MIT OCW Highlights

Intro to Solid-State Chemistry, one of my favorite courses to work on

You never forget your first, and for me, it's true for my first job: working with faculty to publish open educational content at MIT OpenCourseWare. A massive undertaking, OCW's original remit was to publish the entirety of MIT's curriculum online under an open license, for reuse and remixing. I was lucky enough to be present when they hit the milestone of 2000 courses published, and they've come quite a ways since then.

But beyond the world-changing nature of the project itself, my time at OCW was unforgettable because of my colleagues, who taught me so much about how to negotiate the working world and laid the foundation for my intellectual and career pursuits. I also learned to get oriented to a new topic quickly, since we worked on new courses every 2 weeks. I needed to assess the content and handle any IP issues with an understanding of the student viewpoint, whether the course was an introductory survey course or a graduate elective.

I published many courses during my tenure there, but these are some of my favorites, either technically challenging or just plain fascinating content.

Supplemental Resources

These were published not as part of any specific MIT course, but as general teaching resources.

Custom Layouts

Typically courses were published with a tab for each resource type (lecture notes, exams, assignments, etc.) but occasionally we would publish material that demanded a different layout. Coming up with a custom page design that organized material by topic, while still being easy to navigate for users, was always a good fun challenge.

I'd like to shout-out the first link here, which was a course I worked on with 2 colleagues, but they graciously allowed me to organize a topic map and page template for the entire course. Any day I got to bring content-specific knowledge to work was a good one.

Transcription

For these courses, I supervised a student transcriptionist to produce typed versions of the professor's handwritten notes.

Multimedia

These courses include image galleries, audio lectures, or video lectures.