| Your OpenCourseWare Newsletter | September 2024 |
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| The Impact of MIT OpenCourseWare |
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| Image by MIT OpenCourseWare. |
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MIT OpenCourseWare serves tens of thousands of learners daily through our site, and we reach millions of people on our YouTube channel, surpassing 5 million subscribers. We’ve achieved these incredible milestones this past academic year because of you - MIT OpenCourseWare users and supporters who use our free materials. You motivate us to keep publishing open educational resources which so many people around the world benefit from.
Learn more about our collective successes and stories in our Impact Report for 2023–2024, and read on for this month’s exciting news, including the announcement of MIT Open Learning’s new Vice Provost, our AI + Open Education Initiative, and new course publications. Thank you for joining us in our quest to open higher education! |
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| News in MIT Open Learning |
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| Dimitris Bertsimas Named Vice Provost for MIT Open Learning |
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| Photo courtesy of Dimitris Bertsimas. |
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MIT OpenCourseWare is thrilled to welcome Dimitris Bertsimas as the new incoming Vice Provost for Open Learning as of September 1, 2024. He will oversee MIT Open Learning’s offerings—not just MIT OpenCourseWare but also MITx Courses, MITx MicroMasters, MIT xPRO, MIT Horizon, MIT Jameel World Education Lab, MIT pK-12, and others.
Excellent leadership enables us to fulfill our mission to transform teaching and learning at MIT and around the world. Prof. Dimitris, who teaches at MIT Sloan School of Management and also serves as Associate Dean for Business Analytics, will work with the MIT community and beyond to support and further expand our innovative use of digital technologies for increased opportunities and the greater good.
We extend our warm welcome to Vice Provost Bertsimas, who brings more than 35 years of experience at MIT to the position! Learn more about his appointment in this MIT News story.
And for those of you interested in learning directly from him on the topics of optimization, machine learning, and applied probability, you can explore many of his courses on MIT OpenCourseWare, including 6.251J Introduction to Mathematical Programming, 15.071 The Analytics Edge, 15.093J Optimization Methods, 6.231 Dynamic Programming and Stochastic Control, and 15.083J Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization. |
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| AI + Open Education Initiative |
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| Image by Sarah Schwettmann. |
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The remarkable growth of artificial intelligence (AI) poses new benefits and challenges for open education. To meet the moment, MIT Open Learning recently invited practitioners in open education and AI from around the world to submit proposals for rapid response papers or multimedia projects that explore the future of open education in an ecosystem inhabited and shaped by AI systems. The goal? To publicly share the projects under an open license to advance open education for the benefit of all learners.
This initiative, which is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is part of the MIT OpenCourseWare Collaborations Program and fulfills our mission is to build relationships between innovators who, together, make education affordable, accessible, and culturally responsive through open approaches, practices, and policies. This project enlists MIT innovators and an international jury representing leaders from across sectors of education, industry, and science. All bring a commitment to exploring and safeguarding artificial intelligence as a public good and for the advancement of open education. Learn more about this initiative, and look for the winning proposals to be shared with the world in January 2025. |
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| New Courses and Resources |
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| Conditions on the placement of roots in a root system. (This image is in the public domain.) |
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| Science, Technology, Engineering, Math |
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18.745 Lie Groups and Lie Algebras I
18.755 Lie Groups and Lie Algebras II
18.757 Representations of Lie Groups
This sequence of three graduate-level mathematics courses, all taught by Prof. Pavel Etingof, provides an in-depth grounding in the behavior and representation of Lie groups, a special category of mathematical groups that have the characteristics of a smooth manifold, and the Lie algebras that correspond to those groups in a one-to-one relationship. For each course in the sequence, you can access the syllabus, the calendar of topics, and full downloadable lecture notes and problem sets. If you’re already proficient in undergraduate-level mathematical topics such as groups, vector spaces, linear transformations, and real analysis, this sequence of courses offers an opportunity for well-structured further study.
