Chalk Radio

Felice Frankel’s personal website

Felice Frankel on Wikipedia

RES.10-001 Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work on MIT OpenCourseWare

Phenomenal Moments (book)

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Special Episode: Collaborating with Community Colleges

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

MIT OpenCourseWare has been one of the pioneers of open education, leading the way by offering free materials from MIT courses as early as 2001, when no other institutions were pursuing comparably ambitious initiatives. But in subsequent years, there’s been an explosion of activity in open education, led by faculty members, instructional designers, and librarians at institutions throughout the United States and worldwide. In this episode, we hear from senior manager of MIT Open Education collaborations, Dr. Shira Segal, who talks about MIT’s efforts to team up with and learn from open education practitioners at the Maricopa County Community College District in Arizona, whose energetic promotion of open educational resources has saved students over $270 million in textbook costs, and College of the Canyons in California, a leader in the Zero Textbook Cost movement. We also hear excerpts from interviews with four instructors from those colleges, who talk about the potential benefits and unexpected challenges of using open educational resources in general, and about what they learned from their experiences in adapting OCW materials for use in their own classes.

Relevant Resources:

More on MIT OpenCourseWare’s collaboration with community colleges

Maricopa County Community College District

College of the Canyons

Maricopa Community Colleges Save Students $270M in Textbooks

OER and Zero Textbook Cost at College of the Canyons

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

MIT Economist Jon Gruber on AI, Trade-offs & Healthcare

Wed, 5 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Prof. Jonathan Gruber, our guest for this episode, likes to tell his students that economics is a fundamentally right-wing science. What he means by that is that classical economics is built on one powerful explanatory insight: that free markets—networks of buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, weighing the trade-offs of different options and making self-interested choices based on supply and demand—do a better job of deciding how to allocate resources than can be achieved by a top-down, command-economy approach. But as Gruber goes on to explain, that principle only holds when all participants have equal access to markets and to information; in the real world, imbalances in that access lead to market failures, inefficient allocations of resources that leave most people worse off than they would otherwise be. That’s why government regulation still has a role in a properly functioning economy. Tune in to hear Prof. Gruber explain why we need “capitalism with gutter guards” to ensure equitable outcomes, especially in sectors of the economy such as healthcare where the ideal markets envisioned by classical economics are particularly unattainable or undesirable.

Relevant Resources:

Prof. Gruber’s faculty page

14.01 Principles of Microeconomics on MIT OpenCourseWare

14.41 Public Finance and Public Policy on MIT OpenCourseWare

Power and Progress (book by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson)

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

MIT Programmer Ana Bell on Growth Mindset, Coding, and Rubber Ducks

Wed, 14 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Learn about Python, growth mindset, and the uses of rubber ducks in this interview with MIT lecturer Ana Bell. Dr. Bell, who has been programming since she was twelve and now teaches popular introductory courses in computer science, says that coding consists of almost equal parts creativity and logic. The creative part, she explains, gets exercised particularly when you have to come up with an algorithm to solve a given problem, because for any given complex problem there are many possible approaches to tackling it. The logical part comes into play when you sit down to translate that algorithm into an unambiguous sequence of rules in a programming language, and again when you discover that the code you’ve written doesn’t work exactly as you intended it to and you have to set about debugging it. Among the topics the conversation addresses are why everyone–even in the age of generative AI– ought to study at least the basics of programming, why it can be useful to speak to an inanimate object when your coding project is stuck in the debugging stage, and how programming can help you choose your own adventure.

Relevant Resources:

6.100 L Introduction to Computer Science and Programming using Python on MIT OpenCourseWare

Dr. Bell’s faculty page

6.0001 [now 6.100A] Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python on MIT OpenCourseWare

6.0002 [now 6.100B] Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science on MIT OpenCourseWare

Get Programming: Learn to Code with Python (book by Dr. Bell)

Doodle Debug (coloring book by Dr. Bell)

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

MIT Economist Andrew W. Lo on Finance, AI, and Human Behavior

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this the first of two pilot episodes of Chalk Radio with VIDEO, Professor Andrew Lo, who teaches finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, knows that many people find financial matters perplexing and scary. Lots of us don’t have a good head for numbers, and besides, how can one get advice and make sound decisions when it’s taboo to discuss one’s finances at all? That’s where a financial advisor is useful–someone who understands the concepts, can crunch the numbers, and has a fiduciary responsibility to look out for your best interests. For many people, hiring a financial advisor might be a financial impossibility, but Prof. Lo and his colleagues are working to develop an AI financial advisor that not only gives ordinary people access to sound financial advice, but acts with real fiduciary responsibility. Large language models can’t do this yet, he says, but the technology is developing fast. Other topics he touches on in this episode include the outsized influence of finance on drug development and global decarbonization and the equally outsized influence of teachers on their students–he names many who changed his own life, from his third-grade teacher in Queens to his professors at college and graduate school.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Lo’s faculty page

15.401 Finance Theory I on MIT OpenCourseWare

15.481x Adaptive Markets: Financial Market Dynamics and Human Behavior on MIT Open Learning Library

15.482x Healthcare Finance on MIT Open Learning Library

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Sujood from Sudan: An Open Learner's Story

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Sujood Khalid Eldouma recently relocated to the UK for her master’s studies, having previously lived in Egypt after fleeing her native Sudan to escape the devastating civil war in that country. Sujood holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Khartoum, but her ambitions extend far beyond the field she was trained in. She recently graduated from the MIT Emerging Talent certificate program in Computer and Data Science and is pursuing a MicroMasters in statistics and data science through the support of MIT Emerging Talent. In this episode, we hear how Sujood and her classmates at the university in Khartoum used MIT OpenCourseWare lecture videos as the basis of a group learning experience, in which knowledge was shared and lasting friendships were formed. We also hear how Sujood is pursuing her current online studies not just as a means of self-improvement but as part of the groundwork for a much bigger, future project: helping to rebuild Sudan’s educational and scientific infrastructure when peace comes to that country. “I'm not doing it just for myself,” she says. “I'm not doing it just for my family, but in the bigger picture and with a heart filled with hope.”

The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut and hosted by Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen.

Relevant Resources:

MIT Emerging Talent program

MIT MicroMasters Program in Statistics and Data Science

Share Your Open Learning Story

To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Jerry from Uganda: An Open Learner's Story

Wed, 4 Dec 2024 11:41:42 +0000

They say every crisis also presents an opportunity. Open learner Jerry Vance Anguzu seized one such opportunity in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, when his native country of Uganda went into lockdown. Jerry was stuck at home, unable to earn a living, but that enforced inactivity gave him the chance to pursue new directions in his education. A few years earlier, he had discovered MIT OpenCourseWare and had seen what it had to offer; now he returned to MIT Open Learning resources in earnest, plowing through courses in data science and computer programming; soon thereafter he was accepted into the MIT Emerging Talent certificate program, where he began to develop an interest in entrepreneurship. Now, just a few years later, Jerry has his own startup, Everpesa Technologies, a financial services platform that offers sustainable investment opportunities and financial literacy resources to people in sub-Saharan Africa. Along the way, he has become a self-described “OCW ambassador,” enthusiastically spreading the word to relatives and colleagues about the learning resources that are available online through MIT OpenCourseWare. “You don’t need to pay anything,” Jerry tells them. “You just need to have a bit of time.”

The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut and hosted by Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen.

Relevant Resources:

MIT Emerging Talent program

MIT Jameel World Education Lab

MIT MicroMasters Program in Statistics and Data Science

Everpesa website

6.0001 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python on MIT OpenCourseWare

Share Your Open Learning Story

To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Lotfullah from Afghanistan: An Open Learner's Story

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Our guest for this episode, Lotfullah Andishmand, grew up in a village in rural Afghanistan where there was no internet access or electric lights. (He describes having had to navigate by moonlight to get to his uncle’s house for tutoring in chemistry.) In search of educational opportunity, he eventually moved to Kabul, where he discovered MIT OpenCourseWare’s lecture videos while studying electrical engineering at the university. Even there, though, the internet infrastructure was shaky enough that Lotfullah often resorted to downloading the course materials so he could study them at leisure when broadband wasn’t available. He now resides in India and recently graduated from the MIT Emerging Talent certificate program in Computer and Data Science, specifically designed for displaced communities worldwide. As he continues his educational journey in data science and artificial intelligence, he remains deeply mindful of the challenges he encountered as a student in his home country. Recognizing that most of the available online educational resources are in English, a language few Afghans are fluent in, Lotfullah has used his computer skills to create an online learning platform offering educational materials in Persian. Someday, he hopes the platform will expand to include full online courses with direct interaction between instructors and students.

The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut and hosted by Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen.

Relevant Resources:

MIT Emerging Talent program

MIT MicroMasters Program in Statistics and Data Science

6.0001 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python on MIT OpenCourseWare

Hooshmand Lab online learning website (in Persian)

Share Your Open Learning Story

To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Nader from Jordan: An Open Learner's Story

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

When Nader AlEtaywi was in high school in Jordan, he had a passion for finance but his prospects seemed limited. Juggling his studies, minimum-wage jobs, and family crises made it hard to envision a future where he could develop his talents and flourish in his chosen field. Through sheer perseverance he finished high school and entered university, where during the Covid pandemic in late 2020 he discovered the world of educational resources that MIT Open Learning offers. He devoured MIT OpenCourseWare courses in statistics, computer programming, and calculus, and soon realized that he could take steps toward a career in finance by enrolling in a MITx MicroMasters program. The program’s instructional team recognized Nader’s talent, and when he finished the program they offered him a position as a teaching assistant. From there, drawing on the skills he had learned but also on the online community he had become a part of, Nader was able to get jobs in his field, first working for a financial firm in Jordan, and then for companies in the US and Dubai. In this episode, we hear his inspiring story of passion and perseverance.

