| Your OpenCourseWare Newsletter | March 2024 |
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| Celebrating 5 million subscribers, Open Education Week, and more! |
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| Image by Brett Paci / MIT OpenCourseWare |
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| MIT OpenCourseWare has hit a major milestone—our YouTube channel now has 5 million subscribers! As the largest .edu channel on the platform, we are grateful for all of the learners around the world that make this possible and who have engaged with our collections of open educational resources created by MIT faculty. Thank you for your support of MIT OpenCourseWare over the last two decades, and for joining us in the expansive power of open education! |
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MIT OpenCourseWare also recently celebrated Open Education Week with a new video for educators by MIT Open Learning’s Intellectual Property Manager Geoff Wilson, titled Navigating Open Licensing: Strategies for Access and Reuse. To kick off the release of this video, we held virtual office hours to discuss how to add open educational content to your educational materials.
We also co-sponsored an Open Education Week panel discussion on how to accelerate climate action and climate justice through open education, which featured the makers of the Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, among other thought leaders and implementers in the pressing field of climate education.
Read on to discover how our YouTube channel inspires millions of learners across the globe, as well as our latest course publications and a special collection of resources in honor of Women’s History Month.
As always, thank you for being part of our MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) world-wide community! We hope you’ll add to our collection of OCW learning story videos, and that you’ll keep making use of all of the latest educational resources from MIT. |
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| Professor John Dolhun as seen teaching 5.310 Laboratory Chemistry. (Image by MIT OpenCourseWare) |
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“OpenCourseWare changed the landscape of education, and continues to inspire students, teachers, and lifelong learners around the globe to follow their curiosity wherever it leads,” states MIT President Sally Kornbluth on the history and importance of MIT OpenCourseWare.
Read more about how MIT OpenCourseWare’s YouTube channel inspires millions of learners across the globe to expand their knowledge and develop new skills for free in this recent MIT News story. Join us in our celebration of over 5 million subscribers and 430 million views! |
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| New Courses and Resources |
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| Image courtesy of Wei-Chung Allen Lee, Hayden Huang, et al. via Nrets on Wikipedia. License: CC BY.” |
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7.342 Synapse Remodeling in Health and Disease
Our brains are remarkably adaptable throughout our lives. The neurons in the brain form synapses, sites of physical connection and communication between one brain cell and another, and then repeatedly rewire those connections in response to new experiences or to cell death caused by injury, disease, or aging. This course, one of the MIT Biology Department’s Advanced Undergraduate Seminars, focuses on readings from the recent scientific literature that explore how the process of building and rebuilding synaptic connections plays out both in childhood and in later life, and both in healthy brains and in those that are diseased or injured.
8.323 Relativistic Quantum Field Theory I
In a subject such as quantum field theory that is very formalized in its approach, sitting down and trying to reason your way through a problem not only helps you learn the material deeply, but also develops crucial analytical tools. If you’ve already worked your way through the materials in 8.321 Quantum Theory I, you may be ready to tackle Relativistic Quantum Field Theory I. In this course, which focuses on theories that explain phenomena in terms of both special relativity and quantum mechanics, concepts and basic techniques are developed through applications in elementary particle physics and condensed matter physics.
14.310X Data Analysis for Social Scientists
Our world is awash in data. How can we harness that data to answer questions of cultural, social, economic, and policy interest? Starting with essential concepts from the fields of probability and statistics, this course introduces commonly used data analysis techniques such as regression and econometrics, design of experiments, randomized control trials (and A/B testing), machine learning, and data visualization. The practical implementation of these techniques is illustrated with applications drawn from real-world examples and cutting-edge research. Finally, the course provides instruction on the use of the statistical package R, and offers opportunities for students to perform self-directed empirical analyses. If you are interested in further exploring this topic in a synchronized way, consider the upcoming MITx version of this course which can be audited for free. |
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| RES.21G-3002 Teaching Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron RES.21G-3004 Marguerite de Navarre Society Website RES.21G-3001 Teaching La Princesse de Clèves RES.21G-3003 Marguerite de Roberval: A Web-Based Approach to Teaching a Renaissance Heroine These four sites provide links to online resources for the study of three important figures in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French history and literature: Marguerite de Roberval, who spent several years marooned on an island off the coast of Quebec; Marguerite de Navarre, a princess and writer whose popular collection of tales, the Heptaméron, includes a narrative of Roberval’s life; and Madame de La Fayette, author of the influential 1678 novel La Princesse de Clèves. Though the four websites are not themselves part of MIT OpenCourseWare, all four are published under the same Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license that our site uses. |
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| Further MIT OpenCourseWare Courses |
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| The Forge lab in the MIT Department of Material Science and Engineering. (Photo by Christopher Harting). |
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In celebration of Women’s History Month, we have curated a list of courses and workshops from MIT OpenCourseWare that engage with the role of women in the world, both as objects of ideology and cultural portrayal and as autonomous subjects and agents of innovation and change. Dive into the following resources listed in this Medium article by MIT Open Learning!
In addition to WGS.101 Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, deepen your understanding of women’s history, gender studies, and feminist theory with WGS.225J Science of Race, Sex, and Gender on the role of science and medicine in the origins and evolution of concepts of race, sex, and gender from the 17th century to the present, or WGS.S10 History of Women in Science and Engineering, which outlines how contributions by women played a larger role in the advancement of human knowledge and technological achievement.
Explore women’s role in science, health, and medicine with WGS.S10 Black Feminist Health Science Studies, which includes contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations and feminist technoscience studies, or WGS.160J Science Activism: Gender, Race, and Power on scientific responsibility, social justice, and the importance of engaged citizenry in the field of science.
Discover women’s contributions in media and fine arts with WGS.111 Gender & Media: Collaborations in Feminism and Technology that tackles race, class, gender, and sexual identity in new media and the transformative power of digital technologies in representation, and WGS.640 Screen Women: Body Narratives in Popular American Film on the repercussions of embodiment and representations of women within larger cultural narratives.
Finally, explore workshops RES.2-006 Girls Who Build Cameras and RES.2-005 Girls Who Build: Make Your Own Wearables Workshop, which were created as part of MIT OpenCourseWare’s Highlights for High School, a previous MIT initiative that provided teaching and learning materials to high school teachers and students. |
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Thank you to everyone who donated to OpenCourseWare during this year’s MIT 24-Hour Challenge! You and your contribution make it possible for us to share the latest educational resources from MIT with learners and educators worldwide, freely and openly. Thank you for your generosity!
Missed the Challenge, but still want to support OCW?
Support OCW here. |
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| Newsletter edited by Shira Segal with contributions from Peter Chipman, production assistance from Stephanie Hodges, and resource development by Duyen Nguyen and Stephen Nelson. |
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| We want to hear from you! How can MIT OpenCourseWare help you in your educational endeavors? Write to us at ocw@mit.edu with questions or suggestions. |
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| More free resources from MIT Open Learning are available at: |
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