SP.248 NEET Ways of Thinking
This course is designed to allow first-year students to explore MIT’s New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program while acquiring valuable problem-solving skills. It introduces students to the NEET Ways of Thinking, which are cognitive approaches for tackling complex challenges in an uncertain and rapidly changing world. Student teams engaged in project-based learning in interdisciplinary engineering education, applying various “Ways of Thinking” for solving a series of challenges, from molding a plastic figurine to devising tools to help college students select their major. The modularly-arranged course materials include instructors’ presentation slides, assignments, several tutorial videos, and links to helpful external resources. |
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| Humanities and Social Sciences |
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14.02 Principles of Macroeconomics
What is a recession, and why does the unemployment rate vary? Why do exchange rates between currencies fluctuate, and how do policies in one country affect other countries? Why do economies grow at different rates, and what explains movements in the stock market? These are some of the core questions of macroeconomics. If you’re curious about the answers, this course is for you. The course is organized around four major themes: the determinants of short-run economic fluctuations; the determinants of long-run growth; the investigation of government economic policies; and the analysis of economic sectors such as consumer spending, business investment, and financial markets. This course also includes video lectures.
21L.004 Reading Poetry: Social Poetics
This course explores the historical relationship between the lives of everyday people and American poetics, with a special emphasis on what June Jordan once termed the “difficult miracle of Black poetry in America.” How does poetry help us to know one another? And how might we better understand the particular role of poetry for those historically barred from the very practice of reading or writing? In addition to a rich reading list of poetry and prose selections (and a few YouTube video viewings), the course site includes an Instructor Insights page with an embedded episode of the Chalk Radio podcast with Prof. Joshua Bennett.
WGS.301J Feminist Thought
This introductory course brings various feminist theoretical lenses to aspects of gender, race, class, and sexuality. How do we know what we think we know? What paradigm shifts could we make in order to better understand the world as influenced by sex and gender? The course is constructed in concentric circles, moving outward from sex and the body to sexuality, the family, the welfare state, and international politics. In the process, it examines theories of gender, definitions of public and private spheres, gender issues in citizenship, the development of the welfare state, experiences of war and revolution, class formation, and the politics of sexuality. |
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RES.18-015 Topics in Fourier Analysis
This resource presents a series of lecture notes that provide an introduction to Fourier analysis, a technique by which complex wave forms can be interpreted as the sum of a number of simpler components. Topics covered include the Fourier series, the Gibbs phenomenon, the Fourier transform, the L¹ and L² theories, Schwartz’s theory of tempered distributions, the theory of weak convergence of probability measures and its application to a derivation of the Lévy-Khinchine formula, and the elementary theory of singular integral operators, starting with the Hilbert transform and then proving the Lᵖ boundedness of even Calderòn-Zygmund kernels. Interspersed with the lecture notes are a series of example problems for the student to work through; the solutions are provided in a separate document. |
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| Further MIT OpenCourseWare Materials |
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| Got What It Takes to Get Ahead? Get up to Speed with MIT OpenCourseWare |
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| Financial technology, or “FinTech,” is just one of the hot topics you can study on MIT OpenCourseWare. (Photo courtesy of Jason Howie on Flickr. License: CC BY.) |
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Two recent articles from MIT Open Learning on Medium focus on free and low-cost educational materials that will be of interest to anyone who is seeking to develop their potential in business or in the workplace. The first article lists dozens of career-boosting educational resources, including 24 from MIT OpenCourseWare, that focus on communication, collaboration, leadership, and business strategy.
It’s no surprise that one of the recommended resources is Prof. Patrick Henry Winston’s hugely popular presentation on “How to Speak,” which he delivered annually at MIT for years and which has accumulated over 19 million views on YouTube.
The second article offers resources specifically relevant to the needs of entrepreneurs and innovators, with more emphasis on financial and technological considerations, such as the practical advantages and challenges posed by machine learning systems. Taken together, the two articles provide a user-friendly introduction to the breadth of materials available from MIT OpenCourseWare and MIT Open Learning. |
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| Your Support Makes a Difference |
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| Support from learners like you helps us make resources from MIT freely available to the world all year-round through OpenCourseWare. Give today to support new courses, videos, and educator conversations this academic year: |
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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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