The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut and hosted by Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen.

Relevant Resources:

MIT MicroMasters Program in Finance

Dr. Egor Matveyev (MIT faculty page)

Prof. Andrew Lo (MIT faculty page)

Courses by Prof. Lo on MIT OpenCourseWare

Share Your Open Learning Story

To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Jae-Min from South Korea: An Open Learner’s Story

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Jae-Min Hong, our guest for this episode, is a hungry learner with wide-ranging curiosity and a distrust of groupthink. A native of South Korea, she has been fluent in English from childhood, which has opened up many educational possibilities for her. Aiming to widen her cultural horizons, she opted to attend high school in New Zealand; a few years later, she transferred from a Korean university to an American one so she could attend in-person classes during the Covid pandemic. With the help of lecture videos from MIT OpenCourseWare, Jae-Min was able to supplement her formal studies and pursue all the subjects that interest her, from chemistry and thermodynamics through data science and financial technology. She’s now back in South Korea, where she’s finishing a degree in economics at Yonsei University. She feels it’s time for her to really focus her attention on a single field and a single goal, a career in investment banking. But if that doesn’t work out, she says, she can always come back to MIT OpenCourseWare and dip once more into the wealth of resources it has to offer.

The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut.

Relevant Resources:

5.60 Thermodynamics & Kinetics on MIT OpenCourseWare

15.401 Finance Theory I on MIT OpenCourseWare

18.06 Linear Algebra on MIT OpenCourseWare

Prof. Gilbert Strang (MIT faculty page)

RES.18-005 Highlights of Calculus (including “The Big Picture of Calculus”) on MIT OpenCourseWare

Share Your Open Learning Story

To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Maria from Brazil: An Open Learner’s Story

Wed, 2 Oct 2024 11:11:48 +0000

In this inaugural episode of the Open Learners podcast, hosts Emmanuel Kasigazi and Michael Jordan Pilgreen interview Maria Eduarda Barbosa, a medical student located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Maria tells in her own words how MIT OpenCourseWare changed the trajectory of her life, particularly how she might never have achieved her full potential if one of her teachers had not recognized her abilities and urged her to pursue more challenging studies. Googling “Calculus introductory course,” Maria discovered one of Prof. Gilbert Strang’s videos on MIT OpenCourseWare, and it opened a vision of new horizons for her. She became a near-daily user of MIT OpenCourseWare, and the experience transformed her intellectual life, inspiring her to become passionate about her own education and to share that passion with others around her. Maria describes how the experience has not only awakened her curiosity and self-motivation, but also given her a better attitude about the gaps in her existing knowledge. Now, she says, she doesn’t think, “Oh, I'm lost because I'm stupid”; instead she thinks, “I'm lost because I haven't learned this yet.”

The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut.

Relevant Resources:

Prof. Andrew Lo (MIT faculty page)

15.401 Finance Theory I on MIT OpenCourseWare

Prof. Gilbert Strang (MIT faculty page)

RES.18-005 Highlights of Calculus (including “The Big Picture of Calculus”) on MIT OpenCourseWare

Share Your Open Learning Story

To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Introducing the Open Learners Podcast

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Emmanuel Kasigazi is a data scientist from Kampala, Uganda. Michael Jordan Pilgreen is a financial technology engineer from Memphis, Tennessee. Kasigazi and Pilgreen know firsthand how transformative open learning can be: Pilgreen’s discovery of the free educational materials at MIT OpenCourseWare helped him develop new technical skills and eventually led to a new career in a field he is passionate about, while Kasigazi has enjoyed MIT OpenCourseWare’s wealth of lecture videos on YouTube for years, not only to learn within his field but also to immerse himself in the deep questions of psychology and philosophy. In this episode we hear from Kasigazi and Pilgreen about how open learning changed their lives and how they became friends and colleagues despite living on opposite sides of the world. We also hear of their new project, in which they’ll be teaming up to host an upcoming special season of Chalk Radio. Unlike the typical Chalk Radio season, which focuses on the supply side of open learning, featuring interviews with inspired educators at MIT, this special “Open Learners” podcast season will focus on candid conversations with open learners from all over the world. This special season is coming Fall 2024. Don’t miss it!

Relevant Resources:

Emmanuel Kasigazi - Open Learning Story

Michael Jordan Pilgreen - Open Learning Story

Share Your Open Learning Story

To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at open_learners_pod@mit.edu.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Living Poetry with Poet Joshua Bennett

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

This episode features a wide-ranging conversation about poetry: what it is, where it comes from, and why it matters. Our guest, poet (and poetry professor) Joshua Bennett, talks about the early experiences that pushed him toward poetry and about the people who shaped and inspired his creative approach as a writer. Many of these people are fellow poets, others are his own grandparents, parents, and teachers, but Prof. Bennett has also found inspiration in less expected figures; over the course of the interview, he name-checks the singers Yolanda Adams and Marvin Gaye, the biologists Charles Henry Turner and Ernest Everett Just, the astronaut Mae Jemison, and various characters from the TV series Star Trek: the Next Generation. Other topics Prof. Bennett addresses include the relation between poetry and generative AI (his own work is among the vast body of text that has been fed as training data into large language models), education as liberation, and the concept of social poetics. Eventually, the interview blossoms into a heartfelt meditation on human experience: childhood, aging, parenthood, identity, and the ways poetry enhances our humanity by capturing the magic of being alive.

Relevant Resources:

Joshua Bennett’s faculty page

Joshua Bennett (Poetry Foundation)

Aracelis Girmay, from The Black Maria

June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America”

Charles Henry Turner (Wikipedia)

Ernest Everett Just (Wikipedia)

Mae Jemison (Wikipedia)

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Robust Science with Prof. Rebecca Saxe

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Our guest for this episode, Professor Rebecca Saxe, is MIT’s Associate Dean of Science. Prof. Saxe is also the principal investigator for her own laboratory, the Saxe Lab, where she deploys powerful technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the relationship between human thought and brain activity. (She originally went into cognitive neuroscience because, as she puts it, there’s nothing cooler than the fact that “all the thoughts we ever have” arise out of the firing of neurons.). Prof. Saxe is also deeply committed to improving how research is conducted and published, both in her own field and in others to support a scientific method that will be more robust and will yield more reliably replicable results. One of the ways to achieve this more robust science, she explains, is to make a shift toward more openness, embracing transparency in every step of the scientific process and promoting generosity in the sharing of data.

Relevant Resources:

Prof. Saxe’s faculty page at Saxe Lab website

“How We Read Each Other’s Minds” (TED talk video)

Nelson memo on open access to Federally funded research (PDF)

9.401 Tools for Robust Science on MIT OpenCourseWare

RES.9-005 fMRI Bootcamp on MIT OpenCourseWare

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Innovation, Past and Future with Open Learning's Dean Christopher Capozzola

Wed, 5 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

As MIT’s Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning, Christopher Capozzola’s job is to look forward, identifying new opportunities and facing new challenges in online and digital learning. But he’s also a professor of American history. In that capacity, his job also requires him to study the opportunities and challenges people faced in the past—and, in the classroom, to make those past events meaningful to young people in the present. In this episode, Prof. Capozzola draws analogies between the present moment and the late 1800s, when new communication technologies and systems for organizing and presenting information transformed the world. Just like in the 19th century, he says, we’re facing questions about the trustworthiness of the flood of information we’re exposed to, as well as about how to democratize access to that information in order to achieve a more equitable society. In overseeing MIT OpenCourseWare and other programs in MIT Open Learning, Prof. Capozzola says, he’s on a mission to make information both trustable and discoverable, and to seek out—and collaborate with—the innovators and philanthropists (the “Deweys and Carnegies” of today) who can support that mission.

Relevant Resources:

Prof. Capozzola’s faculty page

The Dewey decimal classification system (PDF)

The Carnegie libraries

21H.221 The Places of Migration in United States History on MIT OpenCourseWare

21H.223 War & American Society on MIT OpenCourseWare

21H.224 Law and Society in US History on MIT OpenCourseWare

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

What’s Worth Making? with Prof. Hal Abelson

Wed, 29 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Professor Hal Abelson has been active in computer science for over half a century—the first computer he worked with, in high school, was the kind where programs were encoded in a pattern of holes punched into a paper tape fed into the machine. When he arrived at MIT as a graduate student in the late 1960s, Abelson became involved in exploring computers’ potential as educational tools. One of his first projects, under the guidance of Prof. Seymour Papert, involved working to create a graphics display for use with the Logo programming language, which had first been introduced to schoolkids just a year or two earlier. In this episode, Prof. Abelson reminisces about those early experiences and discusses the importance of computer education for everyone–including, and especially, for children who have the power to make real-world impact through their programming work. He also weighs in on the risks associated with artificial intelligence, and describes his involvement in MIT’s decision to give away educational materials online for free—an initiative that ultimately became MIT OpenCourseWare. Fundamentally, Prof. Abelson believes that computer scientists need to confront not only the technical challenges of designing new systems or applications, but also a deeper, humanistic question: “What, in fact, is worth making?”

