Learn Climate with Open MIT Resources

CURT NEWTON: All right, welcome, everyone. We're so glad you've joined us. Thanks for taking an hour-ish to spend with us, learn about some of the amazing materials that MIT has created and is sharing openly to help you learn climate. This is a presentation that draws on the work of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx Online. And this presentation is part of International Open Access Week which this year has the theme Open for Climate Justice. They've got a great assortment of events happening all week long, and I encourage you to check those out. Maybe you found out about this through International Open Access Week, maybe through other channels, but definitely see some of the other things that are going on this week. It's-- I expect will be of interest. I'd like to begin by introducing your speakers, Sylvia, Dana. Sylvia, you want to say hello? SYLVIA SCHARF: Sure, since I seem to be listed first. Hi, my name is Sylvia Scharf. And I'm with the Environmental Solutions Initiative at MIT, specifically working on climate education, mainly focused on K-12, and even more specifically on high school. So I develop climate education materials, and I'll be talking more about that later. DANA DOYLE: Hi. I'm Dana Doyle. I am the director of the MITx Program, and we support faculty to make robust, MIT-rigorous, interactive courses for the public. And I'll be talking about those more later. CURT NEWTON: Thanks. And I'm Curt Newton. I'm director of MIT OpenCourseWare, and I also have to admit I spend a lot of time and energy personally on climate action work. And these things which work at the intersection of open education and open knowledge and climate action are near and dear to me, and I hope they are to you, too. So a few words to set the context about what we're about here. Climate change is, as I'm sure you're aware, a very large, multidimensional problem that draws on definitely science and the things that we know, but that's not all. Sylvia, what's your perspective on this? SYLVIA SCHARF: Well, that a lot of the time as sort of the background of-- so I would say science communication in general and climate communication as a subset of that has traditionally been this idea that if we shove enough knowledge and data sets and graphs at people, that that will show them the truth. That the way to the truth is through these data sets and things like that. And that is one way to the truth. That is how we know what is happening scientifically. We know that carbon dioxide is rising and that carbon dioxide acts as a blanket around our planet, trapping heat, which is warming all of Earth's systems. And that is changing our climate. We know that. But what we also have started to learn over the past few years is how to talk about these things and how to tell these stories because at base, we as human are storytelling beings. Most of us do not, in fact, think in terms of graphs and data and numbers. Some of us do, and we need those folks, but it's not the majority of us. We think in stories. And so what we know is just that. I use that very basic metaphor to explain what we know about climate change. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, thanks, Sylvia. And building on what we know, that foundation, many of us want to find out what it is that we can do. And MIT, without a doubt, has a lot of perspectives on things that we can do. And that includes applying the science into new technologies and technology solutions and thinking in a rigorous way about how policies work out in the world. But that's not all. Climate change is fundamentally also a very human situation. And so the things that we can do, the solutions that we want to think about, also have a really important human element. And in particular, we want to be keeping in mind the justice and equity aspects of these things as well. And so when we think about what we can do in the solution space, it's not just the technology but also the human and social aspects of that. SYLVIA SCHARF: We had a great question in the chat that a National Academies committee suggested that psychology and sociology be studied to reach average citizens about climate topics. Absolutely. There's actually a branch of psychology called conservation psychology which specifically studies how to formulate messaging, communication, and thinking about how to cause the kind of behavior change and thought change that we need in ways that actually align with how the human brain really works. So there's really some wonderful work in the conservation world and by other people in the sociology and psychology side of this. And absolutely, I think that's vitally important. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, excellent. So when we think about providing resources from MIT to learn about climate, we want to be drawing on all of these things. And one last contextual point that I'd like to make to tee this up, those of you who like graphs have probably seen things like this that show, for instance, this is based on United Nations studies and reports on the different pathways that we have before us. And we have a range of pathways. We're at this juncture right now where the choices that we make really matter tremendously. We have goals to get global warming limited to well below 2 degrees C per the Paris terms, as close to 1.5 degrees warming by the end of the century as we can get. And it's also recognized that there are other pathways. In fact, the one that we're currently on doesn't really come close to that. It's better than the worst case scenarios of no climate policies, but we have a lot of work still to do. And, in particular, that work needs to happen now and in the next few years. We are here at this inflection point among these different pathways that lead us into the future we need. And so over the next few decades, the choices that we make are really, really going to matter. Without a doubt MIT, is very focused on educating the students that are here right now. But really, I'd say in this decade in particular, we need to be bringing