| Your OpenCourseWare Newsletter | June 2024 |
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| Happy Summer and Happy Learning! |
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| The MIT OpenCourseWare collaborations program works closely with community college faculty who use open educational resources from MIT OpenCourseWare. This insight on the benefits of open education comes from John Francis at the College of the Canyons. |
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| As we kick off summer at MIT OpenCourseWare, Season 5 of Chalk Radio podcast continues, along with our celebration of MIT faculty who are committed to caring. We’re also excited to launch the “Voices from the Field” series on our Open Matters blog in order to feature some of the work and efforts of MIT OpenCourseWare’s collaborations program. Happy summer and happy learning! You can discover your next learning journey on our website or YouTube channel, and feel free to share your own video story of MIT OpenCourseWare’s impact on your life here. |
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| Voices from the Field: Collaborating to Support Community College Faculty |
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| Shira Segal (MIT OpenCourseWare), Lisa Young (Maricopa Community Colleges), James Glapa-Grossklag (College of the Canyons), and Sarah Hansen (MIT OpenCourseWare) at OEGlobal 2023 conference. (Photo courtesy of Brett Paci). |
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What can the Massachusetts Institute of Technology learn from faculty at other institutions who use open educational resources (OER) from MIT OpenCourseWare in their teaching? How do implementers of open education at community colleges meet the unique needs of their curriculum and students? What can we learn about open practices by collaborating across sectors of higher education, and how might these collaborations shape what we do in open education?
To begin to answer these questions, MIT OpenCourseWare launched a collaboration with Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona and College of the Canyons in California to support and learn from community college faculty. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this collaboration has yielded a rich set of reflections and observations about the range and use of MIT OpenCourseWare materials, the nature of open education practices, and the value of collaboration itself across institutions. Read more in this Open Matters article. |
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| In episode 6 of Chalk Radio, Prof. Hal Abelson reflects on his long career in computer science and on how computers can be used to augment human potential. (Image by MIT OpenCourseWare). |
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| Season 5 of Chalk Radio continues |
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| If you liked the first four episodes of season 5 of Chalk Radio, MIT OpenCourseWare’s podcast about inspired teaching, be sure to check out the most recent installments! Among the episodes that have premiered in the past month are conversations with veteran computer scientist Prof. Hal Abelson about the purposes technology ought to serve (along with information about OCW’s own origin stories); with MIT Open Learning’s own Dean Christopher Capozzola who provides a historian’s perspective on our present technological moment; and with Dr. Ari Epstein on how he teaches without teaching. As a bonus, Chalk Radio is also republishing “Everything Here Is Sacred,” a special podcast episode created as a collaborative project by Dr. Epstein’s students in the Terrascope first-year learning community. In that episode, the Terrascope team travels to the Navajo Nation to learn firsthand about the Diné people’s traditional connection to the land. |
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| New Courses and Resources |
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| Are they gooses? Or geese? By the age of 4 or 5, you probably know. (Photo courtesy of Ruth Hartnup on Flickr. License: CC BY). |
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24.904 Language Acquisition
Linguists who study language acquisition seek to understand how humans learn to speak and understand a language—a highly complex task that native speakers routinely and seemingly effortlessly accomplish in the first few years of life without explicit instruction. (By contrast, as many of us have found, learning a second language later in life is slow and difficult, even with explicit instruction, and often leaves us far short of native-level fluency.) This course, focusing on first language acquisition, covers topics in core areas of linguistic knowledge, including the lexicon (i.e., the words), sentence structure, meaning composition, and pragmatics, from a developmental perspective.
21G.320 Introduction to French Literature
Students in this course–a study of major French literary genres and an introduction to methods of literary analysis—served on the jury for the Goncourt Prize USA. “Le Goncourt” is the most prestigious literary prize in France. In the course, students studied and ranked books on the Goncourt shortlist, electing a representative to present their selection at a symposium in New York and help choose the winner along with students from other American universities. As part of this course’s materials, you can access lists of assigned readings and films, writing assignments with French-language prompts, and “Ressources Additionnelles pour prolonger le cours” that includes further readings and films. |
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11.308J Ecological Urbanism
This page links to Prof. Anne Whiston Spirn’s own website for her course on ecological urbanism, a discipline that weds the theory and practice of city design and planning with the insights of ecology. Ecological urbanism is critical to the future of the city: it provides a framework for addressing challenges such as climate change, rising sea level, declining oil reserves, rising energy demands, and environmental and social injustice, while fulfilling human needs for health, safety, welfare, meaning, and delight. At Prof. Spirn’s website, users can access course materials including the syllabus, reading list, assignments, and samples of student work.
11.309J Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry
This page links to another of Prof. Anne Whiston Spirn’s beautifully designed course websites. This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, as a research method, and as a medium of inquiry and of expressing ideas. The extensive reading list for the course is designed to serve as the basis for discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, narrative, and how photography can inform research, design, and planning, among other issues. Also included are samples of individual photographs and photo essays created by students in thirteen different iterations of the course, spanning the years from 2006 to 2024. |
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| Further MIT OpenCourseWare Materials |
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| Clockwise from top left: Professors Cynthia Breazeal, Roberto Fernandez, Rohit Karnik, Emery Neal Brown, Wanda Orlikowski, Kristala Prather, Iain Stewart, and Ariel White are among the new cohort of Committed to Caring honorees. (Photos courtesy of the honorees). |
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| Take Online Courses with the MIT Faculty Honored as "Committed to Caring" for 2023-25 |
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| We’re pleased to see a lot of familiar names on the list of faculty who have received MIT’s Committed to Caring award for 2023–2025. This year’s cohort of honorees, selected in recognition of their exceptional contributions as mentors to graduate students, includes eight professors who have shared their course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare; you can find their names, with links to their course materials, in this Medium article from MIT Open Learning. |
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| Free Knowledge Needs Your Support by June 30 |
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Free and open access to knowledge changes lives. We know this because we hear every day from MIT OpenCourseWare learners like you about the impact of MIT’s freely-shared educational resources.
If you’re able, would you please consider a donation to OCW before our fundraising deadline on June 30? As little as $10 can make a huge difference in the lives of your fellow learners, like Nathan. |
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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 ocw@mit.edu with questions or suggestions. |
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| More free resources from MIT Open Learning are available at: |
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![Quote from John Francis that reads, “[MIT OpenCourseWare] opens me up to accessing content that's been cultivated by other people. So I feel like I have this unlimited world of data that I can pull in and curate and create my own classes, create my own curriculum– create my own style of how I want to teach and what I want to highlight.”](https://mcusercontent.com/ad81d725159c1f322a0c54837/images/6bc296b7-3383-1221-7a93-792f61f96157.png)
