Online courses to advance your engineering skills
If you’re looking for online engineering courses this summer to complement your degree or get ahead in your studies, consider one of our selection of online programmes currently offered.
Engineering is an ever-challenging field that demands constant innovation and creativeness. As consumers constantly demand newer, better products to make their lives easier, engineers are expected to gauge these needs beforehand and design products as per consumer requirements.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has projected a 3% growth in engineering occupations from 2019 to 2029.
If you’re looking to advance your skills in the field, Moonshot News has gathered up 5 online courses in engineering.
5 online courses in engineering
Robotics Specialization (Coursea)
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Duration: Approximately 7 months to complete (suggested pace of 5 hours/week)
Robotics is a fast developing market increasingly driven by the development of novel and improved products in areas as diverse as manufacturing, surgery and healthcare, homes and cars, transport and logistics, and many more.
The Introduction to Robotics Specialization will introduce you to the concepts of robot flight and movement, how robots perceive their environment, and how they adjust their movements to avoid obstacles, navigate difficult terrains and accomplish complex tasks such as construction and disaster recovery.
You will be exposed to real world examples of how robots have been applied in disaster situations, how they have made advances in human healthcare and what their future capabilities will be. The courses build towards a capstone in which you will learn how to program a robot to perform a variety of movements such as flying and grasping objects.
Autodesk CAD/CAM/CAE for Mechanical Engineering Specialization (Coursera)
Institution: Autodesk
Duration: Approximately 4 months to complete (suggested pace of 5 hours/week)
The demand placed on today’s engineers goes above and beyond the job description. Products have become complex and engineers are more frequently asked to leave specialized roles and to take on a wide variety of tasks that are beyond their traditional responsibilities. These tasks are centered on form, fit, and function.
Engineers today are required to be on the cutting edge of design innovation. This means not only understanding engineering principles that govern the title and role, but also perfecting the toolsets needed to design and develop products.
Through this specialization, you’ll learn the foundations of applying computer aided design (CAD), computer aided engineering (CAE), and manufacturing principles while developing your technical skills within Autodesk Fusion 360.
An Introduction to Programming the Internet of Things (IOT) Specialization (Coursera)
Institution: University of California, Irvine
Duration: Approximately 6 months to complete (suggested pace of 3 hours/week)
The explosive growth of the “Internet of Things” is changing our world and the rapid drop in price for typical IoT components is allowing people to innovate new designs and products at home.
This Specialization covers embedded systems, the Raspberry Pi Platform, and the Arduino environment for building devices that can control the physical world. In the final Capstone Project, you’ll apply the skills you learned by designing, building, and testing a microcontroller-based embedded system, producing a unique final project suitable for showcasing to future employers.
Fundamentals of Manufacturing Processes (EdX)
Institution: MITx
Duration: Approximately 12 weeks (suggested pace of 4–6 hours/week)
Have you wondered how something was manufactured? Do you want to learn what it takes to turn your design into a finished product at scale? This course introduces a wide range of manufacturing processes including machining, injection molding, casing, and 3D printing; and explains the fundamental and practical aspects of manufacturing at scale.
Together, the content will enable you to design a manufacturing process for a multi-part product, make quantitative estimates of cost and throughput, and recognize important constraints and tradeoffs in manufacturing processes and systems. The course concludes with a perspective on sustainability, digitization, and the worldwide trajectory of manufacturing.
Electronics – for Complete Beginners (Udemy)
Duration: 10 hours on-demand video
Electronics has become important to many fields; communications, automotive, security, defense and consumer electronics, to name just a few. This course will familiarize you with the theory behind various types of electrical and electronic circuitry. It concentrates on practical aspects of the technology, rather than delving into depths of theory that will be of little value in real-world working situations.
If you are a person who likes to know how things work, and enjoys the challenge of figuring out why not when they don’t, the study of electrical engineering technology is sure to offer knowledge and skills that will interest you, and opportunities in the workplace that you will find personally rewarding, and financially attractive.
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