everybody into this conversation and learning all that we can about climate science and the different solutions. So whether you're a student or a teacher or a worker or a professional, a citizen who's active as a voter or an advocate, we want to be supporting everyone in how they engage in this work. So I'm curious to know, and feel free to drop something in the chat about this. What's brought you here to this talk? What things are you interested in learning about? We'd love to know. With that, let's get into it. What specifically are these open resources that are coming from MIT? We're drawing on all disciplines that are taught here across the curriculum-- science, engineering, economics, policy, the humanities. And we think about the breadth of the offerings that we've got here, spanning the full range of things that people might be looking for from really engaging introductions that can come from our trusted sources, pathways to deepen your knowledge, in particular, through flexible, self-paced learning, and ways to go really deep dive, build expertise all the way in through credential-granting, complete courses. And we'll highlight a few of these over the course of the hour. Sylvia. SYLVIA SCHARF: So that idea of the engaging introduction is really the core of the goal of the MIT Climate Portal which can be found at climate.mit.edu. And this is an outwardly-facing page. It's not-- while folks at MIT absolutely can use it and do, it is outwardly-facing. The goal of this is to be used more broadly. And so this includes explainers, which are basically one-page, climate science, you just want to know what is the relationship between phytoplankton and climate change, and there's a one pager on that. You want to understand how concrete and cement work in climate change. There's a one pager on that. If you then discover that your question has not been answered yet, you can actually submit a question to Ask MIT Climate, and we go through those questions and pair them to the right expert to find that answer. So-- and you can also read through previous questions. And they really run the gamut from those seemingly simple questions that are incredibly complex to I know this one specific thing from my realm of expertise. How does it relate to climate change? And then we also have a podcast called TILclimate, which is Today I Learned Climate, and the goal of the TIL podcast, TILclimate podcast is that the episodes are really short. They're under 15 minutes long. So they're, again, in that same way of the one-pager, the quick question, something you could share to a friend who said, you know, we were just recently having that conversation about airplanes and air travel. Here's a podcast on that. And you're not necessarily asking them to dive deep into a subject, but they can learn a lot. And the podcasts are conversations with experts in that field. So they're very, very useful both for that shareability. You can post them to your social media. You can send them in an email to a friend. And they're also, as I'll talk about later, something that, because they're aimed at a general audience, they're also totally understandable to a high school through early college audiences. Teachers can use these as pieces to actually assign to their students, and everything is under a Creative Commons license. For example, we are actually in a partnership right now with an organization called Subject to Climate who is actually adapting our explainers for an interactive on their website to allow teachers to ask questions about climate change and get the answers from our explainers. So that's one of these ways that these open access resources are being used across sites. And then if you want to dive a little bit deeper but still kind of get to pick and choose your bets, we have the Climate Primer. So the Climate Primer is interactive. It was developed by Dr. Kerry Emanuel here at MIT. And you basically scroll through, and there are places where there's audio to listen to, a graph to interact with, something-- maybe a question to answer. So it's that step beyond I'm just going to read something or I'm just going to listen to something. And it's a little bit more interactive, but it's still in chapters. So you can still-- you don't have to go from A to Z through it. You can still say what I'm really interested in at this moment is I want to know how we know what we know. And there's a chapter on that within the Climate Primer. And then the work that I've mostly been working on for the past year and a half plus is developing these Educator Guides. So the Educator Guides are tied to the TILclimate podcast episodes, but they're not a guide to the episode. The idea is that a student would listen to the episode either as homework or in the classroom or maybe not at all. We'd prefer that they listen to it but it's not necessarily necessary for doing the activities. And then teachers can choose as few or as many activities out of each of these guides for their students to do. There's about 3 to 5 activities per guide. They're aimed at a high school audience, though, depending on the educator, you could definitely age them down to middle school and up to college. They're super flexible. So it's not you must do this entire unit, but choose this activity here, this activity here. Pull together what you want. And one of the things that I really wanted to focus on in this is that they are not all what you might call pure science activities because climate change affects all parts of human life. And that means that all subjects can talk about climate change. So there are activities in here that can work in an English classroom, in a math classroom, in a social studies or history classroom. You could translate some of these things into another language in a language classroom. There are so many ways to interact with this work that isn't just looking at graphs and data and data visualization, though there are plenty of data visualizations in there as well because I love them. So these are super useful, and again, Creative Commons license. Teachers can remix them, reshare them, do