| Your OpenCourseWare Newsletter | October 2023 |
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| What It Means to Share with the World |
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| Photo of quantum dots courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-SA |
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| In 2001, MIT OpenCourseWare led the charge to freely share educational materials online with the world. Having just finished celebrating International Open Access Week, we want to thank the MIT faculty who, like Nobel Prize winner Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolf Professor of Chemistry at MIT, have generously published their courses on MIT OpenCourseWare for others to use, reuse, and edit without any login or registration.
We are also looking for new ways to make our course materials even more accessible and to ensure their continued availability in the future. To this end, we are one of many recipients to receive support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, and we are working to examine why and how a decentralized web will be critical to ensuring that all educational resources remain reliable and accessible for learners. Additionally, we are pilot testing a new auto-dub translation feature for some of our video lectures in a handful of courses.
Here at MIT OpenCourseWare, we celebrate the power of open education to transform lives, and we believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn and to have access to high-quality educational materials wherever they are. Join us in this life-long educational journey by reading about new course publications and more in this newsletter, and by visiting the OpenCourseWare website and OpenCourseWare YouTube channel today! |
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| Credit: Photo by Len Rubenstein |
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It’s never much of a surprise when a new crop of Nobel Prize winners is announced and one or more of them are affiliated with MIT—a quick scan of MIT News stories from the past decade turns up articles about more than a dozen MIT researchers or alumni winning the Nobel in one field or another. But it’s especially pleasurable for us when the winner in question is an MIT faculty member who has shared their course materials with the world on MIT OpenCourseWare.
So we’re delighted that one of this year’s winners is Professor Moungi Bawendi, whose collaboration with OpenCourseWare goes back nearly twenty years. Our first two versions of his course 5.60 Thermodynamics & Kinetics have since been archived, but the third version, which Prof. Bawendi and his colleague Prof. Keith Nelson published in 2008, is still available on our site and has been viewed over a million and a half times. Many thanks to Prof. Bawendi for his enduring contribution to open education, and hearty congratulations for his award! |
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MIT OpenCourseWare and MIT Open Learning are dedicated to the transformation of teaching and learning through the innovative use of digital technologies. Our forward-looking work is part of a broad, global community working to preserve and share humanity’s knowledge. We are among several recipients to receive generous, multi-year support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web in order to find ways to use decentralized technologies to promote positive social change, knowledge distribution, and cultural preservation.
To discuss what a decentralized web may look like and the role of higher education institutions in safeguarding materials, we recently held an MIT Open Learning salon titled “Distributing Knowledge with Decentralized Technology.” Learn more about the speakers and topics, and watch the recording of the virtual salon here. |
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| News in MIT OpenCourseWare |
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| Introducing Google Aloud auto-dub Translations for Select OpenCourseWare Videos |
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| Credit: Image courtesy of 18.S190 Introduction to Metric Spaces. |
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To increase the accessibility of our open educational materials for non-English speaking learners, MIT OpenCourseWare is 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. In this beta experiment, users can select audio translations in Spanish (US version) and Portuguese (Brazil version). Simply press play, and then look for the additional audio track options in the settings gear in the lower right hand corner of the video box; this can be accessed both in the embedded video lectures on the MIT OpenCourseWare website and also on our YouTube channel for those select videos.