Relevant Resources:

Prof. Abelson’s faculty page

Logo and the Turtle

Scratch coding language

MIT App Inventor

6.S062 Generative Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education on MIT OpenCourseWare

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Everything Here Is Sacred (Terrascope Radio Replay)

Wed, 22 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In a departure from our usual format, in which we interview an exceptional faculty member to learn about their approach to teaching, this time we’re showcasing an exemplary piece of student work: an exploration of ways in which seemingly everyday places and activities, such as a cornfield, the meeting place of two rivers, or the process of planting and tending crops, are imbued with sacredness in Diné (Navajo) tradition. This episode was created by first-year students as a semester-long project in the course SP.360 Terrascope Radio as part of MIT Terrascope, a learning community for first-year undergraduate students focused on solving complex environmental problems. (For more information on the Terrascope learning community and its approach to student-led problem-solving, check out our interview with Dr. Ari Epstein in Season 5 Episode 5, which we’re releasing simultaneously with this special episode!) Follow along with the Terrascope students as they visit the Navajo Nation and learn firsthand about how the Diné people’s traditional relationship with the land survives as a powerful force in their lives, both shaping their response to environmental issues and marking their identity as a distinct people.

This episode was produced by the Spring 2023 MIT Terrascope Radio class: Xiner Luo, Jacqueline Prawira, Nevena Stojkovic, and Elisa Xia.

Relevant Resources:

S5 E5 Chalk Radio interview about Terrascope with Ari Epstein

Terrascope Radio

The Navajo Nation at Wikipedia

NMSU Agricultural Science Center at Farmington

The Gold King Mine incident

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

The Power of Experience with Dr. Ari Epstein

chalkradio@mit.edu (Ari Epstein, Dave Lishansky, Brett Paci, Sarah Hansen) — Wed, 22 May 2024 08:55:00 +0000

You thought Chalk Radio was a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT? Yes and no! “We don't do a lot of teaching,” says Dr. Ari Epstein, our guest for this week’s episode. Dr. Epstein is associate director of the Terrascope program, a learning community for first-year undergraduates. Each year the program focuses on one particular issue relating to sustainability, and participants in the program learn by direct experience, launching themselves into projects focused on solving complex environmental problems. The role of the program’s instructional staff, Dr. Epstein says, is to create an environment where learning can happen, rather than to impart knowledge or teach skills directly. Toward the end of the semester, the students create a website describing their proposed solutions in as much technical detail as they can. And then a week later, they present their proposals in front of an invited panel of outside experts. In the process of preparing for this presentation, students often come to realize that understanding the history and cultural implications of an issue are just as important as understanding the science behind it and the technology available for dealing with it.

Relevant Resources:

Dr. Epstein’s faculty page

The Terrascope program

RES.12-002 Terrascope on MIT OpenCourseWare

DigDeep

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Economics and Real-World Impact with Dr. Sara Ellison and Prof. Esther Duflo

Wed, 15 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In this episode we meet professor and Nobel laureate Esther Duflo and her colleague Dr. Sara Ellison for a discussion about economics: what it is, how it differs from sociology, how it incorporates classic intellectual tools like probability and statistics with newer technologies like machine learning, and how it can itself be a tool for improving the world by solving problems of inequity one problem at a time. As Duflo and Ellison explain, economics has shifted in recent decades from a primarily solo endeavor to an intensely collaborative one, in which any given paper is likely to have multiple co-authors but also to be based on the work of an even larger group of people—not only professional economists but also psychologists, teachers, NGO workers, and so on. (Fittingly, Duflo’s and Ellison’s teaching is collaborative as well; they work together as co-instructors on the course 14.310x Data Analysis for Social Scientists, available on both MITx Online and MIT OpenCourseWare.) Other topics covered in the episode include why online shopping isn’t as cheap as it seems like it should be and why you should disable some of your spreadsheet’s default settings.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Duflo’s faculty page

Dr. Ellison’s faculty page

14.310x Data Analysis for Social Scientists on MIT OpenCourseWare

14.310x Data Analysis for Social Scientists on MITx Online

MITx MicroMasters Program in Statistics and Data Science

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

The Lumpy Universe with Prof. David Kaiser

Wed, 8 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

This conversation with Prof. David Kaiser, who teaches physics and the history of science at MIT, covers a vast timespan, from the beginning of the universe to the present day. Prof. Kaiser explains that inflationary cosmology helps connect our understanding of quantum fluctuations—what he calls the “jitters” that particles undergo at subatomic levels—to the irregular distribution of matter in the universe. What’s most exciting, he says, is that simulations based on inflationary theory produce predictions that closely match detailed measurements of the cosmos. Later in the interview, Prof. Kaiser discusses how he teaches his course on 20th-century science, seeking to demythologize Albert Einstein (“He was no Einstein as a young person!”) and examining the historical context of the development of nuclear weapons as portrayed in the 2023 film Oppenheimer. He hopes his students will learn to see science not as happening in isolation but as a product and producer of historical events and cultural changes. Lastly, he discusses what he’s learned from his years of teaching the course, and in particular how he helps students who are anxious about writing papers to overcome their fears.

Relevant Resources:

STS.042 Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics In The 20th Century on OCW

Professor Kaiser’s faculty page (MIT Physics department)

Professor Kaiser’s faculty page (MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society)

MIT’s communication requirement

Oppenheimer (2023) on IMDB

Containment (2015) on IMDB

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Reimagining Cities with Prof. David Hsu

Wed, 1 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Paradoxically, urban planning professor David Hsu doesn’t consider himself a “city person,” but he has great appreciation and enthusiasm for cities as places where meaningful steps can be taken toward climate mitigation. In this episode, Prof. Hsu explains that urban planners can help move cities to take action to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the construction, heating, power, and transport sectors. But he observes that the most lasting and successful actions are ones that are implemented democratically, with the consent and participation of the affected communities. To win over those communities, he says, technical experts have to learn to communicate solid facts using math that even a layperson can follow. And they need to learn that sometimes there can be more than one defensible position in response to a given problem—which is why Prof. Hsu often asks his students to read multiple papers that take conflicting positions on a particular problem, and to evaluate which paper’s (or papers’) arguments are more persuasive. Because in the end, it’s people who need to be persuaded to take action against climate change—solutions won’t implement themselves.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Hsu’s faculty page

11.165J Urban Energy Systems and Policy on MIT OpenCourseWare

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

The Kitchen Cloud Chamber with Prof. Anne White

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

You don’t need a multibillion-dollar supercollider to detect subatomic particles. In fact, you can build a working cloud chamber—a device capable of revealing the cosmic radiation and radon decay events that go on continuously around us—with just a block of dry ice, some rubbing alcohol, and a few objects you probably already have in your kitchen. What’s more, constructing the cloud chamber only takes about an hour, making it an ideal project for an introductory physics class, for intellectually engaged nonscientists, or even for curious kindergartners (with some adult supervision!). In this interview, engineering professor Anne White discusses the pedagogical usefulness of such hands-on activities—and at the other end of the spectrum, she describes her enthusiasm for a much, much larger physics project, the decades-long effort to put nuclear fusion to practical use as a source of clean power for the world. The interview also touches on Prof. White’s experience of mentorship, both as mentee in her youth and as mentor now, and on the formative influence of childhood toys in paving the way for the kind of creative goal-driven tinkering that nuclear scientists and engineers practice.

Relevant Resources:

Professor White’s faculty page

22.011 Nuclear Engineering: Science, Systems and Society on MIT OpenCourseWare

Anne White's article: Cloud Chamber Kit for Active Learning in a First-Year Undergraduate Nuclear Science Seminar Class (PDF)

PBS NOVA video on making a kitchen cloud chamber

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Honoring Your Native Language with Prof. Michel DeGraff

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

We first interviewed Professor Michel DeGraff back in season 1; he now returns for another episode, diving deeper into issues of culture and identity. He talks about his childhood in Haiti, where he was punished at school for speaking his own mother tongue, and where he was taught by his teachers and even his parents that Kreyòl was not “a real language.” After doing early work in natural language processing that led him to question widespread assumptions about language, Prof. DeGraff shifted his academic focus to linguistics. He now begins each iteration of his course 24.908 Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities by asking his students to write linguistic autobiographies that describe the languages they grew up speaking and examine their own attitudes about language. In addition to discussing that course, he talks in this episode about his efforts to draw attention to language’s role in perpetuating imbalances of power. As an added bonus, we hear from two students from 24.908, discussing how Prof. DeGraff helped cultivate trust in the classroom, and how that trust freed the students to enrich each other’s understanding of the world by sharing personal experiences and insights.

*English Translation of Prof. Michel DeGraff’s Kreyòl Statement:

So, my fellow countrymen,

There's something that is very VERY important to understand:

we must understand the origins of prejudices against Kreyòl.

We must also remember that Dessalines said, so clearly,

that everyone is human. And he also knew that,

if everyone is human, then every language is a perfectly normal language.

So Kreyòl, too, is a perfectly normal language.

That's why he said, since before 1804,

that Kreyòl is our own language,

so we don't need to always look for other languages to speak.