what they want. We want them to be out there and usable. And aging up into more of the college realm, though some of these activities, again, could be used, especially in an upper high school classroom, my colleague Liz went through the entire OpenCourseWare, which Curt will talk about later, and pulled out every lesson and activity that had to do with climate change or sustainability and put them into this database. So that's fully searchable, and again, open source, open access and as well as all of the explainers from the MIT Climate Portal. And she also wrote these pedagogical practice explainers because there are ways of teaching that benefit sustainability learning better than some other ways of teaching, sort of standard lecture style. So there are also these explainers on best practices around how to teach this content, not just what to teach. So the SCALES Project has just an absolute wealth of material that you can search through that database. CURT NEWTON: Thanks, Sylvia. Speaking for MIT OpenCourseWare, we love that last one in particular among all the others. But just an example of the sort of adaptations that the Creative Commons license opens up to people. And in honor of International Open Access week, we think that's a particularly strong message. So I'm going to talk a little bit about OpenCourseWare. We've been sharing materials freely from the MIT curriculum since 2001, over 20 years now. We've got material from over 2,500 courses shared on the MIT OpenCourseWare website representing all departments and programs from the most introductory first year and even some high school-oriented resources up to some of the most advanced graduate level subjects offered on the planet. The focus primarily has been on teaching materials, but there's more. Among those teaching materials, you'll find notes and readings supplied by the faculty, activities that they've created, assessments, problem sets, exams, and so forth. We're also thrilled to be able to share student work, exemplary student work, such as some of the great projects that people do here as inspirations for perhaps things that you might want to explore yourself. Additionally, a lot of videos and a growing amount of videos, that are on OCW. And we've got this Chalk Radio podcast where we interview faculty about the craft of teaching and share their pedagogical insights. Those videos on our YouTube channel are increasingly a powerful way, a very flexible way, for people to discover this content and share it within their communities. Over OCW's lifetime, we think we've reached over 500 million people around the world. That's half a billion, most of whom have come to the website itself but many more also through the redistribution and remixing that Creative Commons enables. The mode of use for these users typically is for self-paced learning, sometimes adapted into the classrooms, and you can retain those materials, carry them around with you. We hear stories of people who, for instance, don't have reliable internet access at home. And so they print the materials out, and they carry them around in their back pocket. And they're reading this stuff as they're traveling around going about their business. It's not the most high tech, but this is the reality of people's lives. And we're so glad to be able to support that mode of learning no matter where they are. Specifically, with regards to climate change on OCW, we've got over 150 courses. It's not a bright, hard line that defines that. Depending on how you count it, there could be more. We've put them into collections themed around the broader topics of environment and sustainability and, in particular, the work that Sylvia's organization, the Environmental Solutions Initiative, has done around an undergraduate minor on these topics. The courses that flow into that program we feature in this collection. And with regards to energy, in a similar vein, the MIT Energy Initiative has identified a set of courses that undergraduates can take to get that minor, and that forms the basis for our energy collection. I'm just going to hop over for a second show you, for instance, I know, what you can find on OCW. For instance, maybe you're interested at the-- something about the intersection of climate change and food. So just drop into our search box those couple of terms, and lo and behold, we've got a course on that. This is a fairly recent one taught by Professor Dennis McLaughlin, and you'll find a description of the course. Jump over and scan the syllabus to find out what topics are covered. We've got some of those instructor insights that include a podcast interview with Professor McLaughlin about how he teaches this and getting into topics like how do we deal with uncertainty? Uncertainty runs through so much of this work and how we learn and think about it. How do values enter into the conversation? Again, a really fundamental aspect of what it means to be dealing with climate change nowadays. And then on into the materials that are taught, extensive documentation of what was covered in each class, discussion points, readings, and discussion questions. This is a good example of what you'll find on OpenCourseWare for a climate class. DANA DOYLE: Hi. thank you, Curt. All right, so I'm going to preface this a little bit by saying that I refer to our MITx Program as open with a small O because it is not-- the content in here does not have a Creative Commons license. But it is available for free to learn from these courses. So just to get that clarified. Now, the MITx courses, as I said, we work with MIT faculty to develop these courses. They are-- there's a variety of types of courses. There could be courses that are parts of courses, courses that are broken up into modules. But many of our courses are actually full-length MIT courses. So they're very, very intense. They have-- we offer them on edX.org, and we also recently launched MITx online. So they're offered in both places. Not the same courses in both places, but some courses on MITx online and some courses on edX. You can take the course. The only thing that we normally