Soar above the city with OCW

In John's July Newsletter

Chalk Radio: The Power of OER
with Profs. Mary Rowe and Elizabeth Siler

A wooden table with a lit lightbulb on it towards the right with the text "the power of open" across the middle.

In this episode, we talk with both Professor Siler and Professor Rowe about why instructors might decide to share, reuse, and remix course materials, and how that decision plays out in teaching actual courses like their own courses in negotiation.

Many instructors in recent years have turned to open educational resources (OER) so that their students don’t have to pay for an expensive textbook. And that is indeed one of the foremost benefits of OER.

But Professor Elizabeth Siler, who teaches at Worcester State University, has found that using OER offers advantages to instructors too: doing so allows you to teach the material you think your students need to learn, and to teach that material the way you think your students need to learn it, rather than being tied to a prepackaged sequence of material.

Professor Siler enjoys being able to select and adapt material for her courses from publicly-available sources. One source that she’s used successfully in teaching negotiation at WSU is the OpenCourseWare version of a course originally taught at MIT by Professor Mary Rowe.

> Listen to the episode.

A summer evening in Midtown Manhattan. (Photo courtesy of Christine Espino on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-SA.)

11.S948: Seeing the City Afresh

This course explores the city through writing—listening to the voices of poets, short story writers, novelists, journalists, critics, historians, ethnographers, urbanists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. Through extensive reading that informs their work on a longform story, students will join the chorus of storytellers to richly represent the variegated city. Our focus is on three nonfiction forms—essay, memoir, literary narrative—with special emphasis on the writer-editor relationship and on revision as a heuristic to better thinking.

A painting of an airplane from 1909 over a body of water with the portrait of Louis Blériot, the first to fly across the English Channel with an airplane, on the bottom left.

Louis Blériot (1872–1936) became the first to fly across the English Channel with an airplane on July 25, 1909. (Image courtesy of Tom Wigley on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-SA.)

16.687 Private Pilot Ground School

This is a three-day workshop that took place during the MIT Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January, 2019. This workshop aims to provide information for students to prepare for the FAA Private Pilot Knowledge Test. Topics include airplane aerodynamics, aircraft systems, navigation, meteorology, aircraft ownership and maintenance, aircraft performance, multi-engine and jets.

In the popular puzzle Rubik's Cube invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik, each turn of the puzzle faces creates a permutation of the surface colors. (Image by Kristin on flickr. License CC BY-NC-SA.)

18.600 Probability and Random Variables

This course introduces students to probability and random variables. Topics include distribution functions, binomial, geometric, hypergeometric, and Poisson distributions. The other topics covered are uniform, exponential, normal, gamma and beta distributions; conditional probability; Bayes theorem; joint distributions; Chebyshev inequality; law of large numbers; and central limit theorem.

Faculty Profile: Stuart Madnick

An image of Professor Stuart Madnick speaking with his hand raised on the right side of the photo.

Professor Stuart Madnick delves into details at the Cognizant Quality Engineering & Assurance (QE&A) Summit in 2015 in London, UK. (Image by Cognizant Technology Solutions on flickr. License CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)

Through more than five decades at MIT, Stuart Madnick has been ahead of the curve in computer science.

Decades before personal computing went mainstream, years before Bill Gates had even programmed his first game of Tic-tac-toe, Stuart Madnick began dabbling in what would become a lifetime pursuit.

> Read the complete article

Show your support of OpenCourseWare

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Dear John,

You can learn with OCW at any time.

If you can afford to support OCW while you learn, please donate to OCW today. Your donation will help us publish and share more learning materials from MIT openly and freely, at a time when so many are learning from home.

Support the future of OpenCourseWare by making your gift a recurring monthly donation.

Thank you!

Views from OCW Supporters

A mountainside in Haiti with colorful homes in close proximity.

Photo by Robin Canfield on Unsplash.

"Really, MIT is important to me because I read that books are being written in Creole so Haitians can learn how to read and write Creole, since that is the language that is spoken at home and in everyday life...

If a Haitian citizen has access to a computer, OCW can be useful."

-Maria-Teresa, Independent Learner, United States

>We'd love to hear from you. Tell us your OCW Story.

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