100 Reasons to Be Thankful

OCW reached a new milestone last month with the publication of its 100th This Course at MITpage.

The staff marked the occasion with 100 cupcakes (shared, of course, with other members of MIT’s Office of Digital Learning) and with a “thank-a-thon,” in which staff members wrote thank you notes to the instructors of the 100 courses.

Part of OCW’s Educator project, This Course at MIT provides contextual information about how the course was taught on campus—course outcomes, prerequisites, what kind of students took the class, what kind of assessments were used, and so on. About two-thirds of the pages also have instructor insights into how the course was taught—for example, why the course is structured the way it is, what methods are used to engage students in learning, how the instructor has met challenges that the course presents, what kinds of projects students undertake.

This Course at MIT pages are now published for courses in every school at MIT and in a wide variety of disciplines, from computer science to literature. Here is a sampler of recently published pages:

• SP.292 Writing Workshop 
  Instructor Jessica Young explains the benefits and challenges of writing workshops.

• 9.00SC Introduction to Psychology
  Professor John Gabrieli shares how he incorporates demonstrations and the latest research results into his lectures introducing the concepts of psychology.

• 1.00 Introduction to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving
  Dr. George Kocur discusses teaching computer science as active learning to students who are not majors in that subject.

• 22.15 Essential Numerical Methods 
  Professor Ian Hutchinson addresses the challenges of teaching a rapidly paced six-week module to beginning graduate students.

• 7.016 Introductory Biology 
  Dr. Diviya Sinha explains how student learning is assessed in a large introductory biology class.

In another first, OCW piloted an online Roundtable discussion of a This Course at MIT page.  Drs. Jeremy Orloff and Jonathan Bloom spoke with other mathematics educators about their thinking behind 18.05 Introduction to Probability and Statistics, which they reconceived for active learning. (You can see their insights on their This Course at MIT page.) The Roundtable was a great success, and more are in the offing.

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