have behind an actual paywall may be a summative assessment such as an exam. And also, in order to earn a certificate, if you pass, you do need to pay a small fee that helps us to support the program and to actually build all these fantastic courses. We also have the Open Learning Library which is archive material from MITx content and also includes some interactive OCW content. So on there, you may find content with a Creative Commons license. It does-- it would be a little hard in order to use the interactive part because you actually need the platform that supports that interaction. But you can certainly still use the material in your own way. On Open Learning Library, there are no certificates. There's no forum. You don't need to register. You can just go in and access the material and take a look at what you want to do. You can interact with it. You can get auto graded. If you do want to save your progress, you do need to have an account because, obviously, that's how it knows that that progress belongs to you. Next slide, please. Now, in the context of this presentation, I thought we could highlight some of the courses that we have on energy and climate. We do have-- all of these courses are instructor paced, which means that they start at a particular time and they end at a particular time. So we do have two that are currently running. So if you wanted to go in and take a look at them, you can go to-- they're both on edX.org, one in energy economics and policy and one in sustainable energy. And as I said, these courses are very rigorous. I-- as an anecdote, my husband, actually-- he's an architect. And so he was super excited about the sustainable building design, and he started taking it. And then he realized that they were not kidding when they said it was a 12-week course with 13 hours of effort a week, and he was like, oh, my God. I just-- I don't have-- he was like it's hard. I'm like, it's an MIT course. I'm like, yes, it is hard. You're absolutely right. So, as I said, these courses are not for the faint of heart. But they are very, very in-depth, and they have-- you will learn a lot. Let me put it that way. And a lot of these actually come from the organization at MIT that Curt mentioned before, MITEI, which is the MIT Energy Initiative. And they are seriously considering different types of programs and other types of certificates that they could offer. But at the moment, they do just have these courses that will offer you the opportunity to purchase the chance to get a certificate if you pass the course. Next slide, please. One of the great things about Open edX which really differentiates us from, let's say, Coursera or even Emeritus or some courses like that is that Open edX, which is used both by edX.org and by MITx Online, it's an open source platform, and it has really advanced problem types. So here's a couple of still images, and if you can go to the next one, Curt. Oh, and you're going to be doing the video, too. So the first one, if you take a look at the sketch tool, just to show you that perhaps you've seen something like this, an interactive tool. But the thing is that if you do this, it actually will grade you. And so that, while it sounds pretty simple, actually getting it to work so that you can draw on a graph, it checks your drawing, and then passes a grade into the course is unusual. I actually haven't really seen it in any other type of platform. And so here's a quick example that just shows you that you can do the drawing. You can change it. And so this was actually built by one of our digital learning lab scientists at MIT. And that's the great thing about the open source platform is that as our-- the people who build our courses actually come up with new problem types and things like that, it actually gets folded back into the open platform. Then anybody can use it. So it's really fantastic. And there we go. And we can skip the next video, I think, just in the interest of time and make sure we have time for conversation. So as I said, the MITx courses are based on residential courses. And so that means, in some cases, they are actual almost one to one of what is offered on MIT. But sometimes they want to take advantage of the scalability, and they want to make sure that they're including the large audiences because all of these are MOOCs. So there can be hundreds of people taking the course at the same time. It varies, as I said. Some of them are smaller parts. I would-- I say-- I think the smallest one we have is a two-week course, but that's pretty unusual. Usually it's a full length course, and you can access majority of the content for free. It's all the learning is available for free. That is one of the things. And in some courses, we actually have exceptions where the exams are also free if it really is important for the pedagogical nature of the course. And if you make a small payment-- and I would say for a full length MIT course, the cost is usually about $99 or $149, and that then allows you to access the final exam and to get the certificate if you pass. And as we mentioned before, we do have some archives available on Open Learning Library that you can access at any time. I'll check on that, thank you-- the Kerry Emanuel course. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, the Kerry Emanuel course, there's an archived version on Open Learning Library. DANA DOYLE: Yeah, usually there should be. I'll have to check what the link says because sometimes, I don't know why it would be broken. It should still go somewhere, but I'll check it. CURT NEWTON: All right, so now we wanted to walk through a few examples of how different kinds of learners might engage in these materials. Let's start with maybe a team of high school science and social studies teachers. Sylvia, you want to run with that? SYLVIA SCHARF: Yeah, so one, when teachers are building their curriculum for the year, especially I think often social studies teachers will often look at what's going on in the world and try to base some of their subject matter around there. And let's say it's been a particularly bad hurricane year or there have been hurricanes in the other way-- in-- and so they can start with they realize the science teacher maybe understands some things about the relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane ferocity. But the social studies teacher really hasn't. So they go to the Climate Portal. They type in hurricanes, and they get an article from Ask MIT Climate. They get a TILclimate episode, and they get an explainer. So they read those. They listen to them, and they realize, oh, we could assign some of these to our students. And so perhaps they assign listening to the TILclimate episode to their students, and there's also a full transcript for every episode of TILclimate. So for students for whom it's easier to read or they intake information better visually, that's available. And then they realize, oh, there's an educator guide. They click on the educator guide, and there are a bunch of activities in the educator guide. Not all of them are applicable to what they're doing, but some of them are. So they can get that guide as-- and the guides come with-- they're both what the students will be able to do at the end. If you keep scrolling down you can see what standards it's tied to at the high school level for both Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core standards. And this has four different activities, one of which is more directly science oriented and one of which-- the next one is about language and the language we use to talk about hurricanes. So all of a sudden now they've got things they can bring to their students to talk about this topical issue in the classroom that is ready to go. And that can kind be the beginning of, perhaps, including more climate change across their topic area. But at the moment, given how little climate change is being taught in schools, this would be amazing. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. And so you mentioned the climate science and risk primer which Kerry Emanuel also wrote which would be a wonderful next step transition. And then there was-- SYLVIA SCHARF: And something that teachers have assigned to their students as well as something they can interact with. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, maybe I'll just call that up for a second so people can see what that's like. SYLVIA SCHARF: So that's just climateprimer.mit.edu. CURT NEWTON: It's in there? SYLVIA SCHARF: Yeah, it's sort of in the Climate Portal but not entirely. So climate-- yeah, there we go. So-- and if you scroll down, you can actually see there's an introduction, but then there are a bunch of chapters. So, again, you could start with the beginning, or you can say I just really want to understand how the atmosphere works. And you can see these animations, callouts of the key pieces of information. And, again, if you pause on that animation, you'll see that it is both downloadable and shareable. So, again, it's open access. It's something that you can snag and throw into a PowerPoint presentation or however you are sharing. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, love that. Anything else on the ESI materials, on this Sylvia? SYLVIA SCHARF: Yeah, I mean, I think there are all-- there are so many different ways to interact with it. And I think that that really gives flexibility for teachers who are differentiating their classrooms as well. So there are some students who are going to do better being assigned something to read. Others are going to listen, and then they can teach each other what they learned. The explainer on hurricanes and the podcast on hurricanes cover very similar topics but from different angles. Then they teach each other, and now there's a whole bunch of learning that's happening in that classroom. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, great. I'll just take a moment since this was asked about. Let's see-- Emanuel. Yeah, so this is what the Open Learning Library site for Kerry Emanuel's global warming science course is like. And you can jump in if you want to really get in deep with Kerry's teaching, and it's all available here for you as well. Next scenario was a-- imagine a working professional, maybe somebody who's worked in technology but not specifically around climate and associated fields, wants to explore the broad field of renewable energy as perhaps a growth opportunity. As our high school teaching team did, the Climate Portal would be a wonderful place to start on that. Sylvia, what might they start with here? SYLVIA SCHARF: Renewable. You'll get quite a few. Yep, 660 results, plenty to get me going on with. But there is definitely-- there is an explainer, and that just goes through the discussion of it literally. I love this graphic here because it just defines the terms of the difference between renewable and low carbon because those are not the same words, though they are often used interchangeably. And also from here, actually, if you scroll up a little bit, there are a bunch of connections on the right hand side of the screen to other resources. So you start on the explainer, and it's already popping you off to a bunch of other things. For example, the US Energy Information Administration which, by the way, if you love nerdy graphs, they're amazing. And you can make them work in a whole bunch of different ways. So there's already connections even when you're just on the explainer site to other resources that can help you understand this. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, among the Learn More resources here is an OpenCourseWare class called D-Lab Energy which focuses on developing country needs, technologies that are appropriate for use there. It's really an incredible class that MIT students go out and work in the field with community partners. For instance, Tanzania, there's a long-- been a long-running exchange. Also Nicaragua and documentation, extensive documentation, of some of the student projects that are done in this space. SYLVIA SCHARF: So actually somebody had asked a question about ways to engage in research to solve real-life problems. So this is an example of it could at least give a foundation for ideas of how to develop a similar project in whatever your context is. