for a deep dive into the civilizations which preceded the Middle Ages – how they lived, what they believed, how they rose and fell, what they left behind and their influence on successive civilizations right up to the present day – then this video lecture series is for you.
Is popular culture the frivolous fluff floating on the surface of human existence, or the very glue that binds societies together? Well, it’s both, really. You can watch The Simpsons just for laughs or analyse it as a serious social barometer. However you choose to consume it, though, the show sprang up spontaneously without intervention from the Establishment and is not highbrow, so it’s part of popular culture.
Have you always doodled? Do you cover every available piece of paper in ideas, designs and cartoons? Then you have a natural affinity for creating visual images and it might be worth exploring the world of comic art. It might be possible to turn your ‘idle’ doodles into a career as a creative professional. Not paying attention or being bored in school could lead to a fulfilling creative career! While the non-doodlers settle into their jobs as accountants and financial advisors, those who doodled have the chance of really becoming something.
Synthesizers have come a long way since the Moog and the Fairlight in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s no longer new to hear samples of raindrops falling into water in music tracks, as it was when Jean-Michel Jarre gave us his groundbreaking soundscapes on the pioneering albums Oxygène and Équinoxe. Synth sounds are so commonplace now that to create new sounds, you need to know a few things about how they work, and learn a bunch of software, to see how you can push the envelope.
Maybe there’s a slight pang of guilt at the clickbaity title, but it got your attention and there are excellent reasons to read on. We’re talking about the links between exercise and feeling good in yourself, otherwise known as mental health. Here’s a course that delves into the exact mechanisms that link exercising to that inner glow.
The Basque country between France and Spain has a proud culinary tradition that has led to the creation in 2011 of the Basque Culinary Center, a university dedicated entirely to food. The Faculty of Gastronomic Sciences at Mondragon University joined with a group of prominent chefs to found the first official university-level training courses in Spain (the Degree in Gastronomy and Culinary Arts), combined with a Research and Innovation Center in the field of food and gastronomy.
There’s a course on Udemy that might be worth looking into if you’re tired of the 9 to 5 routine and want to see more of the world. It describes how to get paid to travel. They don’t give away the exact details of their method because that would be stupid – they are selling an ‘information product’ in the style of get rich quick schemes, and the only way to get at their secret sauce is to pay for it.
TV game shows love progress bars, don’t they? The contestants and audience hold their breath as blocks light up to create a path towards a prize, or a big thermometer-like thing rises until a desired goal is reached. We seem to be hard-wired to respond to these visualisations of progress, and get a sense of achievement and reward when the goal is reached.
