Building on the Past and Looking to the Future

MIT AeroAstro Student Projects (Photo: Jake Belcher).

The end of the calendar year is a time of reflection and appreciation for us at MIT OpenCourseWare. As always, we are impressed and excited by the learners around the world that make use of our free, open educational materials, and we remain dedicated to the learning journeys that MIT faculty enable for others when they publish their course materials on our website and YouTube channel.

This is also a time of imagination and vision-making for our collective future. What do we want to create and build together, and how can we anticipate the solutions needed not just for tomorrow and the coming year but for the next decade and those that follow?

With the belief that open learning is a key and foundation to humankind’s progress and peace, we will continue to provide high-quality educational materials that highlight our interconnectedness and power to change the world through shared knowledge.

We are wishing you a restful and peaceful holiday season, in the many ways that you may celebrate. Keep learning with and alongside us as we continue to "open learning" together.

Expanding our auto-dub translation efforts with Google Aloud

Professor Patrick H. Winston and written excerpts from his How to Speak talk. (Image by Brett Paci. Photo by Azeddine Tahiri. Used with permission.)

To increase the accessibility of our open educational materials for non-English speaking learners, MIT OpenCourseWare has been pilot testing a new auto-dub translation feature for some of our video lectures on YouTube with Google Aloud, beginning with the video lectures in the courses 11.165J Urban Energy Systems and Policy and 18.S190 Introduction to Metric Spaces, as well as to Gil Strang’s final 18.06 Linear Algebra lecture. (Strang’s lecture has the added benefit of additional closed caption language options in Arabic, Chinese, and French!)

We have now also added this auto-dub translation feature to the video lectures in the course IDS.333 Risk and Decision Analysis and to Prof. Patrick Winston’s How to Speak lecture. The latter is a popular lecture that was an MIT tradition for over 40 years and which has been viewed over 17 million times on YouTube! To choose another language, simply press play, and then look for the additional audio track options by clicking the settings “gear” icon in the lower right-hand corner of the video player.

(Photo courtesy of Mary Harrsch on Flickr. License: CC BY.)

21H.154 Inventing the Samurai

The samurai are familiar figures outside Japan largely because of their depiction in films such as Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai. But they were also a real-life warrior class that exerted influence in their country for many centuries. This course, taught in English for students who have studied some Japanese, explores the historical origins of the samurai, as well as their reinvention throughout Japan’s history, with a special focus on the pre-modern era. Among the materials available on the course site for this course are an extensive reading list and a complete set of lecture slides.

WGS.225J Science of Race, Sex, and Gender

The fields of science and medicine have been intimately involved in the development and evolution of concepts of race, sex, and gender from the 17th century to the present. This undergraduate-level course, jointly taught through MIT’s program in Women’s and Gender Studies and the program on Science, Technology, and Society, focuses on analyzing biological, medical, and anthropological studies to learn how they intersect with historical, social, political, and cultural ideas about racial, sexual, and gender differences. To explore this topic, check out the course’s reading list which also references four suggested films on race, sex, and gender.

RES.1-001 Project Evaluation: Essays and Case Studies

Carl D. Martland, who taught 1.011 Project Evaluation for many years in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has taken the materials he originally prepared for that class between 1997 and 2010 and shaped them into a free online textbook. This two-volume open textbook will be of particular interest to engineers, planners, and managers who design, build, and operate infrastructure systems, as well as to students in planning or engineering who are interested in transportation, water resources, energy, city planning, or real estate development. The textbook is presented here along with an associated syllabus and a series of problem sets.

6.S062 Generative Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education

Recent breakthroughs in machine learning enable anyone to create computer-generated text, music, videos, and programs from prompts in everyday language without the need to code. This development raises pressing questions about the implications of generative AI systems for educational curricula and teaching methods across a broad range of subjects. How should educators respond to AI technology and the occasionally overstated claims made for it? The materials in this course serve as an introduction to the foundations of generative AI and explore how an analytical frame of mind can help clarify the core issues underlying both the successes and failures of these systems.

Marta Belcher, General Counsel of the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, in conversation with Christopher Capozzola, senior associate dean for MIT Open Learning speak during the Fireside Chat: The Future of Decentralized Web. (Photo courtesy of MIT Open Learning)

Our forward-looking work at MIT OpenCourseWare is part of a broad, global community working to preserve and share humanity’s knowledge. At a recent MIT Open Learning salon with the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, titled “Distributing Knowledge with Decentralized Technology,” experts outlined some of the ways that decentralized web technologies support access and distribution of knowledge, including MIT OpenCourseWare’s Mirror Site Program.
Did you know that MIT OpenCourseWare gives educational organizations with limited internet access free hard drives containing our website's content? Read more in this Medium article on the day’s events and speakers, and check out all of the day's recordings on YouTube.

Support MIT OpenCourseWare as part of our end-of-year fundraiser! If you’re able, please help us “open learning” and share education with others. Make your donation today to empower learners everywhere, all year round. Thank you for your support!