Yes, we must remember, if we did not have Kreyòl as a language,

we could never have succeeded in making this revolution

that gave us an independent Haiti.

Kreyòl was the language of the revolution.

So, today, we must use

Kreyòl too as language of instruction.

It is this language that will allow all children in Haiti

to access quality education as their right.

Relevant Resources:

Professor DeGraff’s faculty page

24.908 Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities on OpenCourseWare

The MIT-Haiti Initiative

Chalk Radio Season 1 episode with Prof. DeGraff

NY Times op-ed by Prof. DeGraff

Linguistics and Economics in the Caribbean (article by Ianá Ferguson)

Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions (https://www.sessions.blue/)

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Sustainability Education Across Learning Environments with Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers

Wed, 5 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Many people associate the word “sustainability” with a few specific activities such as composting or recycling. Our guests for this episode, Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers, point out that sustainability is actually much broader, encompassing all the future-oriented practices that promote the continued flourishing of individuals, cultures, and life on earth. Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers have sought not only to make education a tool for sustainability but to make it a sustainable activity itself. In this episode, they describe how they created the Sustainability and Climate Change Across Learning Environments (SCALES) project, a curated repository of open-source, easily adaptable educational resources, many of them originally adapted from course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare. These resources, which are categorized according to a set of six main pedagogical approaches and six chief competency areas, draw from a surprisingly wide range of academic fields, but each was selected for its potential to support sustainability in the classroom and in the world. After all, Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers say, sustainability is an inherently interdisciplinary subject, one that can inform–and be informed by–teaching in nearly any field of study.

Relevant Resources:

Dr. Potter-Nelson’s website

Sarah Meyers at MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative

Teaching with Sustainability resource on OpenCourseWare

The SCALES Project

Dr. Potter-Nelson’s white paper on sustainability education

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Teaching Teachers with Dr. Summer Morrill

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Nobody comes into this world already knowing how to teach—and most students arrive at undergraduate or graduate programs without any teaching experience at all. For those who are selected to be teaching assistants, the prospect of facing a classroom of students for the first time can be terrifying. To assuage those fears and provide pedagogical skills, the Biology department at MIT runs a training program for new TAs; our guest Dr. Summer Morrill helped develop the curriculum for that program, as well as serving as an instructor in it. In this episode, Dr. Morrill describes how she designed the content of the training program to reflect the specific challenges Biology TAs typically face in their first semester. Among the topics she discusses are the importance of empathy and inclusiveness in classroom teaching, how the same habits of thought that make effective biologists can also make especially effective teachers, and ways in which the course materials from the training program (which she is sharing in a forthcoming supplemental resource on OCW), would lend themselves to being usefully adapted for training TAs in other disciplines and at other institutions.

Relevant Resources:

RES.7-005 Biology Teaching Assistant (TA) Training on OCW

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Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Communication is the Whole Game with Paige Bright & Prof. Haynes Miller

Wed, 8 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In this episode we meet Haynes Miller, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, who in his 35+ years of active teaching at MIT has done much to shape the institute’s math curriculum. Prof. Miller’s special focus is algebraic topology, but his teaching has encompassed a wide range of other topics from differential equations to number theory, and he has a special interest in teaching undergraduates. Join us as Prof. Miller discusses math education with guest host Paige Bright, a current MIT third-year student who was one of his students in a first-year seminar and who has since acquired teaching experience of her own as the instructor for the course Introduction to Metric Spaces during the Independent Activities Period in January 2022 and 2023. Among the topics they cover in this discussion are the importance of communication in mathematics, Prof. Miller’s use of computer manipulatives (which he calls “mathlets”) to engage students more actively, what “lab work” means in the context of pure mathematics, how instructors from different institutions have come together online to discuss ways to improve undergraduate math education, and what happens when you ask students to switch roles and become teachers.

Relevant Resources:

18.03 Differential Equations on OCW

18.821 Project Laboratory in Mathematics on OCW

18.915 Graduate Topology Seminar: Kan Seminar on OCW

Paige Bright’s course 18.S190 Introduction to Metric Spaces on OCW

Prof. Miller’s faculty page

Prof. Miller’s “manipulatives” at mathlets.org

Online Seminar on Undergraduate Mathematics Education (OLSUME)

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Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Opening Computer Science to Everyone with Chancellor Eric Grimson

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Eric Grimson is MIT’s chancellor for academic advancement and interim vice president for Open Learning; he’s also a longstanding professor of computer science and medical engineering. In this episode, Prof. Grimson shares his thoughts on in-person and online education. We learn that he rehearses each lecture one, two, or even three times before coming to the classroom, and that he often pauses in his speech when lecturing to avoid distracting his students with “um”s and “ah”s and similar disfluencies. But though some of the techniques he describes might seem to reflect a view of teaching as performance, Grimson firmly believes that education should be a dialogue rather than a monologue—that students should be engaged as partners in the exploration of the material, even in an introductory-level class. “Anybody with enough curiosity ought to be able to explore a field,” he says, “and we ought to be able to teach at a level that opens it up to them.” The same conviction underlies his commitment to sharing his expertise online, whether by publishing his course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare or through purpose-built MOOCs on MITx. [Warning: this episode also includes numerous bad jokes!]

Relevant Resources:

6.0001 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python on OCW

6.0002 Introduction To Computational Thinking And Data Science on OCW

Professor Grimson’s faculty page

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Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Seeing Green with Drs. Sandland and Chazot

Wed, 8 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

MIT has long been an innovator in online education. For even longer—for its whole history, in fact—it has championed hands-on learning. These two emphases may seem incompatible, but the MICRO initiative draws on both in an effort to increase diversity within the field of materials science. Dr. Jessica Sandland and Dr. Cécile Chazot, our guests for this episode, describe how MICRO recruits undergraduates from minoritized backgrounds to do impactful research remotely in collaboration with MIT researchers. Dr. Sandland and Dr. Chazot see this collaboration as a mutually beneficial relationship: the MICRO students gain valuable experience in cutting-edge research, as well as an introduction to a field they may not have had the opportunity to study previously, while the MIT researchers benefit both from the students’ work on the projects and from the fresh perspectives they bring to the field. In this episode, we also hear how MICRO supports participants’ professional development with guidance from “near-peer” grad-student mentors, who provide help not only in technical matters but also in developing soft skills such as writing abstracts or defining questions for research.

Relevant Resources:

Abstracts of research by MICRO participants

MICRO resource on OCW

Mentoring worksheets:

Apply to MICRO

Dr. Sandland’s faculty page

Dr. Chazot’s website

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Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Well-being is the Goal with Prof. Frank Schilbach

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Do you always make the best possible choices, even when you’re stressed or short on sleep? The ideally rational person (“Homo economicus”) assumed by conventional economics always acts in ways that are materially advantageous to them. But Associate Professor Frank Schilbach seeks in his research and teaching to explore the ways in which Homo economicus fails as a model of actual human behavior; in particular, Prof. Schilbach is interested in uncovering the psychological factors that influence people’s choices, even when those choices appear obviously counterproductive and irrational. In this episode, Prof. Schilbach discusses how psychologically-informed interventions can not only boost people’s productivity, earnings, and savings, but can even increase their tendency toward benevolence and cooperation. As he puts it, while economists have not ignored mental health altogether, they have tended to view it instrumentally, in terms of its effects on productivity or financial stability. It would be better, he suggests, to view mental health as valuable for its own sake, as an inherent element of overall well-being–which is why he prioritizes students’ mental health by making assignments due not first thing in the morning but at 6 or 8 PM!

Relevant Resources:

Professor Schilbach’s behavioral economics course on OCW

Professor Schilbach’s faculty page

Professor Schilbach at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

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If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits:

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

The Greatest Existential Threat with Prof. Robert Redwine and Dr. Jim Walsh

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0000

To most people, especially those who are too young to remember the Cold War, the possibility of nuclear Armageddon may seem so remote as not to be worth contemplating. But Prof. Bob Redwine and Jim Walsh, two of the instructors behind MIT’s Nuclear Weapons Education Project (NWEP), warn that it may not be so unlikely after all, and that failure to take the threat of nuclear war seriously makes it more likely that it will actually occur. Redwine, Walsh, and their colleagues used their expertise from a wide array of fields to create the NWEP and its associated course 8.S271 Nuclear Weapons – History and Prospects. Together, the course and the project website represent an interdisciplinary effort to educate nonspecialists on the science, technology, and history of nuclear weapons, along with present efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and to reach international agreements to reduce the likelihood of a world-devastating conflict. In this episode, we hear how the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed geopolitics forever, how a well-intentioned nuclear doctrine may have disastrous unintended consequences, and why understanding the topic of nuclear weapons requires an interdisciplinary approach.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Redwine’s faculty page

Jim Walsh’s faculty page

8.S271 Nuclear Weapons - History and Future Prospects on OCW

Nuclear Weapons Education Project website

“Nuclear Gets Personal with Prof. Michael Short” (Chalk Radio episode)

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If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Visualizing Calculus with Professor Gigliola Staffilani

