The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the most highly regarded universities in the U.S. Admission is fiercely competitive, and tuition and fees run about $18,000 a semester. Yet regardless of your age, occupation, location, or educational background, you can participate--at no cost--in any of the 1,800 courses that MIT offers.
Since its launch in 2002, MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project has shared course materials--syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and exams--with over 50 million visitors. Students, educators, and independent learners in more than 200 countries and territories have already taken part in this remarkable program.
Yes, there are disclaimers. OCW doesn't grant degrees or allow access to MIT faculty. And the materials posted online don't always reflect the full content of a course. (For instance, you may need to buy a textbook, and of course you'll miss out on class discussions and labs.) But the OCW site contains academic resources prepared by MIT faculty under an open license that lets users download and modify the materials for noncommercial use.
If you have the impression that MIT is concerned only with science and technology, make a point of visiting the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. There, among countless other offerings, you'll find dozens of OCW courses--both undergraduate and graduate--in writing, rhetoric, and linguistics. (The date beside each course title refers to the semester in which the course was offered on campus; OCW course materials, however, are available at any time.) Here's a small sample.
- 21W.730-3 Expository Writing: Autobiography: Theory and Practice
Highlights
This course features downloadable assignments, bibliography, and samples of student work.
Instructor
Professor Elizabeth Fox
Description
Focus: What can we believe when we read an autobiography? How do writers recall, select, shape, and present their lives to construct life stories? Readings that ground these questions include selections from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent (pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs), "A Sketch of the Past" by Virginia Woolf, Notes of A Native Son by James Baldwin, "The Achievement of Desire" by Richard Rodriguez, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and "Our Secret" by Susan Griffin. Discussion, papers, and brief oral presentations will focus on the content of the life stories as well as the forms and techniques authors use to shape autobiography. We will identify masks and stances used to achieve various goals, sources and interrelationships of technical and thematic concerns, and "fictions" of autobiographical writing. Assignments will allow students to consider texts in terms of their implicit theories of autobiography, of theories we read, and of students' experiences; assignments also allow some autobiographical writing. - 21W.730-4 Expository Writing: Analyzing Mass Media
Highlights
This course features extensive examples of course writing assignments and supporting study materials.
Instructor
Professor Andrea Walsh
Description
This course focuses on developing and refining the skills that will you need to express your voice more effectively as an academic writer. As a focus for our writing this semester, this course explores what it means to live in the age of mass media. We will debate the power of popular American media in shaping our ideas of self, family and community and in defining social issues. Throughout the semester, students will focus on writing as a process of drafting and revising to create essays that are lively, clear, engaging and meaningful to a wider audience. - 21W.747-1 Rhetoric
Highlights
This course features detailed descriptions of its assignments and an extensive list of readings. Links to other rhetoric Web sites are also available in the related resources section.
Instructor
Dr. Steven Strang
Description
This course is an introduction to the history, the theory, the practice, and the implications (both social and ethical) of rhetoric, the art and craft of persuasion. By the end of the semester, you will have been exposed to several of the key concepts of rhetoric (e.g., ethos, pathos, logos, invention, style, arrangement, kairos, stasis, commonplaces) and to the over-riding importance of writing to your audience. You will have gotten a taste of rhetorical history and theory. You will explore and analyze and respond to some key texts by significant writers. You will have had a chance to practice speaking and debating before the class. You will have written and revised several texts. You will have examined some of your core beliefs and assumptions. In this course you will act as both a rhetor (a person who uses rhetoric) and a rhetorician (one who studies the art of rhetoric). Because the study of rhetoric has always had as one of its goals the creation of active and informed citizens and because rhetors write to influence the real world and thus to become agents of positive change, the topics you choose and the essays you write will have the important purpose of persuading your readers (the class and me). - 24.900 Introduction to Linguistics
Highlights
This course features a comprehensive set of lecture notes, assignments, fieldwork guidelines, and exams.
Instructor
Professor Suzanne Flynn
Description
This core-curriculum linguistics class will provide some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Topics include the intricate system that governs language, how it is acquired, the similarities and differences among languages, and how spoken (and signed) language relates to written language, among others. - 24.902 Language and Its Structure II: Syntax
Highlights
Lecture notes for all sessions and all assignments for the course may be downloaded.
Instructor
Professor David Pesetsky
Description
This course will acquaint you with some of the important results and ideas of the last half-century of research in syntax. We will explore a large number of issues and a large amount of data so that you can learn something of what this field is all about. From time to time, we will discuss related work in language acquisition and processing. The class will emphasize ideas and arguments for these ideas in addition to the the details of particular analyses. At the same time, you will learn the mechanics of one particular approach (sometimes called Principles and Parameters syntax). Most of all, the course tries to show why the study of syntax is exciting, and why its results are important to researchers in other language sciences. The class assumes some familiarity with basic concepts of theoretical linguistics, of the sort you could acquire in 24.900.
Here's some more good news. The success of OCW at MIT has inspired 200 other universities in 30 countries to share their course materials through the OpenCourseWare Consortium, where over 8,000 courses are now available--all at no cost.
As Rodney Dangerfield predicted, heading back to school isn't just for kids anymore.
More About OpenCourseWare (OCW):
Image: Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., 1986
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