Production of Educational Videos is an introduction to technical communication that is situated in the production of educational videos; the assignments are all focused on the production of videos that teach some aspect of MIT’s first-year core curriculum. The objective of these assignments is improvement in both communication ability and communication habits; these improvements are effected by providing participants with instruction, practice, feedback, and the opportunity for reflection. In addition to improvements in communication skills, improvement is expected in students’ attitude towards writing, oral presentations, and collaboration; as the semester progresses, students should feel confident of their ability to write, present, and collaborate.

Sustainability challenges organizations to address the implications – and responses – in their own operations and supply chain, products/services/markets, and community responsibilities. This course exposes students to professionals and organizations who are actively working toward making their organizations and industries sustainable.

This course discusses the evolution and role of urban public transportation modes, systems, and services, focusing on bus and rail. It covers various topics, including current practice and new methods for data collection and analysis, performance monitoring, route design, frequency determination, vehicle and crew scheduling, effect of pricing policy and service quality on ridership.

This video lesson presents a real world problem that can be solved by using the Pythagorean theorem. The problem faces a juice seller daily. He has equilateral barrels with equal heights and he always tries to empty the juice of two barrels into a third barrel that has a volume equal to the sum of the volumes of the two barrels. This juice seller wants to find a simple way to help him select the right barrel without wasting time, and without any calculations - since he is ignorant of Mathematics. The prerequisite for this lesson includes knowledge of the following: the Pythagorean theorem; calculation of a triangles area knowing the angle between its two sides; cosine rule; calculation of a circle's area; and calculation of the areas and volumes of solids with regular bases.

This lesson teaches students about the history of the Pythagorean theorem, along with proofs and applications. It is geared toward high school Geometry students that have completed a year of Algebra.

This lesson aims to help students with quadratic functions y = ax2 + bx + c. This is the next step after linear functions bx + c. The lesson begins with three quadratics and their graphs (three parabolas): y = x2 - 2x + (0 or 1 or 2). The prerequisite or co-requisite is some working experience with algebra, like factoring x2 -2x into x(x-2). The objective is to connect four things: the formula for y, the graph of y (a parabola), the roots of y and the minimum or maximum of y. The particular example y = x2 – 2x could be repeated by the teacher, for emphasis. The lesson will take more than one class period (and this is deserved!). The breaks allow time to consider parabolas starting with -x2 and opening downward. A physical path would be one (dangerous?) activity.

Video lecture on quadratic equations and their graphs. The video connects the equation, the graph, the roots, and the minimum or maximum of the quadratic function.

The topic of this video is energy in general, and specifically the ways we can quantify it. In order to make the concepts accessible to a broad audience, this video focuses on everyday things and events. How is it that energy plays a part in a child riding a scooter? How is the energy we consume in playing related to the energy on the food we eat? This video poses these questions to the class and challenges them to put a list of five such items into an ordering from most energy to least.

The scope of this video lesson consists in studying the sets of Rational and Irrational numbers. It is best suited for an advanced math course: Algebra 2 or higher.

The central concern of this class is the historical relationship between the social lives of everyday people and U.S. American poetics, with a special emphasis on what June Jordan once termed the “difficult miracle of Black poetry in America.” How does poetry help us to know one another? And how might we better understand the particular role of poetry, of poiesis, for those historically barred from the very practice of reading or writing, from ownership (even of one’s own body), and various generally recognized forms of belonging? For this course, these will be some of our animating questions.

A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies.

The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. The contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.

For the last century, precepts of scientific management and administrative rationality have concentrated power in the hands of technical specialists, which in recent decades has contributed to widespread disenfranchisement and discontent among stakeholders in natural resources cases. In this seminar we examine the limitations of scientific management as a model both for governance and for gathering and using information, and describe alternative methods for informing and organizing decision-making processes. We feature cases involving large carnivores in the West (mountain lions and grizzly bears), Northeast coastal fisheries, and adaptive management of the Colorado River. There will be nightly readings and a short written assignment.