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Professor Gigliola Staffilani, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Mathematics, was closely involved in designing and teaching the introductory-level 18.01 Calculus I course series now found on the MIT Open Learning Library. She’s also been involved in teaching calculus to students on campus. To help students become proficient in a notoriously intimidating subject, she has tried to design learning experiences that bridge the gap between the pure abstractions that mathematicians love, exemplified by the use of conventional notation such as x, y, and f(x), and the concrete real-world situations in which calculus is typically applied in other fields such as chemistry or physics. In this episode, Prof. Staffilani discusses her efforts to make calculus less abstract and more intuitive for learners–efforts that draw on a diverse mix of teaching tools and props: digital applets, sketching tools, bagels, croissants, donuts, and even a balloon in a box. She also discusses her commitment to increasing equity and fighting implicit bias in her field.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Staffilani’s faculty page

Single variable calculus courses on MIT’s Open Learning Library

18.01 Calculus I: Single Variable Calculus on OCW

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If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Finding Expertise Everywhere with Prof. M. Amah Edoh

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Though there’s widespread consensus that the slavery and colonization that characterize the history of European relations with Africa represent a legacy of grave injustice, there is much less agreement on how to redress that injustice. Professor M. Amah Edoh, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Anthropology, designed the course 21A.S01 Reparations for Slavery and Colonization with the goal of honestly facing the historical record and openly discussing how best to respond. Because she believes expertise is too often conceived of as something that flows “north-south” from the developed nations toward the developing world, she structured the course to embrace expertise wherever it might be found—recruiting guest lecturers from various disciplines and from institutions around the world, as well as activists currently involved in the quest for reparative justice. She even went a step further, sharing the lecture videos on YouTube while the semester was still ongoing and inviting viewers to contribute their own insights into how to deal with the ongoing legacy of historical wrongs. In this episode, Prof. Edoh describes the motivation for this innovative course structure and reflects on the challenges of grappling with such a sensitive subject.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Edoh’s faculty page

Course materials by Professor Edoh on OCW

21A.S01 Reparations for Slavery and Colonization on OCW

Open Learning story on 21A.S01

OCW YouTube playlist for 21A.S01

Africa’s Expertise (YouTube lecture by Prof Edoh)

African Futures Action Lab

How Africa Has Been Made to Mean (2020 episode of Chalk Radio)

RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education)

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer (https://twitter.com/learning_sarah)

Brett Paci, producer (https://twitter.com/Brett_Paci)

Dave Lishansky, producer (https://twitter.com/DaveResonates)

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

AI Literacy for All with Prof. Cynthia Breazeal

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000

When humans interact, they don’t just pass information from one to the other; there’s always some relational element, with the participants responding to each other’s emotional cues. Professor Cynthia Breazeal, MIT’s new Dean of Digital Learning, believes it’s possible to design this element into human-computer interactions as well. She foresees a day when AI won’t merely perform practical tasks for us, but also will provide us with companionship, emotional comfort, and even mental health support. But a future of closer human-AI collaborative relationships doesn’t only require technological development—it also requires us to learn what AI is capable of and how to interact with it in a more informed way. To further this goal, Professor Breazeal leads the Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) initiative at MIT, which runs an annual “Day of AI” program to promote better understanding of AI in the next generation of technology users and developers. In this episode, she describes those projects as well as her work developing the groundbreaking social robots Kismet and Jibo, prototypes of what she calls “warm tech”—AI-enabled devices designed to be engaging, expressive, and personal.

Relevant Resources:

Day of AI

Professor Breazeal’s faculty page

Professor Breazeal named Dean of Digital Learning

Professor Breazeal introduces Jibo (YouTube video)

The Rise of Personal Robotics (TED talk by Professor Breazeal)

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseWare, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Nidhi Shastri and Aubrey Calloway, scriptwriters

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Making Ethical Decisions in Software Design with Prof. Daniel Jackson & Serena Booth

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000

In the previous episode we learned about a project undertaken as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative at MIT’s Schwartzman College of Computing. In this episode we hear about another SERC project, from Prof. Daniel Jackson and graduate teaching assistant Serena Booth, who have partnered to incorporate ethical considerations in Prof. Jackson and Prof. Arvind Satyanarayan’s course 6.170 Software Studio. Jackson and Booth explain that software can fail its users in three ways: First, it can simply work badly, failing to meet the purpose it was intended for. Second, it may do what the user wants it to, while simultaneously accomplishing some insidious purpose that the user is unaware of. Third, as Prof. Jackson puts it, it may “contribute to a computational environment that has subtly pernicious effects” on the individual or on society—effects unintended not only by the user but also by the software designer. In their revised syllabus for 6.170, Jackson and Booth attempt to address these second and third types of failure by introducing ethical concerns early in the course and by sharing an ethics protocol to scaffold students’ decision-making throughout the software design process.

Relevant Resources:

Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) resource on OpenCourseWare

6.170 Software Studio ethics assignments

SERC website

Professor Jackson’s faculty page

Serena Booth’s personal website

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

The Human Element in Machine Learning with Prof. Catherine D’Ignazio, Prof. Jacob Andreas & Harini Suresh

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

When computer science was in its infancy, programmers quickly realized that though computers are astonishingly powerful tools, the results they achieve are only as good as the data you feed into them. (This principle was quickly formalized as GIGO: “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”) What was true in the era of the UNIVAC has proved still to be true in the era of machine learning: among other well-publicized AI fiascos, chatbots that have interacted with bigots have learned to spew racist invective, while facial-recognition software trained solely on images of white people sometimes fails to recognize people of color as human. In this episode, we meet Prof. Catherine D’Ignazio of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and Prof. Jacob Andreas and Harini Suresh of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 2021, D’Ignazio, Andreas, and Suresh collaborated as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing initiative from the Schwarzman College of Computing in a project to teach computer science students in 6.864 Natural Language Processing to recognize how deep learning systems can replicate and magnify the biases inherent in the data sets that are used to train them.

Relevant Resources:

Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) resource on OpenCourseWare

Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing

SERC website

Professor D’Ignazio’s faculty page

Professor Andreas’s faculty page

Harini Suresh’s personal website

Desmond Patton’s paper on analysis of communications on Twitter

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseWare, donate to help keep those programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Script writing assistance by Aubrey Calaway

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

When There Isn't A Simple Answer with Prof. Dennis McLaughlin

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Most of the students in Professor Dennis McLaughlin’s course 1.74 Land, Water, Food, and Climate come to it with established opinions on some very controversial topics: whether GMOs are safe, whether climate change is real (and really human-induced), whether organic agriculture is preferable to conventional agriculture, and whether it’s better for land to be worked by individual farmers or by larger corporations. Dealing with topics like these in an introductory graduate-level class can be challenging. You have to train students to read the scientific literature so that they can evaluate the facts on both sides of an issue. But you also have to strike a balance between those concrete facts and the intangible social values that enter into debates on sensitive topics. In this episode, Professor McLaughlin describes his approach to those two challenges in teaching 1.74; he also explains how a diversity of backgrounds among the students in the class enriches class discussion, and he describes what he sees as the teacher’s role: to adjust and when necessary reframe the terms of discussion, while still allowing students the freedom to explore the ramifications of their ideas.

Relevant Resources:

Share your teaching ideas and insights with Dennis McLaughlin

Professor McLaughlin’s course on OCW

Professor McLaughlin’s faculty page

Other environment courses on OCW

The MIT Climate Portal

Connect with Curt Newton at LinkedIn or Twitter

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Script writing assistance by Nidhi Shastri

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Learning about Life through Laboratory Chemistry with Drs. John Dolhun & Sarah Hewett

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Students in MIT’s course 5.310 Laboratory Chemistry have a state-of-the art lab to work in, with energy-saving hibernating fume hoods and a new spectrometer that achieves mind-blowingly precise measurements—not parts per million or parts per billion, but parts per trillion! And the students do spend much of their time in that new lab. But Dr. John Dolhun, director of the Undergraduate Chemistry Teaching Labs at MIT, who taught 5.310 for many years, and Dr. Sarah Hewett, who currently teaches it, make sure that the course doesn’t take place entirely behind closed doors. One of the lab activities involves collecting water samples from the Charles River and analyzing them for dissolved oxygen and contaminants such as phosphates. This activity, named the “Ellen Swallow Richards Lab” after an environmental chemist who was also the first female student at MIT, ensures that the coursework is grounded in real-world concerns. In this episode, Dr. Dolhun and Dr. Hewett discuss that lab and other topics, such as how to teach perseverance, why their course emphasizes ways of communicating science to an audience of nonscientists, and the importance of sharing educational resources.

Relevant Resources

Share your teaching ideas and insights with John Dolhun and Sarah Hewett

Dr. Dolhun and Dr. Hewett’s course on OCW

ChemLab Boot Camp video series on OCW

Ellen Swallow Richards biography at Wikipedia

MIT Spectrum article on the new undergraduate chemistry labs

MIT News article on energy-saving measures in the undergraduate chemistry labs

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

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Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, please donate to help keep those programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Script writing assistance by Aubrey Calaway

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Re-engineering Education with VP for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma

Wed, 1 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Sanjay Sarma is not only a professor of mechanical engineering; he’s also Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, where he oversees innovative efforts to reimagine education, and he is coauthor (with Luke Yoquinto) of the recent book Grasp, which explores the nature of learning. In this episode, Professor Sarma discusses the differences between nominal learning, in which you memorize a fact or procedure but soon forget it, and real learning, in which you can effectively apply the skills and concepts you’ve previously mastered. When the format of education is consistent with what science tells us about how our brains store and retrieve information, Sarma says, real learning can be optimized. He argues that well-designed platforms for online learning are a vital resource for people worldwide who lack access to in-person education—like a glass of water to someone in a desert. But he also sees online learning as an indispensable tool for in-person education, allowing innovations that help to maximize the value of students’ and instructors’ time together, and he is optimistic about the potential value of online learning credentials as a pathway toward in-person degrees.