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, excellent point. Also linked off of that explainer on the portal is that renewable energy class that runs-- running currently on edX. So you can dive in pretty deep here, right, Dana? DANA DOYLE: Absolutely. And also, as I said, they're instructor paced, but they do get offered fairly frequently. So if you-- if this one's a little too far along for you, there will be another opportunity in the future. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. Many of these courses that are running on MITx in kind of their most recent form, there-- you may find a version of it also on OpenCourseWare. In fact, there is an older version of this course on OpenCourseWare from the MIT classroom from a few years back. This is a fast-moving field. So I'll encourage you to go to the most recent thing you can, such as this MITx class, if that works for you. All right, a third user, a citizen advocate. Imagine somebody who's been talking with legislators and policy makers in their realm and keeps running up against the ways that economics and other more detailed policy discussions are really kind of ruling the way the conversations flow. And so they want to learn more about how economics and policy impact climate change. Once again, we go back to the Climate Portal. SYLVIA SCHARF: Let's start at the Climate Portal. And you could actually just search for policy, and you'll start-- you'll get things right there because we have-- so some of these are more news articles, things like that, which, again, we tend to, when we post those news articles, we embed links within them back to other resources that will be helpful to give that kind of context. I know there is an explainer on carbon and carbon pricing. And then we did just have an episode back in February about the costs of adaptation versus the costs of not adapting and the cost of mitigation versus the cost of not mitigating. So-- and, again, there's an educator guide associated with that. And it links out to a bunch of explainers and-- as well. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. This is a really important issue for anybody who's involved as a citizen trying to understand how all these forces come together. I'll highlight on OpenCourseWare a recent course just published that has an, I would say, a state-of-the-art reading list for anybody who wants to get a broad view on energy systems and policy making and what kind of things come up. It's focused on cities in particular and the way that so many issues intersect within our urban environment. But I'd highlight this one taught by Professor David Hsu just published on OCW as a tremendous resource for anybody who gets involved in deeper policy discussions with their policymakers. And then over on MITx, there's a course to go even deeper on energy and economics, right, Dana? DANA DOYLE: Yes, absolutely. It's-- as all the courses are, it's intense. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. DANA DOYLE: I would click into it, but I'm a little concerned. It was a little buggy this morning. CURT NEWTON: That's what it looks like on the front. DANA DOYLE: Yes, so as you can see, you can see it's 12 weeks, and the eight to 12 hours is accurate. And that's for an MIT student. So that was the other kind of hang up that my husband had. He was like, I'm not actually an MIT student. I'm like, oh, well, then it might take a little more work than that. But, yeah, so here's what you'll learn. And every one of the courses on the About Pages has this which will give you an overview of what's in there. And as I said, you can access the course. You can get in there, and you can take a look at what's in the course itself. You need to have an account to do that, but it's definitely worth it because it doesn't cost you anything except a few minutes to sign up. And then you can get in there. You can start practicing things, seeing how it works for you. And we also encourage people to just start, and because, as I said, if-- you don't have to pay for it. You can just learn from the courses for free. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, thanks, Dana. So hopefully that gives you a sense of the range, the richness of materials that MIT is sharing openly for people to learn about climate change no matter where they're coming from, no matter what they're looking for. I'd like to close with a quick reflection on how we might think about, again, in this huge space, what is it that we might do? This framing by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who, for instance, has co-edited a wonderful book called All We Can Save, 40 essays by women working in climate justice. She's got this framing about this Venn diagram which you see here. Think about the intersection of what work needs doing, what are you good at, and what brings you some sense of joy? Find that overlap point. And I'm confident that you will find something to do there good. And there's a great podcast from TILclimate on this subject of just thinking through in this huge space how to find what it is I can do. SYLVIA SCHARF: And there's an educator guide tied to that as well that actually has this Venn diagram activity from Dr. Ayana. And so you could use that just with your family and friends. And I'm seeing the note in the chat about folks who are doing garden and compost programs, especially in urban centers, and that's a great example of bringing the thing that gives you joy into action that needs doing and work that needs doing and using the skills and your joy to do the work that needs to be done. And then being able to use these resources to help explain to yourself and others how is it that the work that I am doing is connected? Because you find that string, you pull on it. It's connected. Everything we do has a connection. CURT NEWTON: So in closing, no matter who you are-- a student or a teacher, a worker or a professional, a citizen active as voting or an advocate-- the whole world needs