English

Ecosystems are central to addressing business and societal challenges; they foster collaboration and the pooling of resources to drive innovation aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This course adopts a managerial perspective to create and manage ecosystems—physical, digital, or hybrid. Explore strategic, engineering, and technological intersections, stakeholder relationships, and real-world examples such as Brightlands campuses and global hubs like Silicon Valley. Through designing your own ecosystems, participants build practical skills in developing value propositions and collaboration structures, highlighting the practical relevance of ecosystem management.

The course develops students' professional communication skills. It enhances their vocal qualities and connection with the audience. It aids them in becoming fluent and confident speakers, and effective and efficient writers, who know how to state a clear main idea and provide clear and structured substantiation for their claims. The course focuses on projecting the voice, pronouncing clearly, breathing effectively, and relaxing the voice. Students give presentations throughout the course. 

On a global scale, wealth, health, and life opportunities are unfairly distributed. Several philosophers have emphasized that this unfairness gives the affluent a moral duty to help the worst-off, others have tried to formulate basic principles for a fair society. Whereas political philosophers of the past mainly focused on these issues through the lens of the nation state, contemporary thinkers argue that globalization processes force us to approach themes like sustainability, justice and equality on an international level, for example by constructing international institutions or by rethinking ideas about national sovereignty. This course discusses a wide range of analyses of these issues by visiting core political theories of past and present and coupling these with debates on specific (applied) questions. The focus is on values as diverse as liberty, equality, (international) justice, sovereignty, sustainability and more, and critically discuss issues arising from phenomena like migration, climate change and poverty.

This course gives students an overview of how to create projects in electronics. The course covers a basic overview of electronics, solder skills, use of computer chips (“microcontrollers”) to make sound, control lights, and move things, use Arduino and other easy/fun microcontroller development boards, modify (“hack”) existing programs for controlling electronics with microcontrollers, basics of how to make sound with microcontrollers (“Digital Signal Processing”), read a schematic diagram, use solderless breadboards (to quickly make electronic projects), use some tools for debugging projects, design solder boards (“Printed Circuit Boards”) using software (using KiCad), principals of Open Source, patents, project names, and Intellectual Property, skills to manufacture projects (both small-scale and mass-production), basics of starting one’s own small business, and principals of entrepreneurial thinking and hacker’s mindset. The course uses, as an example, a project called “TV-B-Gone universal remote control”, which was invented by the course instructor. With the ideas learned through the TV-B-Gone project, students are then in an excellent position to apply the lessons learned to come up with their own project ideas, and implement them in small groups and with their own projects, and present them at the end of the class.

This course will go through the different parts of the climate system, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and lithosphere and cover the evidence for human influenced climate change globally and in Australia. It will discuss the consequences and risks that climate change presents to the society, environment, ecosystems and biodiversity, and the potential strategies to mitigate and adapt for a future warmer world.

This class provides an opportunity for students to formulate a multicultural communication strategy, based on analysis of the actors involved and there interests while applying the appropriate methodologies for its implementation in the public arena. Prior knowledge required of historical analysis of the international system and research methodologies. 

This course takes a sociological approach to the study of inequalities in the region. The first sessions provide fundamental sociological tools to approach social inequalities, minorities, and minoritization. It then interrogates the discursive constructions of the Middle East and North Africa region as demographically homogenous (for example, homogenously Arab). Each meeting is based on the study of a factor linked to social inequalities and linked minoritization; under study are minority-groups as well as minoritization based on gender, socio-economic class, race, citizen/migrant status, urban versus rural habitation, language/dialects spoken, religion/sect. The course ends with a study of minority movements that contest their unequal status.

This course examines the development and adoption of integrated crop management processes to control plant pathogens, insects and weeds. The advantages and disadvantages of biological, cultural, physical and chemical control methods are explored using examples from agro-ecosystems. It covers the principles of healthy plant production, the ecology of diseases, insects and weeds and integrated approaches to manage these pests. C

This course introduces the basic mathematical tools of Quantum Mechanics with a special emphasis on the connection between physical phenomena and mathematical modelling. The Hilbert space of physical states is reviewed as a particular case of a linear vector space. General properties of representation theory are discussed for the case of finite groups and are applied to quantum mechanical systems. Representations of the continuous groups U(1), SO(3), and SU(2) are presented and discussed in relation with invariance under translations and rotations. The general theory of angular momentum is introduced and applied to cases of physical interest. Quantum mechanical results are compared to their classical counterparts for a number of physical systems.

The course introduces host-pathogen interactions and disease as general ecological phenomena that extend far beyond the clinical/ biomedical context and have considerable relevance for agriculture and conservation. It fosters active, self-paced, independent learning in a blended course that is delivered online, with optional face-to-face workshop sessions and ample online support. It is assessed entirely by coursework to promote the development of skills that are relevant for authentic professional work.