Relevant Resources:

Sanjay Sarma & Luke Yoquinto’s xTalk on Grasp

Professor Sarma’s course on OCW

Professor Sarma’s faculty page

Professor Sarma at MIT Open Learning

Professor Sarma’s book Grasp

Micromasters programs from MITx

Connect with Us:

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current:

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW:

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits:

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Script writing assistance from Nidhi Shastri

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Sketching a Picture of the Mind with Prof. Nancy Kanwisher

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 11:27:39 +0000

Nancy Kanwisher, founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, describes the effort to understand the mind as “the grandest scientific quest of all time,” partly because it seeks to answer fundamental questions that all people ponder from time to time: What is knowledge? How does memory work? How do we form our perceptions of the world? In this episode, Prof. Kanwisher gives a nutshell history of her field and describes how scientists use imaging techniques to study the brain structures involved in different cognitive skills. She also reflects on the usefulness of personal anecdotes as a teaching technique in courses like her 9.13 The Human Brain. Kanwisher believes scientists have a moral obligation to share the results of their research with the world—which may explain why she has published her course materials for 9.13 on OpenCourseWare—but she doesn’t see that sharing as an onerous responsibility. “The stuff I do is easily shareable with people,” she says, “but it’s also fun. It’s really fun to get an idea across and see somebody resonate to it.”

Relevant Resources

Share your teaching ideas and insights with Nancy Kanwisher

Professor Kanwisher’s course on OCW (9.13 The Human Brain)

Professor Kanwisher at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research

Professor Kanwisher’s series of short videos on brain science

Contribute Your Ideas to Contemporary Movements for Justice

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer (https://twitter.com/learning_sarah)

Brett Paci, producer (https://twitter.com/Brett_Paci)

Dave Lishansky, producer (https://twitter.com/DaveResonates)

Script writing assistance from Nidhi Shastri

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Prof. Edoh Wants to Know What You Think

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Brett Paci, Amah Edoh, Dave Lishansky) — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Contemporary Movements for Justice is an MIT course in which scholars and activists speak about pursuing justice for European colonialism in Africa and its contemporary legacies.

Do you have ideas that could help shape these discussions? If so, please participate in this new OCW opportunity. Watch course lectures online at the same time as MIT students. No registration required, and it’s completely free. Then share your ideas by following the link below. Professor Edoh will incorporate your questions and comments into the offline discussions that happen in class. After each class discussion she'll pin a summary comment on each video on YouTube so you can see how your contributions informed the conversation.

The next course module is on the efforts of a group of Afro-descended Belgian activists to hold accountable a commission that was established to examine Belgium’s colonial past in Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda. Tune in to the OCW YouTube channel throughout November 2021 to watch videos from experts speaking about transitional and reparative justice in this context. You can find a complete schedule of the lectures for the course below.

Amah Edoh is the Homer A. Burnell Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at MIT. Last year she was the winner of the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She has previously appeared on the Chalk Radio podcast (and been profiled in Open Matters) discussing her course 21G.026 Global Africa: Creative Cultures. In addition to that course, OCW also has published the materials from Professor Edoh’s 21G.025 Africa and the Politics of Knowledge.

Relevant Resources:

Contemporary Movements for Justice Video Playlist

Professor Edoh's Faculty Page

Lecture Schedule:

October

November

Relevance of a Transitional Justice Framework to Address Belgium's Colonial Past (coming soon)
Accessing Archives to Make Claims (coming soon)

Connect with Us:

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us at 617-715-2517

Stay Current:

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW:

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!

Credits:

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Building Our Muscle for Democracy (Prof. Ceasar McDowell)

Thu, 3 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000

The classic New England town meeting, with voters gathered in a large hall to decide issues directly, is often cited as the purest form of American democracy. But historically, those town meetings gave a voice only to certain classes of people. In this episode we meet Ceasar McDowell, Professor of the Practice of Community Development at MIT and newly appointed associate director of MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication. Prof. McDowell has devoted his career to nurturing a more vibrant, inclusive democracy, one adapted to the complex reality of a modern, largely urbanized America. In his course 11.312 Engaging Community (coming soon to OpenCourseWare), he helps his students use the tools of civic design to craft forms of community engagement and decision-making that will bring everyone into the conversation, even those on the margins of our society. In keeping with his commitment to collaborative effort, Prof. McDowell encourages his students to propose specific real-life problems they’re interested in, and to decide collectively which ones to address in the class. “We have to learn to talk to each other,” he says. “Yes, this is hard work, and yes, you can do it.”

Relevant Resources:

Professor McDowell’s faculty page

MIT's Center for Constructive Communication

We Who Engage (blog)

We Who Engage (podcast episodes)

We Who Engage (Instagram)

America’s Path Forward

Civic Design Framework

Connect with Us:

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us at 617-715-2517

Stay Current:

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW:

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!

Credits:

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

In Climate Conversations, Empathy is Everything (Brandon Leshchinskiy)

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 09:00:00 +0000

In our previous episode we met Professor Dava Newman, cofounder of the nonprofit group EarthDNA. Today’s guest is Brandon Leshchinskiy, a graduate student in Technology and Policy at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, who has helped Prof. Newman create the EarthDNA Ambassadors program, training young people in communication, negotiation, and storytelling to build support for individual and collective action on climate change. Leshchinskiy has crafted an engaging interactive presentation, called Climate 101, that creatively employs materials from various sources to examine climate change from scientific, economic, and civic perspectives. By teaching young people to deliver this presentation effectively, he is developing a cohort of trained climate educators who can in turn teach their peers to reach out to friends and family on one of humanity’s most pressing issues. In this episode, Leshchinskiy discusses why young people make effective climate ambassadors, how climate presentations can be made more powerful by customizing them with specific details that are relevant to people’s own communities, what we can learn from society’s response to the challenges of Covid-19, and how to avoid developing “doom fatigue” from exposure to negative news stories.

Relevant Resources

OCW’s 20th anniversary celebration registration page

EarthDNA’s Climate 101 on OCW

EarthDNA on the Web

EarthDNA Ambassadors program

Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Prize winner)

“I will be a hummingbird” (YouTube video)

Professor Dava Newman at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Rand Wentworth at Harvard’s Center for the Environment

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Visualizing the Future of Spaceship Earth (Prof. Dava Newman)

Wed, 3 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Professor Dava Newman is an aerospace engineer whose career has largely focused on developing improved space suits for eventual interplanetary travel. But in recent years she has turned her sights back toward Earth, using the vast amounts of data collected by satellites in near space to inform and motivate the public for the fight against catastrophic climate change. In this episode, Prof. Newman fields listener-submitted questions about climate change and also talks more specifically about EarthDNA, a nonprofit startup she co-founded to serve as a platform for climate advocacy and action. EarthDNA aims to curate petabytes of data and presents it in eye-catching visualizations structured around the four major subsystems of our home planet—oceans, land, air, and near space. But it won’t just present the facts; it also seeks to steer users toward actions and activities that will make a difference. One of the chief goals for the platform is to provide personalized information that is relevant to the user’s specific interests and geographic location because, as Prof. Newman explains, we all care most about what’s happening in our own backyards or in the places that are important to us.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Newman’s climate resources on OCW

EarthDNA on the Web

Professor Newman’s aerospace engineering course on OCW

Professor Newman at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Encountering Each Other (Essayist Garnette Cadogan)

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Dave Lishansky, Brett Paci, Garnette Cadogan) — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Garnette Cadogan is an acclaimed essayist who teaches in MIT’s Urban Studies and Planning program. As befits a teacher who is also a professional creative writer, he conceives of the academic syllabus as a matrix of interconnected and recurring themes and leitmotifs, not as a schematic outline of self-contained units. In this episode, he describes how he designed his latest class, 11.S947 The Fire This Time: Race and Racism in American Cities, to draw on a wide range of cultural documents—not only written texts but also standup comedy, song, poetry, and film—to de-simplify students’ understanding of racial relations. Too often, he says, the struggle for social justice is presented in terms of a teleological progression toward freedom and inclusion, and too often victimization is presented as if it were the only experience of those on the receiving end of racism’s injustices. Oppression dehumanizes everyone, oppressor and oppressed alike, Cadogan says, but it isn’t the sum total of anyone’s being. He hopes this class will help students encounter the experiences of others in their full human complexity of joy, hope, pessimism, struggle, and imagination.

Relevant Resources

Garnette Cadogan’s course 1.S947 The Fire This Time: Race and Racism in American Cities -- coming soon!

