| Your OpenCourseWare Newsletter | November 2023 |
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| Honoring the Luminaries and Practitioners of Open Education |
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| Barker Library reading room, Building 10. Credit: Photo by Christopher Harting/MIT. |
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We always have a lot to celebrate here at MIT OpenCourseWare, from the founding vision that MIT President Charles M. Vest outlined with MIT faculty over twenty years ago—and the support we received from luminaries like Marshall “Mike” Smith at the Hewlett Foundation to enable this vision to materialize—to the countless MIT faculty that continue to generously share their course materials on our MIT OpenCourseWare website and YouTube channel.
Most of all, we celebrate the wide range of independent learners, educators, and students around the world who make use of our free, open educational resources in their own learning, teaching, and exploration.
You can read about our new course publications and more in this newsletter, and we invite you to share your learning story with us or to support MIT OpenCourseWare on Giving Tuesday, November 28, 2023. Thank you for being an invaluable and integral part of our open learning community!
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| Photo credit: Courtesy of the Smith family. |
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| To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, some people see things as they are and say, “Why?” while others dream of things that never were and say, “Why not?” Such are our visionaries, and as the director of education programs at the Hewlett Foundation—which generously supported the early moonshot ambitions of MIT OpenCourseWare beginning in 2001—Mike Smith was a miracle maker and prominent voice that set the foundation for open education at large. Smith took giant strides in education, philanthropy, and government.
Upon Smith’s death this past year, MIT Open Learning Peter B. Kaufman writes, “The generosity of his spirit lives on. We still ask how we can apply the game-changing approach of MIT OpenCourseWare and open educational resources more broadly to opening more knowledge, to battling ignorance, to fighting for all the good progressive goals. And when we do think of these questions from time to time, we can see—as if we needed more evidence—how Mike's legacy will endure forever.” At MIT OpenCourseWare we honor his memory, vision, and support. |
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| Two different line-integral paths around a crack tip. Image credit: Image courtesy of Subra Suresh. |
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| Congratulations to the awardees of the National Medals of Technology and Innovation and the National Medals of Science! The White House recently honored four MIT affiliates with the nation’s highest awards for scientists and innovators, and we are especially excited for Prof. Subra Suresh, former MIT School of Engineering dean, on being honored for his commitment to research and collaboration across borders. You can learn from his free course in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) on MIT OpenCourseWare: 3.35 Fracture and Fatigue. Thank you for sharing your work with the world, Prof. Suresh, and congratulations on this national honor! |
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| New Courses and Resources |
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| Left: Cover of Calculus, by Professor Gilbert Strang. Image courtesy of Gil Strang. Used with permission. License: CC BY-NC-SA. Right: The shielded chamber at MIT where magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals were measured by David Cohen using superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUID). Image credit: Courtesy of Sherrykhan78. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA. |
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RES.18-001 Calculus Online Textbook
We are very excited to present an updated, 3rd edition of Prof. Gilbert Strang’s Calculus, a popular open textbook that was first published in 1991 by Wellesley-Cambridge Press. This updated edition is a useful resource for educators and self-learners alike: it is well organized, covers single variable and multivariable calculus in depth, and is rich with applications. The site also offers MIT OpenCourseWare users an online Instructor’s Manual and a student Study Guide to accompany the textbook, as well as a personal note from Prof. Strang himself: “I hope the book and the exercises and the videos and even Chapter 0 will be useful to you! Best wishes in all your work.” Thank you, Prof. Strang, for this invaluable resource!
24.S95 Linguistics in K–12 Education
The study of linguistics can help develop young people’s understanding of scientific inquiry as well as their understanding of the nature of language. Students who took this seminar at MIT worked with one another and in partnership with K–12 teachers to create pedagogical materials that would encourage middle- and high-school students to be inquisitive about their native languages and about language in general. At this course site, you can access the syllabus, reading list, selected lecture notes, and detailed descriptions of the four assignments.
RES.9-007 MEG Workshop
This resource from the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and sponsored by the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) presents a series of four videos from a workshop on magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology for recording and analyzing patterns of brain activity. MEG can perform feats of mind reading by revealing what a person is seeing, perceiving, attending to, or remembering, thereby helping researchers assess the role of large-scale brain networks in cognitive function. The aim of this workshop is to deconstruct the tools used in MEG, survey their challenges and limitations, and demonstrate data analysis procedures to novice researchers. In addition to the videos, the resource offers links to lecture slide files from the first three lectures.
RES.9-006 AFNI Training Bootcamp
This training course, aimed at people who are already doing functional MRI (fMRI) data analysis, or those who will be in the near future, provides an introduction to the use of the Analysis of Functional NeuroImages (AFNI) software suite. AFNI is an open-source software collection of C, Python, and R programs and shell scripts that assists researchers in analyzing and displaying anatomical and functional MRI (fMRI) data. Through MIT OpenCourseWare, users can access an impressive series of 35 videos of the training sessions, as well as links to .pdfs of the class handouts by topic. |
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RES.11-003 Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit
These resources and programming from the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) at MIT, and which are part of a larger initiative to expand climate justice education at MIT and beyond, can help educators across disciplines to integrate climate justice content into their courses. The Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit presents a range of climate-justice-adaptable teaching modules, a starter guide for teaching climate justice, resources for students, and climate justice data sets that can serve as supportive tools to enhance teaching content and approaches.
As a bonus, MIT OpenCourseWare users can read an Instructor Insights interview in which Chris Rabe, co-creator of the Toolkit, shares his insights on the rationale behind the project. For even more context about this resource, including how two MIT instructors are already putting the Toolkit to its intended use, check out this Medium article. |
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| What have we learned about online learning since the creation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) well over a decade ago? What are effective strategies to implement these courses in today’s world? And how can educators leverage tools and technologies such as generative AI in course development and delivery? These were just some of the many topics discussed at the “2023 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Learning with MOOCs” conference hosted last month at MIT. See the list of keynote speakers and topics here, and read more about the LWMOOCs conference in this Medium article by MIT Open Learning. |
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| Please Support OpenCourseWare this Giving Tuesday, November 28th |
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Giving Tuesday is a global movement to unleash the power of radical generosity to build a better world. We believe that a better world must include access to reliable, high-quality education for all. You and your generosity can help us unleash knowledge to give millions of people globally the resources to better their lives, their communities, and the world. If you’re in the position to donate, please consider a gift to MIT OpenCourseWare this Giving Tuesday, November 28.
You can also support MIT OpenCourseWare in honor of Giving Tuesday by sharing your story with us or by introducing someone in your community to OCW’s wealth of learning resources.
Thank you for helping us build a better world through shared knowledge! |
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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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