learning on this. We have to be taking action in a way that's really never happened before over this next decade to set us on the path that we know I need to be on. So MIT is really thrilled to be able to offer this range of climate learning opportunities for everyone. Yeah, thank you. And I think we've got a little time for some questions. If you have anything that's on your mind, to please drop in the chat. SYLVIA SCHARF: I'm also going to drop all those links again into the chat so you don't have to scramble to write them down. CURT NEWTON: Thank you, Sylvia. SYLVIA SCHARF: We also had somebody drop into the chat the idea of opportunities for education for corporate sustainability initiatives. And I think that's one of the great things about these materials is they can be used across areas. I recently piloted over the summer a short-term newsletter that was aimed at teachers. But, in fact, one of my participants was somebody who's the CEO of the nonprofit they work for keeps ending up with climate questions even though the nonprofit that they are, not directly-- that isn't directly climate related. And so they were taking my mini course via email because they wanted to be able to help their CEO answer those questions around climate change. So it's just there are so many different applications. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. It's great hearing the conversation taking shape about the ways in which climate can become everyone's job. There-- because it touches pretty much everything across the whole society in our lives, there's a need for an opportunity for everyone to do things here. Was there anything else in the chat? Oh, good point, Susan, about En-ROADS. Yeah I happen to be an En-ROADS Climate Ambassador. Susan, I imagine you might be involved in that, too. Wonderful free online tool that's MIT-affiliated. It's kind of a spin out from MIT Sloan School of Management, online-- free online simulator that's just such a powerful tool for leading people through discussions to test their ideas for climate solutions. Yeah, Susan, anything else you might want to share about En-ROADS? SUSAN GOLDEN: It's an excellent tool for developing conversations, and there's a workshop. There's assignments right on the website for teachers, high school, and you could even go down to middle school. I work with teachers-- thank you for this moment. But you can go to schools with that as well as universities. I've worked with universities, high schools, and middle schools for using this in the class, En-ROADS in a classroom. There's workshops, and there's also a wonderful, fun, role play game where you pretend you're in the United Nations Climate Summit. So those are all wonderful opportunities to use this amazing and free tool. If anyone wants more information about it, you can talk to Curt, or I'm going to throw my email in there in case anyone wants to contact me. But thank you for this amazing plethora of information on other places to go at MIT. Thank you. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, I'll also make a plug that the classroom assignment materials among other things are Creative Commons licensed, again, specifically to foster that remix, reuse, and share back what you've done spirit that's driving Open Access Week here. Question from Roe I see. DANA DOYLE: Yes. I can take that one. There usually are prerequisites. It would be on the About page when you go to edX. It'll mention the things, and they tend to be-- we try to get it to be as specific as possible of like what type of math. It's like when you say college math, that means different things to different people. So it varies a little bit, but I do recommend taking a look at the prerequisites, and also, again, just start doing the work. And then you'll see kind of like, OK, this is-- what they meant by college math is not what I meant by college math. So definitely just your experience will also help you with that, but the prerequisites are listed on the About page. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, good. I see a question from Jorge. Coursera and MIT are working together. Dana, you want to say anything? DANA DOYLE: Yeah, so we currently don't. We only build on Open edX which is only on edX.org. I mean, it's on various places because it's an open platform, but we use edX.org and MITx Online for our MOOCs. There are some other offerings. I'm not aware of any on climate change that are in the-- on other platforms, but we do have other places at MIT that do others. But I actually am not aware of anybody doing anything on Coursera at this time. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. I see a question from-- don't know if I'll pronounce it right-- Ayoola? The YouTube-- best YouTube page that compiles climate resources. I mean, OCW has a YouTube channel that's got all of our videos on it. I'm not sure that we have a single kind of compiled video collection, and that's a great idea given all the things that have been expanding. I know on the Climate Portal, you can do a, in some places, a search that limits you to different types of resources. Sylvia, is there anything on the portal that might help? SYLVIA SCHARF: Yeah, we don't have very much that's video. We're mostly audio and visual, though I know that's an area we are interested in branching into. But thus far, we've been doing the podcast but not YouTube videos. CURT NEWTON: Yeah, well, stay tuned. Let's watch for something to happen there. There's-- I know there's videos, for instance, of these symposia, public symposia, that MIT has run over the last few years. Wonderful things have been collected there. So let's run with that a little bit. Roe asks a very good question about the order of-- a suggested order for taking things. That's a little less curated than some of us would like, to be sure. And we're actually in some conversations right now that might start to provide a little bit more of a guide for how to make your way through that. My colleagues, would you like to offer any thoughts on that? DANA DOYLE: Yeah, I think that for the courses that I've mentioned, I don't believe that there is necessarily an order that they go in because I'm not 100%-- in some cases where we have a series of courses, it's very clear that you take Finance I before you take Finance II, and you need to take Machine Learning before-- but for these particular courses, I think that they all kind of have their own flavors where you could start them in any order that you're comfortable with. So I would probably look at the prerequisites and see what you're prepared to do. