| Your OpenCourseWare Newsletter | December 2024 |
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| “Open Is in Our DNA”: Supporting the Open Education Global Community |
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| Image: Curt Newton, MIT OpenCourseWare’s publication director, speaks at the 2024 OEGlobal conference in Brisbane, Australia, where he announced the hosts of the 2026 conference. Photo: Isla Haddow-Flood, Open Education Global. |
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MIT OpenCourseWare is humbled and excited to announce that we’ll be welcoming the open education community to Cambridge, Mass., in the fall of 2026 for the Open Education Global conference. We will be co-hosts with the Massachusetts Open Educational Resources (OER) Advisory Council and OEGlobal, a nonprofit that supports the development and use of open education around the world. The conference will mark MIT OpenCourseWare’s 25th anniversary and the 18th anniversary of OEGlobal.
The OEGlobal 2026 conference will be focused on inventing a more open and equitable future together. As MIT President Sally Kornbluth states, “Open is in our DNA … We champion OpenCourseWare, open access, and open science, all crucial to our mission. Our doors are open too, so come join us.” Hear her voice, amongst others, in this announcement video: |
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| Learn more in this Medium article by MIT Open Learning and continue your own learning journey with MIT OpenCourseWare on our website and YouTube channel. We can’t wait to welcome you! |
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| Special Season of Chalk Radio: Learning with Open Learners Around the World |
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| Image: Katherine Ouellette. |
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| The Open Learners podcast continues! In this special season of Chalk Radio, we’ve been listening to the stories of independent learners around the world whose discovery of educational resources from MIT Open Learning has transformed their lives. The latest episode features an interview between hosts Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Pilgreen and guest Jerry Vance Anguzu, an open learner from Uganda. Jerry found that the constraints imposed by the Covid lockdown actually offered an open door to new skills and new opportunities. It all started, he tells us, with free course materials from MIT OpenCourseWare—which is why he considers himself a self-appointed “OCW ambassador.” Don’t miss his inspiring story! |
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| MIT OpenCourseWare Sparks the Joy of Deep Understanding |
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| Photo: Dan Svoboda/Fermilab |
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| As an undergraduate studying physics at Marmara University in Turkey, Doğa Kürkçüoğlu turned to MIT OpenCourseWare to supplement what he was learning. “MIT professors showed me how to look at a concept from different angles that I hadn’t before, and that helped me internalize information,” he states. What’s more, Kürkçüoğlu says he felt ready to dive into his PhD and doctoral research at Georgia Tech, thanks to the many MIT OpenCourseWare lectures, courses, and study guides. Now a staff scientist at Fermilab, Kürkçüoğlu shares his inspiring story about how “learning should be fun” in this MIT News article. Thank you, Kürkçüoğlu! |
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| New Courses and Resources |
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| The Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York City. The monument depicts women’s suffrage pioneers Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (Image courtesy of Corey Seeman on Flickr. License CC BY-NC-SA.) |
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2.43 Advanced Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics, the study of how heat relates to other forms of energy, is crucial to the question of how civilization can persist on a planet that is rapidly being warmed by the very technologies that sustain that civilization. This graduate-level course for students with prior experience in general thermodynamics offers a self-contained review of general thermodynamics concepts, multicomponent equilibrium properties, chemical equilibrium, electrochemical potentials, and chemical kinetics. The course provides an introduction to the methods of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and offers a unified understanding of phase equilibria, transport, and nonequilibrium phenomena that may be useful for future energy and climate engineering technologies.
7.003 Applied Molecular Biology Lab
Students in this undergraduate experimental biology course worked in MIT’s teaching laboratory practicing techniques in molecular biology, genetics, and cell biology and studying the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast). The course was designed not only to teach students how to accurately and safely perform these techniques, but also to understand how and why they work and what scientific questions they can address, with the goal that students would be able to design and perform their own experiments by the end of the semester. The extensive online materials include the lab manual, in-lab questions, safety guidelines, problem sets, and more.
WGS.110J Sexual and Gender Identities in the Modern United States
This undergraduate course offers an introduction to the history of gender, sex, and sexuality in the modern United States, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. It begins with an overview of historical approaches to the field, emphasizing the changing nature of sexual and gender identities over time. The remainder of the course flows chronologically, tracing the expanding and contracting nature of attempts to control, construct, and contain sexual and gender identities—and the efforts of those who worked to resist, reject, and reimagine the meanings and lived experiences of sex, sexuality, and gender. |
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RES.12-001 Topics in Fluid Dynamics
This resource presents three essays developed from the author’s experience teaching the graduate-level course 12.800 Fluid Dynamics of the Atmosphere and Ocean as part of MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Joint Program in Oceanography. The essays, “Lagrangian and Eulerian Representations of Fluid Flow,” “Dimensional Analysis of Models and Data Sets: Similarity Solutions and Scaling Analysis,” and “A Coriolis Tutorial,” are designed to help students master the concepts and mathematical tools that underpin classical and geophysical fluid dynamics. The essays treat these topics in considerably greater depth than a comprehensive fluids textbook can afford, and they are accompanied by data files to encourage application and experimentation. |
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18.226 Probabilistic Methods in Combinatorics
A few months ago, MIT OpenCourseWare published newly updated materials from the course 18.226 Probabilistic Methods in Combinatorics, a graduate-level introduction to a fundamental and powerful technique in combinatorics and theoretical computer science. The course site has now been enriched and expanded by the addition of a set of eleven recently-produced lecture videos that cover many of the key topics of the course. These videos, specially recorded by Prof. Yufei Zhao using lightboard technology, supplement the full lecture notes and other course materials and offer clear, visually-engaging explanations of selected aspects of probabilistic combinatorics. |
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| Further MIT OpenCourseWare Materials |
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| Fuel Your Passions for Storytelling and Food |
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| Image courtesy of Jeremy Keith on Flickr. License: CC BY. |
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| Linear algebra and introductory computer science have always been two of the most popular subjects on MIT OpenCourseWare, but our offerings extend far beyond those perennial favorites. Two recent posts from MIT Open Learning on Medium celebrate the diversity of courses available on MIT OpenCourseWare and elsewhere at MIT Open Learning. The first, “Fuel Your Passion for Storytelling with 16 Free Online Courses from MIT,” highlights courses on writing-related topics, including fiction writing, playwriting, essays, autobiography, poetry, sportswriting, technical writing, and popular science communication. The second, “Ten Free MIT Courses and Lectures for Food Lovers,” lists an array of courses that explore food from various perspectives, including courses on ethnic cooking, cookbooks, and the political, cultural, environmental, and historic implications of what we eat—as well as one quirky nuclear science lecture focusing on the parallels between the properties of metals in nuclear reactors and the properties of different cheeses. Bon appétit! |
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| Support Free and Open Knowledge by Dec. 31st |
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| Image by MIT Open Learning. |
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This past year, over 9 million people learned for free with MIT OpenCourseWare. Learners like Jerry from Uganda were able to transform their education and livelihood with the knowledge gained from MIT’s course materials.
Thanks to the support of alumni, friends, and fellow learners like you, we’ve ensured that OCW remains a vibrant reflection of MIT’s evolving curriculum. If you’re in a position to give, please consider making a donation to OCW today to help us share more life-changing knowledge in 2025 and beyond. |
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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 Yvonne Ng. |
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| We want to hear from you! How can MIT OpenCourseWare help you in your educational endeavors? Write to us at [email protected] with questions or suggestions. |
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| More free resources from MIT Open Learning are available at: |
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