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This Specialization is intended for the general public, including pre-health undergraduate students, healthcare professionals, and professionals in other healthcare-related industries seeking to develop a deeper understanding of dental medicine. Through three courses developed by Penn Dental Medicine, you will cover a basic introduction to dental medicine and dental education, oral health and its connection to systemic health, and modern advancements in dentistry and dental technologies. Learners may apply the skills obtained through completing this Specialization in different ways depending on the role and the industry of the learner. For undergraduate students contemplating a career in dentistry, this group of learners should be able to make more informed career choices at the completion of this course. For those who are non-dental health care professionals, the learners will have a better understanding of the relationship between systemic and oral health. Lastly, for professionals employed by non-healthcare industries that are affiliated with dental practice, such as insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, it is our hope that these learners will have a better understanding of dental therapy and the scope of dental care.

Thomas Berry (1914-2009) was a historian of world religions and an early voice awakening moral sensibilities to the environmental crisis. He is known for articulating a “new story” of the universe that explores the implications of the evolutionary sciences and cultural traditions for creating a flourishing future. This course investigates Berry’s life and thought in relation to the Journey of the Universe project. It draws on his books, articles, and recorded lectures to examine such ideas as: the New Story, the Great Work, and the emerging Ecozoic era. The course explores Berry’s insights into cosmology as a context for locating the human in a dynamic unfolding universe and thus participating in the creative work of our times. In particular, we will examine Berry’s reflections on renewal and reform in the areas of ecology, economics, education, spirituality, and the arts. Course Rationale: Thomas Berry was an original, creative, and comprehensive thinker, especially regarding the critical nature of our global environmental crisis. His intellectual importance resides in his response to the ecological crisis by bringing together the humanities and science in an evolutionary narrative. In addition, he articulated the need for the moral participation of the world religions in addressing environmental issues. He came to this realization largely through his study of cosmologies embedded within religious traditions. Sensing the significance of these stories as “functional cosmologies” he explored the widespread influence that these stories transmitted through a tradition, for example, in rituals, ethics, and subsistence practices.

This second course in the XR for Everybody specialization looks at how to design new user experiences for XR technologies. The course provides learners with a design thinking mindset and equips them with a fundamental toolbox for creating XR applications using rapid prototyping. It starts with a broad overview of the complete XR design process, discussing different paths to becoming an XR creator, what is generally involved in making XR experiences, and how to best get started. The course then emphasizes design thinking, critiques, and ethics while introducing guidelines and user-centered techniques like design jams. The second half of the course introduces a variety of methods and tools for prototyping both physically and digitally including on the XR devices themselves through immersive authoring. The course has an honors track that guides learners through creating their own storyboard, physical prototype, and digital prototype of an XR experience. You will work on exercises that allow you to practice your design skills and also build XR technologies into your workflow by working with specific templates and new digital tools that allow you to preview physical prototypes on AR/VR devices.

This is the first course in a Coursera Specialization track involving Web Application Architectures. This course will give you the basic background, terminology and fundamental concepts that you need to understand in order to build modern full stack web applications. A full stack web developer is familiar with each "layer" of the software technologies involved in a web application, including data modeling and database technologies, the web server environment and middleware components, network protocols, the user interface and basic visual design and user interaction concepts. In this course we will learn by doing. We will start by learning the major components of web application architectures, along with the fundamental design patterns and philosophies that are used to organize them. You will build and continually refine a fully functional full-stack web application as we progress through the modules in this course. Along the way you will be exposed to agile software development practices, numerous tools that software engineers are expected to know how to use, and a modern web application development framework. This course is also available in Spanish. To join the Spanish version, visit this page: https://www.coursera.org/learn/apliweb.

This course begins with an overview of general intellectual property law in the United States, then examines how the policy choices behind those laws shapes the behavior of major players in the healthcare industry. We will examine how patents and trademarks shape the behavior of pharmaceutical companies, and how complex issues involving medical research in university settings, and ownership of genetic information and material, are resolved by intellectual property laws. The course concludes with in-depth case studies of an international pharmaceutical company, a major medical device company, and a start-up in the emerging DNA-testing industry.