Garnette Cadogan’s course 11.S948 Seeing the City Afresh on OCW

Garnette Cadogan’s essay “Walking While Black”

Garnette Cadogan’s faculty page

Watch MIT’s 47th Annual MLK Jr Celebration to hear more voices on the role of joy in the struggle against systemic racism

Read Honing My Knife Skills, an essay by Sharon Lin, one of Garnette Cadogan's students in the course, The Fire This Time

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Seeing the Big Picture from Space (Astronaut Jeff Hoffman)

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Over the years, Sarah Hansen has interviewed the creator of the “Women of NASA” minifigure series as well as a professor of astronautics and former deputy administrator of NASA. Now, for the first time, she interviews an actual astronaut, Jeff Hoffman, who teaches aerospace engineering and systems engineering at MIT. In this episode, Prof. Hoffman describes his experiences in space and how one’s understanding of the world is changed by seeing it from the outside, as a finite sphere, with our seemingly boundless sky revealed as just a thin layer of breathable atmosphere. So far this broadening of physical perspective has been limited to a select few, but Prof. Hoffman tries to achieve an analogous broadening in his students’ mental perspective by introducing them to the Conceive Design Implement Operate (CDIO) framework, an approach to engineering education that uses student-designed-and-built projects to develop teamwork and professionalism and to help students envision the big picture of the systems being designed: what they are intended to be and how they will be used in the real world by actual people, whether on the ground or in the vacuum of space.

Relevant Resources

Professor Hoffman’s systems engineering course on OCW

Professor Hoffman’s aerospace engineering course on MIT’s Open Learning Library

Professor Hoffman’s full video interview with Sarah Hansen

Professor Hoffman’s faculty page

CDIO approach to engineering education

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Making Solid State Chemistry Matter (Prof. Jeffrey Grossman)

chalkradio@mit.edu (Jeffrey Grossman, Sarah Hansen, Brett Paci) — Wed, 2 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

First-year students who already plan to major in chemistry don’t require any special bells or whistles to motivate them to study the subject. But introductory chemistry is a required subject for all students at MIT, regardless of their intended major, and materials scientist Jeffrey Grossman has found that for many students in his course 3.091 Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, the subject becomes much more accessible if he takes conscious steps to make it real for them. He does this both inside and outside the classroom. First, he makes sure that part of each lecture he delivers explores the connection between the topic of the lecture and his students’ actual experience. Second, he gives students the chance to play around with real-world materials so they can learn the principles of chemistry firsthand. As Professor Grossman explains in this episode, it was by playing around with materials that the very first chemists began to learn about matter and its properties, and this kind of basic experimentation has an inherently multisensory quality that deepens and enriches students’ understanding of the concepts they learn.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Grossman’s course on OCW

Professor Grossman’s faculty page

MIT’s General Institute Requirements (GIRs)

“Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (PDF) (Richard Feynman’s lecture on atomic-scale engineering)

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Searching for the Oldest Stars (Prof. Anna Frebel)

chalkradio@mit.edu (Anna Frebel, Sarah Hansen, Brett Paci) — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:00:00 +0000

For millions of years after the Big Bang, nearly all the matter in the universe was in the form of hydrogen and helium; other elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen only formed later, in nuclear reactions inside stars. To learn what the universe looked like back then, MIT astrophysicist Anna Frebel studies the oldest stars we can find—13 billion years old, to be precise—scanning them for traces of elements that will give a clue to their history. As Professor Frebel explains to Sarah Hansen in this episode, curiosity about the origins of the universe we live in is a profoundly human trait, just like curiosity about one’s own family history. To help communicate to laypeople the wonder and amazement that motivates astronomers like herself, Prof. Frebel has written a book and recorded a companion series of videos, both of which are intentionally designed to be as user-friendly as possible. It doesn’t matter, she says, if viewers and readers don’t grasp all the details; her hope is that they will develop the desire to understand more, and that that desire will spark further learning.

Relevant Resources:

"Cosmic Origin of the Chemical Elements" on OCW

Professor Frebel’s book Searching for the Oldest Stars

Professor Frebel’s faculty page

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If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!

Connect with Us

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If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Paying it Forward with FinTech (Prof. Gary Gensler)

chalkradio@mit.edu (MIT OpenCourseWare) — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000

One might imagine that an expert on financial technology would view human relations through a primarily transactional lens. But Professor Gary Gensler, in teaching his course on financial technology (or “FinTech”) at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, tries to base his interactions with his students on a different model. Feeling indebted to the older mentors who helped and supported him in his student days and his early career, he seeks to repay that debt by nurturing his own students’ intellectual and professional development and by teaching them to do the same for others in years to come. In this episode, Prof. Gensler discusses his teaching philosophy and how he sees his role in the FinTech course as involving the communication of values and respect as much as it involves transmitting knowledge of the course’s up-to-the-minute subject matter. Along the way, he touches on what FinTech is, how artificial intelligence is shaking up the financial sector, and how, when teaching remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, he helped students develop a sense of community.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Gensler’s course on OCW

Professor Gensler’s faculty page

Benjamin Franklin quote referenced by Prof. Gensler

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If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

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

chalkradio@mit.edu (Elizabeth Siler, Sarah Hansen, Mary Rowe) — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 09:00:07 +0000

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. 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.

Relevant Resources:

Mary Rowe’s MIT faculty page

Elizabeth Siler’s Worcester State University faculty page

15.667 Negotiation and Conflict Management on OCW

Dealing with an Aggressive Competitive Negotiator case study [PDF]

Guidelines for writing a Perceived Injurious Experience letter [PDF]

Other negotiation courses on OCW

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If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Thinking Like an Economist with Prof. Jonathan Gruber

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Jonathan Gruber) — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 09:00:01 +0000

Professor Jonathan Gruber wants to train students to think like economists. Economics uses elegant mathematical models to explain how people make decisions and allocate their resources—but all too often those models are taught in ways that remain disconnected from students’ own experience. In this episode, Professor Gruber shares his thoughts on bridging that gap in his course 14.01 Introductory Microeconomics. He says he tries to anchor the course with real-world examples; as he explains, “You only really understand something when you go out in the real world and apply it.” And those examples, he says, have to be relatable. So rather than discussing companies none of his students have heard of or commodities nobody cares about, he illustrates fundamental economic concepts with examples like Kim Kardashian’s exercise corset, Uber’s policy of surge pricing, and LeBron James’s decision not to attend college. By engaging students with accessible examples of economic principles in action, Professor Gruber helps them develop economic intuition—a sense of how the mathematical models apply in the real, seemingly chaotic world. If you’ve always thought economics was boring, listen in on this podcast. It may change your mind!

Relevant Resources:

Professor Gruber’s Scholar course on OCW

Professor Gruber’s microeconomics course on EdX

Professor Gruber’s faculty page

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Learning to Fly with Drs. Philip Greenspun & Tina Srivastava

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Philip Greenspun, Tina Srivastava) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 09:00:16 +0000

Can you really learn to fly by sitting in a classroom and attending lectures? Of course not! But the course offered by Philip Greenspun and Tina Srivastava in 16.687 Private Pilot Ground School has proven surprisingly popular as a means of learning the basic principles one needs to know before getting into the cockpit of a small aircraft. Originally offered in weekly class sessions over the course of a semester, 16.687 has evolved over the years; it now takes the form of an immersive three-day classroom experience. In this episode, Greenspun and Srivastava discuss how they’ve maintained flexibility in their teaching while still making sure they cover the standard body of material that prospective pilots are required to master. They also explain why they feel that online study can’t completely substitute for the in-person learning experience: to be a pilot, one needs not only to learn facts but also to become comfortable with decision-making in the quickly changing circumstances presented by flying planes. This skill, Greenspun and Srivastava say, is much harder to acquire through individual study than in the interactive environment of a classroom discussion.

Relevant Resources:

Private Pilot Ground School course on OCW

MIT Flying Club

FAA website: Become a Pilot

Flight manuals available online

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Unpacking Misconceptions about Language & Identities with Prof. Michel DeGraff

chalkradio@mit.edu (Michel DeGraff, Sarah Hansen) — Wed, 27 May 2020 09:00:21 +0000

“We all hold dear certain attitudes about language,” Professor Michel DeGraff says in this episode centered on his course 24.908 Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities. Those attitudes can be positive for ourselves and for others, DeGraff says, but they can also have negative effects. His goal is to make linguistics accessible to a broader audience, to connect language to issues of culture and identity, and to show how language prejudices are rooted in hierarchies of power. Specifically, he seeks to increase public awareness that the creoles of the Caribbean, like his native Haitian Creole (or Kreyòl), are fully developed languages worthy of as much respect as higher-prestige languages like French or English. To pursue this goal, he promotes dual-language education for Haitian-American students, and he himself speaks Kreyòl in as many public forums as possible—including in the videos on the OpenCourseWare site for his course, and at various points in this podcast itself! At the same time, as he explains, he encourages his students to examine their own backgrounds to see how their attitudes about the languages they speak have been shaped by explicit or implicit attitudes about culture and identity.

Relevant Resources:

Professor DeGraff’s course on OCW

Professor DeGraff’s faculty page

The MIT-Haiti Initiative

English / Haitian Creole dual-language kindergarten in Boston

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Special Episode: Teaching Remotely During Covid-19 with Prof. Justin Reich

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Justin Reich) — Wed, 13 May 2020 09:00:06 +0000

Join us as we talk with Justin Reich, assistant professor in comparative media studies at MIT. Professor Reich runs the Teaching Systems Lab, which was founded with the mission of designing, implementing, and researching the future of teacher learning. With the emergence of the current coronavirus pandemic, Prof. Reich has been turning his attention to helping teachers and education policy makers figure out how to transition rapidly to remote learning. In this special episode of Chalk Radio, Prof. Reich discusses the need for teachers to use a balance between asynchronous materials and synchronous check-ins, the challenge of making home learning equitable for students, and the value of existing open educational resources (like the materials on OCW!) for teachers who are suddenly forced to teach their classes remotely. “It’s totally normal to struggle during a pandemic,” Reich says, but he reassures teachers and parents that effective education at home may look different from effective in-school education—we simply need to recognize and cultivate the kinds of learning that can happen best under these extraordinary circumstances.