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. SYLVIA SCHARF: I'm noticing Elizabeth has a question about looking at what individual actions people can do. And I think my overall message is find a group. Join with others. Find the work that you want to do that others are doing and you can join. The focus on individual actions is really something that takes the pressure off the places where the policy needs to be. There's-- going back, actually, to that first question about the idea of our understanding of psychology, there is a psychological phenomenon called the single action bias. And it means that within our brains, and this can be for any topic. It can be from I want to keep my house cleaner. I want to be eating more vegetables. Whatever it is that you're setting for yourself, there is a certain part of our brain that basically once we've done one thing towards that thing kind of checks it off and moves on to the other things that we also-- are also important in our lives. And so single actions on climate have that same effect. For decades, we really focused on pushing turning off the lights and recycling. And if those single actions had the effect we wanted, we would be in a very different world today than we are. And, in fact, what we found is that that focus on single actions actually reduces energy available for the larger communal actions that need to happen. So my overall thing is don't. Go find the group. Find the people who are doing the work that excites you. Find the organizations whose work aligns with your values, your interests, and what brings you joy, and join them. CURT NEWTON: Couldn't agree more. Love it. Yeah, anything else happening here? SYLVIA SCHARF: So professional community groups, where to collaborate. I think, I mean, I don't know of any-- every profession kind of has their own, and I think you can often find groups. See, for example, if there's a conference within your professional realm. See who's presenting at that conference on the intersection of climate and sustainability issues with that area. See who that is. Talk to them. See what work is being done and kind of follow up. CURT NEWTON: Yeah I see Jorge has got an interesting question about what are some challenges that MIT might be putting out in the world? I think that's what you're asking, to draw more entrepreneurs in to help out. I'll hold up a program that MIT hosts called Solve, which is continually running and refreshing challenges that are put out to people around a small number of the big challenges out in the world. And there's often a current thread running about something to do with climate change and sustainability. I'm not familiar with exactly what Solve is doing right now. But that's one place to work. Yeah, anybody know other things entrepreneurs-- DANA DOYLE: I could also just mention that Solve actually-- and this is more generally speaking. They do have an edX course called Business and Impact Planning for Social Enterprises. It has already run this year. They tend to run it again. But I would keep an eye out for that if you were interested because that actually-- it's a whole program. And part of it is making a business plan and all of that. So if you're a little new to entrepreneurship or things like that, you could actually take the course, and it helps prepare you to participate in Solve. But you don't have to. So it really does do a lot of building up of just like how do you make plans, and how do you engage? CURT NEWTON: Yeah. Good. I think we're drawing close to the end of the hour here. Maybe take one more question. DANA DOYLE: I think you can probably answer that in a minute or two, Curt. Go ahead. Go for it. CURT NEWTON: That last one, the financial problem. Yeah, we've got that done. SYLVIA SCHARF: Solve it. Solve it right now. CURT NEWTON: Yeah. I will share, similar to the question about individual actions, it's really important to try to keep a kind of a bigger picture framing here. And that so often the challenge around the finances of climate is how can we afford to spend this money? When in reality, the question we should be asking is given the damages that not taking action are confronting us with, how could we afford not to do it? How can we afford to not take this action? And it goes way beyond just the financial, too. But starting from there, then you can get into, for a given policy. For instance, here in the state of Massachusetts, we have a big challenge ahead of us about how to make our very old housing stock, which tends to be heated by fossil fuels, more efficient. What's the most efficient way to go about that? Reasonable people will disagree, thankfully. But you can get into that once you've got that baseline commitment that we can't afford not to take this action and also we can't afford to not be thinking about the unequal harms that are put out in the world around this as well. So keep an eye on what's going on at the upcoming United Nations COP where this concept of loss and damage will be central, and some of the financial underpinnings of taking action will be central as well. Yeah, great question. At the end of the day, we live in an economy-driven world, and it's a place where we should all be able to engage. And hopefully some of the resources that you can find at MIT among these resources will help you plot a course. So with that, thank you, Sylvia. Thank you, Dana. It's been really fun to do this and so glad you could join us. And stay tuned. Thanks for your questions. We will be continuing to work this space. DANA DOYLE: Thank you, everybody. SYLVIA SCHARF: All right, thanks so much, everybody.