In addition to the above, select courses, we’ve also added this audio dub feature to Gil Strang’s Final 18.06 Linear Algebra Lecture, and added additional closed caption language options in Arabic, Chinese, and French! Stay tuned for further auto-dubbed translations in the future as we continue testing the technology in order to make our content more accessible for a wide audience. |
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| New Courses and Resources |
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| Credit: Seattle's "Chaotic Noise Marching Corps" in Somerville, MA during a previous Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands event, courtesy of Peter Lee. License: CC BY-NC 2.0 |
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| Humanities and Social Sciences |
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| 21A.505J The Anthropology of Sound: How do we experience the realm of sound? How do our perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds? This course examines how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, as well as how the technologies of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording have been developed and have spread across the globe. One major concern of the course is the ways in which the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts; it also addresses questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing. Be sure to check out the lecture slides here; the anthology of audio projects created by students in the class is also worth a listen! |
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| Science, Math, Technology, and Engineering |
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3.020 Thermodynamics of Materials: This course introduces the competition between energetics and disorder that underpins materials thermodynamics. In thirty lecture videos and associated lecture notes and other materials, Prof. Rafael Jaramillo presents classical thermodynamic concepts in the context of phase equilibria including phase transformations, phase diagrams, and chemical reactions. The course also covers computerized thermodynamics and provides an introduction to statistical thermodynamics. As a bonus, educators may be interested to read Prof. Jaramillo’s written insights on team teaching, open-book exams, and why it is important “to question our motivations, to strive to know ourselves, and to be clear-eyed in assessing our impacts on others.”
18.S096 Matrix Calculus for Machine Learning and Beyond: The foundational calculus courses at MIT, such as 18.01 Single Variable Calculus and 18.02 Multivariable Calculus cover univariate and vector calculus, respectively. Modern applications such as machine learning and large-scale optimization require students to take the next big step, applying calculus to matrices and arbitrary vector spaces. Watching the sixteen lecture videos from this short eight-lecture course, you can learn techniques that allow you to think of a matrix holistically (not just as an array of scalars), as well as how to compute derivatives of matrix factorizations. Learn how differentiation formulas must be reimagined in large-scale computing in these lecture notes and readings. |
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RES.7-009 7.InT Inclusive Teaching: In this resource, you can explore why inclusive teaching is relevant and important by articulating the multiple intersecting identities you hold, and reflecting on how your identities influence your experiences with education. The Inclusive Teaching Module, hosted on MIT’s Open Learning Library, offers both a standalone online course for those looking to learn more about inclusive teaching and also as a set of tools that educators can use to present workshops on the topic at their own institutions. The facilitation guide includes videos, questionnaires, and reflection exercises that foster belonging, growth, accessibility, and personal connections.
6.5060 Algorithm Engineering: This research-oriented course on algorithm engineering covers the theory and practice of algorithms and data structures, including models of computation, algorithm design and analysis, and performance engineering of algorithm implementations. By generously sharing their detailed course website, Professors Charles Leiserson and Julian Shun allow OpenCourseWare users to access the calendar of lecture topics, with links to slide decks as well as to the required and optional readings (many of them openly accessible in full). Curious to learn more about stencil computations, functional trees, or graph neural networks? This course is for you.
6.5830 Database Systems: Professors Samuel Madden and Tim Kraska share a wide range of materials on the website they built for this course from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which uses primary readings from the database community as an introduction to the foundations of database systems, including the relational algebra and data model, schema normalization, query optimization, and transactions, among other topics. The lab assignments involve using Go, but no prior experience in that programming language is required; the first lab provides a basic Go tutorial. Lecture slides and notes are included. |
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| Credit: Image courtesy of MIT 7.InT Inclusive Teaching Module. |
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| What does the research tell us about the impacts of inclusive teaching principles such as respect, empathy, autonomy, self-efficacy, and other practices that foster belonging, growth, accessibility, and personal connections in the classroom? In this recent Medium article by MIT Open Learning, you can read more about Darcy Gordon’s creation of the Inclusive Teaching Module, a resource that is available as a new resource on the OpenCourseWare site.
Gordon, a Digital Learning Lab scientist in MIT Open Learning and an instructor of blended and online learning in the MIT Department of Biology, first developed the Inclusive Teaching Module as a postdoc in 2019, in collaboration with a colleague, and has been continually updating it ever since. You can directly access the module in the MIT Open Learning Library for free, either as a guest or by enrolling. Educators and non-educators alike can make use of these principles in their work and in everyday personal interactions. |
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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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