In John's May Newsletter

It's a match! Give today, double your impact

Double the impact, double the love. Give now.

The first $10,000 raised in our 20th anniversary campaign is being matched, which means your gift today will go twice as far in helping us unleash our vision and potential for the next generation of OpenCourseWare. A gift of any size can help us get there.

Thank you for helping us reach our goal and making a more ambitious OCW possible!

Chalk Radio: In Climate Conversations, Empathy is Everything with Brandon Leshchinskiy

A photo of a tree with overlay text that reads "In bringing up climate change, you have to be aware you might be threatening the way someone sees themselves. -Brandon Leshchinskiy"

In this episode, MIT graduate researcher Brandon Leshchinskiy shares how he’s preparing the next generation of climate educators to tackle one of humanity’s most pressing challenges.

Our guest is Brandon Leshchinskiy, a graduate student in Technology and Policy at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. He has crafted an engaging interactive presentation called Climate 101 that creatively employs materials from various sources to examine climate change from scientific, economic, and civic perspectives.

In this episode, Leshchinskiy discusses why young people make effective climate ambassadors, how climate presentations can be made more powerful by customizing them with specific details that are relevant to people’s own communities, what we can learn from society’s response to the challenges of Covid-19, and how to avoid developing “doom fatigue” from exposure to negative news stories.

> Read the complete article

Check out the latest on our YouTube page, which recently surpassed 3 MILLION subscribers!

"It's an older code sir, but it checks out." Check out this classic lecture from legendary MIT math professor Gil Strang. #Math #EigenValues #EigenVectors #MayThe4thBeWithYou

We are thrilled to present course 5.310 Laboratory Chemistry! Join Dr. John Dolhun and Dr. Sarah Hewett as they introduce experimental chemistry for non-chemistry majors. 🧪 #Chemistry

Join us for a livestream event on Wednesday, June 9 from 1-2PM EDT.

In this live discussion, we’ll talk about some of OCW’s efforts to raise awareness and support a terrific community of learners around the world-- like you! We’d love to hear your ideas about how we can improve our outreach, too.

Register for the event here.

A screen-grab of the landing page. Reads: "Climate Science, Risk & Solutions: Climate Knowledge for Everyone."

MIT's Climate Primer website summarizes the most important lines of evidence for human-caused climate change. (Image courtesy of Kerry Emanuel. CC BY-NC-SA).

RES.ENV-005 Climate Science, Risk & Solutions: A Climate Primer

The goal of the Climate Primer website is to summarize the most important lines of evidence for human-caused climate change. It confronts the stickier questions about uncertainty in our projections, engages in a discussion of risk and risk management, and concludes by presenting different options for taking action. We hope that the facts prepare you for more effective conversations with your community about values, trade-offs, politics, and actions.

Dr. Philip Pearce is pictured with students demonstrating a tuned mass damper, a device consisting of two coupled oscillators that is the course’s unofficial mascot. They stand in front of a chalkboard with mathematical equations.

Dr. Philip Pearce (second from left) demonstrates a tuned mass damper, a device consisting of two coupled oscillators that is the course’s unofficial mascot. (Photo by Sarah Hansen, MIT OpenCourseWare.)

18.031 System Functions and the Laplace Transform

This half-semester course studies basic continuous control theory as well as representation of functions in the complex frequency domain. It covers generalized functions, unit impulse response, and convolution. Also covered are the Laplace transform, system (or transfer) functions, and the pole diagram.

Examples from mechanical and electrical engineering are provided. Go to OCW's Open Learning Library site for 18.031: System Functions and the Laplace Transform. The site is free to use, just like all OCW sites. You have the option to sign up and enroll in the course if you want to track your progress, or you can view and use all the materials without enrolling.

A student with short brown hair is shown looking into a microscope, as are other students in the background.

This course focuses on competency-based education in schools.(Image courtesy of MIT OpenCourseWare).

RES.CMS-502 Competency-Based Education: The Why, What, and How

This course will help you develop an understanding of the characteristic elements of competency-based education (CBE) and how schools are implementing it. You will learn about CBE's potential for closing opportunity gaps, as well as challenges and concerns. You will get a closer look at what the implementation of CBE looks and feels like for students, teachers, administrators, families, and community members. You will consider the kinds of system-wide shifts necessary to support this innovation in education.

By looking at research and hearing from experts and voices in schools, you will leave the course equipped to start or continue conversations about whether CBE is a good fit in your context.

This course is part of the Open Learning Library, which is free to use. You have the option to sign up and enroll in the course if you want to track your progress, or you can view and use all the materials without enrolling.

A breast cancer tumor and the surrounding (non-cancerous) tissue, known as the microenvironment. The tumor cells are shown in blue-green, along with macrophages in red, and collagen fibers in bright green. (By Joseph Szulczewski, David Inman, Kevin Eliceiri, and Patricia Keely. National Cancer Institute \ Carbone Cancer Center at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Public domain.)

7.342 The Seeds and the Soil: Roles of Tumor Heterogeneity and the Tumor Microenvironment in Cancer Metastasis

Metastatic disease is responsible for the vast majority of deaths associated with cancer, yet our understanding of how metastases arise is still developing. In this course, we will introduce various concepts and models that have been proposed to explain how cancer cells disseminate from a primary tumor to distant anatomical sites. We’ll learn about the critical factors that influence cancer metastasis frontiers through analysis and discussion of relevant primary research articles, with an emphasis on mechanisms of metastasis that can be applied across different cancer types. Students will gain a broad understanding of the field of cancer metastasis, including state-of-the-art techniques that are being used to address pressing questions in the field.

This course is one of many Advanced Undergraduate Seminars offered by the Biology Department at MIT. These seminars are tailored for students with an interest in using primary research literature to discuss and learn about current biological research in a highly interactive setting. Many instructors of the Advanced Undergraduate Seminars are postdoctoral scientists with a strong interest in teaching.

OCW In the News

How MIT Shares Its Course Materials With The World, For Free

Dean Rajagopal was recently interviewed by Forbes about OCW, including sharing pedagogical techniques and future plans.

"Krishna Rajagopal is a professor of theoretical physics at MIT who studies the very first moments of the newborn Universe. Since 2017, he has been MIT’s Dean for Digital Learning, leading MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), a free publication of MIT courses and materials, open to the public around the globe."

> Read the complete article

For free resources for high school teachers and students, check out: