ESI Stories

Learn Climate with Open MIT Resources

October 20, 2022

By Sylvia Scharf, ESI Climate Education Specialist; with input from Curt Newton, MIT OpenCourseWare Director, and Dana Doyle, MITx Program Director

Climate change spans all disciplines: science, engineering, economics, policy, humanities. It touches every part of human life. And it demands that we freely share and develop knowledge together to take it on.

That’s why ESI and our colleagues across MIT are building a collection of freely available, open resources to both learn and teach about climate change, from many angles and in many fields of knowledge:

• Dipping your toes into new climate topics with engaging introductions from trusted sources;
• Deepening your knowledge with resources for flexible, self-paced learning;
• Building expertise with credential-granting complete courses.

As an introduction to climate change science and solutions, look no further than the MIT Climate Portal. There you will find well-researched Explainers understandable to a general audience, get caught up with our award-winning TILclimate podcast, explore the Climate Primer, and ask your own questions at Ask MIT Climate. All these resources are free to share and adapt under a broad Creative Commons license.

Are you an educator? It can be hard to find high-quality, ready-to-use climate resources, no matter what subject you teach. Explore our Educator Guides for classroom-ready high school activities across all topic areas. All the resources on the Climate Portal are also ready to be assigned to students. At the upper high school and college level, delve into the SCALES project for sustainability pedagogy and activities from MIT OpenCourseWare.

If you’re looking to dig even deeper, either to help your professional understanding or to support your own engagement as an active citizen and community member, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) shares materials from more than 150 climate-related MIT courses at all levels. You can learn at your own pace, working through a complete course or easily sampling topics among many courses. All OCW materials are free to download, reuse, and remix for educators or others who want to share their learning.

Want an in-depth MIT Course experience with the opportunity to earn a certificate?  MITx Massive Open Online Courses from across MIT are offered via MITx Online and edx.org.  These rigorous courses are designed, built and offered by MIT faculty. These are are offered asynchronously, online for free (exams and certificates usually require a small fee). There are new and newly-updated climate and energy-related courses available on a regular basis.

As part of International Open Access Week, we are highlighting multiple ways that interested people from all walks of life can learn about climate change from MIT. Join us Tuesday, October 25 at 10am to learn more about all these free, open modes of climate learning.

No matter where you are in your climate learning, MIT has open-access resources to help you learn about climate change, apply what you learn, and share your understanding with your community. Join us!