Thankful for thoughts from OCW learners

4.401 Environmental Technologies in Buildings (New Course) This course focuses on the thermal, luminous, and acoustic behavior of buildings, examining the basic scientific principles underlying these phenomena and introducing students to technologies and analysis techniques for designing comfortable indoor environments. Students are challenged to apply these techniques and explore the role light, energy, and sound can play in shaping architecture.

"I have used OCW both for myself and for my kids.
Recently I was tasked with analyzing several data sets each with hundreds of millions of records. They were too big for Excel and Access. Over a weekend I watched several of the Power BI videos and was then able to do in 5 hours what I'd been struggling with for the prior week.
So grateful that OCW and edX were there.
I'm 57 and competing in a world that favors the young. I need to continually build my skills and don't have the time or money to take a traditional class.
-Nancy, Independent Learner, USA

RES.8-007 Cosmic Origin of the Chemical Elements (New Resource) Everything around us is made from different chemical elements: carbon, silicon, iron, and all the other elements from the Periodic Table. The lighter elements were mostly produced in the Big Bang, but the rest were (and are) formed within stars and in the explosions of supernovae. In this series of short lecture videos, created to accompany her book Searching for the Oldest Stars: Ancient Relics from the Early Universe (Princeton University Press, 2019), Professor Anna Frebel reveals the secrets of stardust and explains the cosmic origin of the elements.

6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems (Updated Course) 6.172 is an 18-unit class that provides a hands-on, project-based introduction to building scalable and high-performance software systems. Topics include performance analysis, algorithmic techniques for high performance, instruction-level optimizations, caching optimizations, parallel programming, and building scalable systems. The course programming language is C.