| Your OpenCourseWare Newsletter | April 2024 |
|
| Honoring Earth Day with MIT Climate Initiatives |
|
| Image: MIT on Climate Change (Image by MIT) |
|
Addressing climate change is an institutional priority at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The newly launched MIT on Climate Change webpage highlights how MIT is mobilizing to meet this vital and urgent moment with serious solutions, with a new Climate Project initiative that engages the entire MIT community, and myriad ways that MIT is sharing climate knowledge with the world.
Featured efforts include our own MIT OpenCourseWare’s free course materials on environment and sustainability, a collection of 99 courses from across the MIT curriculum about the science, technology, policy, and cultural aspects of these challenges.
You can join our efforts by making use of the many openly available materials at MIT and on MIT OpenCourseWare as we continue to build our collaborative capacity for open learning and community-centered progress on climate change and climate justice. It will, indeed, take all of us. |
|
| Explore the many courses, resources, podcasts, and educator guides available from MIT in this Medium article by MIT Open Learning. Look to MIT OpenCourseWare, MITx, and the MIT Climate Portal to build your foundational understanding of climate change science, learn how renewable and carbon-free energies will propel us toward a cleaner and greener future, and discover how policymaking, diplomacy, academic study, and activism are coming together to tackle the challenges we face. |
|
| New Courses and Resources |
|
| The Crab Nebula, as viewed by the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory(Image courtesy of NASA/CXC/SAO/F. Seward et al.) |
|
WGS.101 Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies
This course explores critical questions about the meaning of gender in society and covers key issues and debates in women’s and gender studies scholarship, both contemporary and historical. Gender scholarship analyzes themes of gendered performance and power in various social spheres, such as law, culture, work, education, medicine, social policy, and the family, and explores how gender, race, class, and sexuality directly intersect in individual lives and institutions. The MIT OpenCourseWare site for WGS.101 is set up with a modular structure to make it easier for self-learners to follow along with the lecture outlines, readings and viewings, and assignments. Bonus material includes an Instructor Insights interview, too.
Introductory Science and Math
This is not a new course but a new OCW Collections page that presents a curated list of links to introductory science and math courses available on MIT OpenCourseWare. Here you’ll find the foundational subjects in calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology that constitute a key part of MIT’s General Institute Requirements (GIR) for all undergraduate students and are typically taken in the first year or two of an MIT education. And since there is more than one way to learn these key concepts,with differing emphasis on theory or on real-world applications, for instance, the collection shares some of the varied approaches offered at MIT. |
|
RES.ENV-005 Climate Science Risk Solutions - A Climate Primer
This page, linking to the MIT Climate Primer website, has been on our site since 2020, but the Climate Primer itself has been substantially updated for 2024. The goal of the Climate Primer is to summarize the most important lines of evidence for human-caused climate change. It confronts the stickier questions about uncertainty in climate projections, engages in a discussion of risk and risk management, and concludes by presenting options for taking action.
Prof. Kerry Emanuel, creator of the Climate Primer and faculty in the Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), hopes that the facts prepare you for more effective conversations with your community about values, trade-offs, politics, and actions. Bonus: this resource carries a CC BY-NC-SA license, and is also award-winning, earning a Webby for web media design when it initially launched. Additionally, MIT Open Learning contributed to its initial production.
RES.HS-001 Chandra Astrophysics Institute
In the Chandra Astrophysics Institute, a year-long program training for high-school students to take part in authentic astronomy projects, institute participants develop valuable research skills and get firsthand experience in how science is done. Students first investigated different astronomical systems during a five-week summer session at MIT and then, mentored by MIT researchers and educators, applied these skills to undertake research projects in x-ray astronomy. The MIT OpenCourseWare site for the program, originally published as part of our “Highlights for High School” initiative, presents thirty-five activities across six different investigations and includes a wide range of lesson plans, assessment ideas, teacher tips, videos, and image galleries for you to explore.
RES.12-001 Topics in Fluid Dynamics
This resource presents three essays developed by Dr. James F. Price based on his experience teaching the graduate-level course 12.800 Fluid Dynamics of the Atmosphere and Ocean. The essays in the collection, “Lagrangian and Eulerian Representations of Fluid Flow” (revised and expanded in 2024), “Dimensional Analysis of Models and Data Sets: Similarity Solutions and Scaling Analysis,” and “A Coriolis Tutorial” (revised and expanded in 2023), treat their respective topics in considerably greater depth than a comprehensive fluids textbook can afford. As an added bonus, they are presented here along with MATLAB® and Fortran data files to encourage application and experimentation.
RES.HSO-001 MIT Haystack Observatory K-12 STEM Lesson Plans
Are your students interested in black holes, space weather, drones, or GPS? The thirty lesson plans presented in this resource were developed by teachers with the assistance of staff at the MIT Haystack Observatory. This material explores the atmosphere and the universe with activities focused on the research specialties at Haystack, incorporating basic concepts from scientific fields such as electromagnetism, optics, and molecular chemistry that astronomers and atmospheric scientists use every day. All of the lesson plans have been successfully used in high-school classrooms and have been prepared with specific attention to the goals and objectives of current science curricula. |
|
| Support access to life-changing education with OCW |
|
Did you know that MIT OpenCourseWare provides free copies of our website on hard drives to educational organizations with limited or costly Internet access? Through the OCW Mirror Site Program, learners in regions with no or low connectivity are able to access more than 2,500 courses from MIT.
You can help bring these life-changing resources to even more people worldwide. If you’re in the position to give, please support OpenCourseWare today. |
|
| Newsletter edited by Shira Segal with contributions from Peter Chipman, production assistance from Stephanie Hodges, and resource development by Duyen Nguyen and Stephen Nelson. |
|
| 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. |
|
|
| More free resources from MIT Open Learning are available at: |
|
|
| | | | |
|