Relevant Resources:

The Teaching Systems Lab

Professor Reich’s faculty page

Professor Reich’s TeachLab podcast

Interview with Prof. Reich on WBUR’s “On Point”

Resources, tools, and support for teaching remotely at MIT

Support remote learning by donating to OCW

Support OCW by sharing your story

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Hands-on, Minds On with Dr. Christopher Terman

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Christopher Terman) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:00:14 +0000

You might imagine that fluency is an inherently good thing in teaching. But Dr. Christopher Terman, Senior Lecturer Emeritus at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, explains that breaks in the flow of the classroom can actually make the learning experience more memorable. This is just one of the insights Dr. Terman has gained in twenty years of teaching the course 6.004 Computation Structures. “If you’re going to spend 40% of your time in the classroom,” he says, “you might as well teach well.” He and the rest of the teaching team for 6.004 are always seeking to optimize their students’ learning experience, adapting the course through repeated iterations to include as much as possible of what they’ve found works best. Among the details Dr. Terman shares in this episode are how the course engages students from different backgrounds by offering a “buffet” of learning materials through the use of the MITx learning platform, how creating hands-on browser-based digital design lab experiences help students internalize the material, and how online forums reduce student frustration by offering quicker answers to questions that arise outside of class.

Relevant Resources

Dr. Terman’s Faculty Page

6.004 on OCW

Enhance your teaching at MIT with the MITx Residential Platform

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Film Is for Everyone with Prof. David Thorburn

chalkradio@mit.edu (David Thorburn, Sarah Hansen) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 09:00:04 +0000

What would Shakespeare have made of today’s popular television shows? He might or might not like them, but he wouldn’t dismiss them simply because they’re popular. In this episode, Professor David Thorburn, who has spent his career challenging conventional assumptions about what kinds of works have artistic merit, speaks eloquently about why popular art forms like film and television belong in the classroom. He explains that in his course 21L.011 The Film Experience, which he has taught at MIT for over 35 years, he strives to reframe classic works for modern audiences—with “classic works” in this context meaning everything from Charlie Chaplin comedies to Technicolor musicals, Hitchcock thrillers, and Japanese samurai movies. Professor Thorburn hopes that his lectures, which are available in full on MIT OpenCourseWare, will help as many students as possible to know how to enjoy the movies more richly, regardless of their intended major. In passing, he talks about topics as various as the usefulness of lectures as an educational technique, the difficulty of imagining a world without iPads, the universality of “All in the Family,” and his admiration for Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Thorburn’s course on OCW

A profile of Professor Thorburn

Knots, Professor Thorburn’s first book of poetry

Wikipedia article on Jean Renoir

Wikipedia article on Claude Monet’s cathedral paintings

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Social Impact at Scale, One Project at a Time with Dr. Anjali Sastry

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Anjali Sastry) — Wed, 1 Apr 2020 09:00:02 +0000

This episode explores a new kind of independent study. MIT has traditionally encouraged its Sloan MBA fellows to engage in international projects with partners around the globe. Our guest, Dr. Anjali Sastry, has led over 100 groups of MBA fellows in these projects. But she recently changed the structure of the class so that instead of signing on to projects developed by instructors, students are now able to develop their own projects based on their own interests. All the new projects in this course called 15.960 New Executive Thinking Social-Impact Projects involve applying technology in new ways to find solutions to common problems worldwide. In one project, for example, a student employed data analytics to improve financing prospects for small-scale farmers in Brazil and elsewhere. Sastry finds that mentoring a variety of students with disparate interests presents a real challenge, because it often involves working in areas beyond her own area of expertise. And keeping track of the various projects required her to develop a very structured process for students to use in reporting their progress. It’s worth the extra effort, though it isn’t easy, says Sastry. “Teaching this way is incredibly rewarding, and also really scary.”

Relevant Resources:

Dr. Sastry’s Social-Impact course on OCW

Other courses by Dr. Sastry on OCW

Dr. Sastry's MITx course on Business and Impact Planning for Social Enterprises

Dr. Sastry’s faculty page

Sloan Fellows MBA Program

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Making Deep Learning Human with Prof. Gilbert Strang

chalkradio@mit.edu (Gilbert Strang, Sarah Hansen) — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 09:00:13 +0000

Mathematics Professor Gilbert Strang is one of MIT’s most revered instructors; his courses, especially the perennially popular linear algebra course 18.06, have received millions of visits on OpenCourseWare, and his lecture videos have won him a devoted following on YouTube as well. (A sample YouTube comment on one of his lectures: “This is not lecture, this is art.”) A few years ago, Professor Strang began teaching a new course (18.065) focusing on the application of mathematical matrices to deep learning and AI. This new course is very unlike a typical undergraduate math course. For one thing, there’s no final exam—in fact, there are no exams at all! Instead, Professor Strang asks each student to spend the semester developing a project that applies the techniques they’re studying to some topic or problem they personally find interesting. In this episode, we hear from Professor Strang about his efforts to humanize math teaching, the value of thinking through problems in real time during lectures—even if it means getting stuck and having to backtrack!—and the importance of staying continually conscious of your students.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Strang’s faculty page

18.065 on OCW

18.06 on OCW

18.06 Scholar on OCW

Profile of Professor Strang

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

How Africa Has Been Made to Mean with Prof. Amah Edoh

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen, Amah Edoh) — Wed, 4 Mar 2020 10:00:14 +0000

“How has Africa been made to mean?” For a long time, Africa has been depicted in the arts and media as a place of famine and dysfunction. More recently, the continent has been increasingly portrayed as the next frontier for business and artistic innovation. In this episode, we talk with MIT Professor of African Studies M. Amah Edoh about how Africa, as a concept, is produced through cultural practices--things like music, film, theatre, clothing, etc. She shares how she engages MIT students with this concept in 21G.026 Global Africa: Creative Cultures, a course she’s shared on MIT OpenCourseWare. Topics include how her own experiences with formal education shape how and why she tries to value students’ voices in the classroom, redefining students’ relationships to scholarly texts to make academia feel less alienating, giving students language to articulate relationships of power, encouraging students to experiment with creative cultural production, getting off campus to experience cultural performance in a social context, and living the life of a new faculty member (spoiler alert: it’s a lot like engaging in marathon improvisational theatre, and it’s exhausting!).

Relevant Resources:

Professor Edoh’s course on OCW

“The Price of Love” [PDF] (Wedding Project) by Nwamaka Amobi and Gabrielle Ballard

Professor Edoh’s faculty page

Blog post on Professor’s Edoh’s approach to creating a supportive academic culture

Faculty profile: 3 Questions with M. Amah Edoh on Africa and Innovation

Spotify playlist

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Nuclear Gets Personal with Prof. Michael Short

chalkradio@mit.edu (Michael Short, Sarah Hansen) — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 10:00:01 +0000

It’s a safe bet that Professor Michael Short’s 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation is the only course at MIT where students are encouraged to bring their toenail clippings to class. In this episode, Professor Short discusses one of the core principles of his teaching philosophy: the importance of making abstract concepts tangible by means of hands-on activities. Want to know how much gold or arsenic is in your body? Bombard the aforementioned toenail clippings with neutrons in a reactor and see what gamma rays they give off! Want to know whether the stone in your ring is a genuine diamond or just a cubic zirconia? Put it under the electron microscope! Professor Short also emphasizes the value of opening “knowledge gaps”—awakening his students’ curiosity by focusing on interesting questions they don’t yet know the answer to. Later, Professor Short describes how he designed the course with a built-in mechanism for collecting real-time feedback so that he can respond immediately to students’ concerns. As a bonus, near the end of the podcast, Professor Short answers various nuclear science questions posed by actual OpenCourseWare users.

Relevant Resources:

Professor Short’s Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation course on OCW

Professor Short’s Do-It-Yourself Geiger Counters on OCW

Professor Short’s faculty page

Blog post on Professor Short’s work in Mongolia

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Connect with Us

If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!

Call us @ 617-715-2517

Stay Current

Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.

Support OCW

If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!

Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman

Coming Soon: Chalk Radio from MIT OCW

chalkradio@mit.edu (Sarah Hansen) — Sat, 1 Feb 2020 15:50:10 +0000

In each episode of this new podcast, we meet the instructors behind one of MIT’s most interesting courses, from nuclear physics to film appreciation to piloting small aircraft. The instructors open up to us about the passions that drive their cutting-edge research and innovative teaching, sharing stories that are candid, funny, serious, personal⁠, and full of insights. Listening in on these conversations is like being right here with us in person under the MIT dome, talking with your favorite professors.

About the Host

Dr. Sarah Hansen connects educators around the world to openly licensed MIT teaching materials and approaches through the MIT OpenCourseWare Educator project. Before she began working at MIT, she was a faculty member in the Education Department at St. Catherine University. She was an elementary school teacher before teaching teachers. Sarah holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Minnesota, where her scholarship focused on equity issues in education. Her hobbies include doing art projects with her preschool-aged daughter, spending time with her family in India, and experiencing gorgeous public architecture.

Relevant Resources