A panoply of language offerings and courses on OCW

In John's September Newsletter

A Panoply of Language Offerings at MIT and on OCW

Studying Japanese culture goes hand in hand with studying the Japanese language. (Image courtesy of Jennifer Pack on Flickr. License CC BY-NC.)

There’s more to learning a language than just working your way through a textbook, say these MIT instructors.

By Peter Chipman, OCW Digital Publication Specialist and OCW Educator Assistant

Aside from English, MIT offers courses in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. (MIT students wishing to study a language not on this list, such as Arabic, Irish, Swahili, or Tibetan, can do so by cross-registering for courses at Harvard or Wellesley.) Many of MIT’s language course offerings are represented on OpenCourseWare, and several of their OCW course sites include Instructor Insights either in text or video form. Here are five OCW offerings that feature Instructor Insights on approaches to teaching languages:

> Read the complete article

21M.380 Music and Technology: Recording Techniques and Audio Production (Updated Course) This course is an introduction to music recording and audio production from both a practical and a theoretical perspective. Learn about the physical nature and human perception of sound, how it is transformed to and from electrical signals by means of microphones and loudspeakers, and how it can be creatively modeled through mixing consoles, signal processors, and digital audio workstations. The course covers making informed choices about microphone selection and positioning, and various editing, mixing, and mastering techniques.

MAS.S62 Cryptocurrency Engineering and Design (New Course) Bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies have gained attention over the years as the systems continue to evolve. This course looks at the design of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and how they function in practice, focusing on cryptography, game theory, and network architecture.

An OCW Story

"It has been 30 years since I studied Computer Science in college and graduate school at Harvard and Brown. After all these years working in Information Technology in the business world OCW has allowed me to go back to school for free and have access to MIT's level of teaching.

I am so impressed by the commitment of the professors in the algorithms area to putting their valuable teaching online for free on OCW.

I have completed 6.042 and 6.006 and am just starting 6.046. These classes are great because they have video of lectures and breakout recitations with notes. They have assignments and exams with answers. 6.042 had a free online textbook.

I have always felt that the algorithms and data structures classes from college have given me an edge in my IT career and now after all of this time OCW is refreshing my CS theory knowledge and that can only help my career in the years to come. Plus, I really just enjoy the classes.

-Bobby, OCW Fan

> Share your OCW story with us

6.004 Computation Structures (Updated Course) This course introduces architecture of digital systems, emphasizing structural principles common to a wide range of technologies. It covers the topics including multilevel implementation strategies, definition of new primitives (e.g., gates, instructions, procedures, processes) and their mechanization using lower-level elements. It also includes analysis of potential concurrency, precedence constraints and performance measures, pipelined and multidimensional systems, instruction set design issues and architectural support for contemporary software structures.

Shake Up Your Teaching with OCW Instructor Insights

Photo courtesy of ladylong on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC

When you’re faced with an unexpected teaching challenge, OpenCourseWare’s Instructor Insights can help.

By Peter Chipman, OCW Digital Publication Specialist and OCW Educator Assistant

Imagine: You’re an experienced math instructor at a respected university, and you’ve just heard some alarming news. The university’s president has announced a new initiative to improve students’ communication skills by incorporating writing assignments into the curricula of introductory-level courses in all departments. One of your standby courses, Intro to Non-Euclidean Multidimensional Geometry, falls under the new policy.

What are you to do?

> Read the complete article

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