The goal of this course is to give an introduction to the representation theory of compact and non-compact Lie groups. It will rely on some material from 18.745 Lie Groups and Lie Algebras I and 18.755 Lie Groups and Lie Algebras II, but full familiarity with this material is not required. Topics include continuous representations; algebras of measures on a Lie group; K-finite, smooth, and analytic vectors; admissible representations; unitary representations; the Harish-Chandra admissibility and analyticity theorems; (g,K)-modules; infinitesimal equivalence and realizations; Harish-Chandra’s globalization theorem; representations of SL(2,R), the Chevalley restriction theorem; the Chevalley-Shepard-Todd theorem; Kostant’s theorem; Harish-Chandra isomorphism; Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand category O; projective functors; classification of irreducible Harish-Chandra bimodules; the nilpotent cone; the Duflo-Joseph theorem; Duflo’s primitive ideal theorem; the Borel-Weil theorem; Springer resolution; Beilinson-Bernstein localization; D-modules; and classification of representations of a semisimple real group in terms of the orbits of the complexified maximal compact subgroup on the flag variety.

This course is an introduction to real-world dynamics of public policy controversies. Topics to be considered include national, state, and local policy disputes, such as smoking, hazardous waste, abortion, gun control, and education. Using a case study approach, students study whether and how those disputes get resolved. Students conduct debates and simulations in addition to writing a series of short essays.

This video aims to provide an illustrative lesson about the respiratory system in birds and how the adaptations of that system over time have made it different than that of other living creatures, especially mammals. Birds are omnipresent in our lives, and students will come to understand and appreciate the fascinating inner workings of these beautiful creatures. This lesson discusses avian features and differences for 20 to 25 minutes, with approximately 20 minutes of in-class student activities.

The topic of photosynthesis is a fundamental concept in biology, chemistry, and earth science. Educational studies have found that despite classroom presentations, most students retain their naive idea that a plant's mass is mostly derived from the soil, and not from the air. To call students' attention to this misconception, at the beginning of this lesson we will provide a surprising experimental result so that students will confront their mental mistake. Next, we will help students better envision photosynthesis by modeling where the atoms come from in this important process that produces food for the planet. This lesson can be completed in 50-60 minutes, with the students working on in-class activities during 20-25 minutes of the lesson. As a prerequisite, students need an introductory lesson on photosynthesis, something that includes the overall chemical equation. If students have already studied the intracellular photosynthetic process in detail, this video can still be very helpful because students often miss the big picture about photosynthesis. Materials needed include red, white and black LEGO bricks (described in downloadable hand-out) or strips of red, white and black paper plus paper clips (directions provided in downloadable hand-out). In addition to class discussions, the major in-class activity of this video involves the students' modeling with LEGO bricks or colored paper where the atoms come from in photosynthesis.

Here at TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), there’s one question we get from our listeners more than any other: “What can I do to make a difference on climate change?” In this special episode of the podcast, three guests who have made acting on climate a big part of their lives join interim host Aaron Krol to share their stories and their advice for those who want to do more. Together, we discuss how to mobilize and inspire others, how small individual actions can lead to large societal ones, and why your contributions to a cooler, more resilient future can have benefits that aren’t just about rising seas or mounting heat waves.

“I love to travel. But I hate the fact that something I love to do, creates so much pollution.” In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), MIT professor Steven Barrett and host Laur Hesse Fisher dig into how — and why — air travel impacts our earth’s climate, and what solutions are on the horizon. They explore the surprising heating effect of condensation trails (“contrails”), how computer simulations of the earth’s climate system are built, and what scientists and engineers are doing to make flying, well, less bad for the planet.

Humans have changed clouds: where they form, how much precipitation they produce, and how quickly it rains or snows. In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), MIT professor Dan Cziczo joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to spell out why this is, and what this has to do with climate change. They explore how clouds form in the first place, how human activity has impacted cloud formation and rainfall, and what scientists are still trying to understand. They touch upon the emerging field of geoengineering and how humans could create more clouds to cool the planet -- but we’ll have full episode on that coming out soon.

Humans use around 90 billion metric tons of materials every year, creating about ⅓ of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Which materials produce the most emissions? You might be surprised.