Online courses directory (417)
This course will introduce you to the psychology behind gender and sexuality, or the study of the different ways our gender roles and sexual identities impact our lives. Although the terms “gender” and “sex” are often used synonymously in everyday speech, this course will assign the terms two different meanings. “Sex” refers to biological differencei.e. whether you are a female or male from a biological standpoint. “Gender” refers to the social and psychological attributes that come along with one’s sex. Though these terms are similar and relate to one another, there is a distinct difference between the two that you should recognize for the purposes of this course. In this course, we will take a look at how our understanding of our own gender and sex can affect different aspects of our functioning, while also identifying the factors in our lives that can impact our gender and sex. While we often assume we know a lot about how gender affects our lives and the lives of the opposite gender, t…
This course covers central topics in language processing, including: the structure of language; sentence, discourse, and morphological processing; storage and access of words in the mental dictionary; speech processing; the relationship between the computational resources available in working memory and the language processing mechanism; and ambiguity resolution. The course also considers computational modeling, including connectionist models; the relationship between language and thought; and issues in language acquisition including critical period phenomena, the acquisition of speech, and the acquisition of words. Experimental methodologies such as self-paced reading, eye-tracking, cross-modal priming, and neural imaging methods are also examined.
We will examine current research and theory regarding the validity and utility of commonly accepted gender differences in many realms. Topics include: gender differences in cognitive abilities; the social construction of gender; developmental, family, educational and medical influences; and political and economic forces.
Do you have an interest in biology and quantitative tools? Do you know computational methods but do not realize how they apply to biological problems? Do you know biology but do not understand how scientists really analyze complicated data? 7.QBWx: Quantitative Biology Workshop is designed to give learners exposure to the application of quantitative tools to analyze biological data at an introductory level. For the last few years, the Biology Department of MIT has run this workshop-style course as part of a one-week outreach program for students from other universities. With 7.QBWx, we can give more learners from around the world the chance to discover quantitative biology. We hope that this series of workshops encourages learners to explore new interests and take more biology and computational courses.
We expect that learners from 7.00x Introduction to Biology – The Secret of Life or an equivalent course can complete this workshop-based course without a background in programming. The course content will introduce programming languages but will not teach any one language in a comprehensive manner. The content of each week varies. We want learners to have an introduction to multiple languages and tools to find a topic that they would want to explore more. Participants with programming experience will find some weeks easier than students with only biology experience, while those with a biology background should find the week on genetics easier. We recommend that learners try to complete each week to find what interests them the most.
Workshop Content Creators and Residential Leaders
Gregory Hale, Michael Goard, Ph.D., Ben Stinson, Kunle Demuren, Sara Gosline, Ph.D., Glenna Foight, Leyla Isik, Samir El-Boustani, Ph.D., Gerald Pho, and Rajeev Rikhye
Residential Outreach Workshop Organizer and Creator
Mandana Sassanfar, Ph.D.
This workshop includes activities on the following biological topics: population biology, biochemical equilibrium and kinetics, molecular modeling of enzymes, visual neuroscience, genetics, gene expression and development, and genomics. The tools and programming languages include MATLAB, PyMOL, StarGenetics, Python, and R. This course does not require learners to download MATLAB. All MATLAB activities run and are graded within the edX platform. We do recommend that participants download a few other free tools for the activities so that they learn how to use the same tools and programs that scientists use.
To provide instruction and dialog on practical ethical issues relating to the responsible conduct of human and animal research in the brain and cognitive sciences. Specific emphasis will be placed on topics relevant to young researchers including data handling, animal and human subjects, misconduct, mentoring, intellectual property, and publication.
This series of research talks by members of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences introduces students to different approaches to the study of the brain and mind.
Topics include:
- From Neurons to Neural Networks
- Prefrontal Cortex and the Neural Basis of Cognitive Control
- Hippocampal Memory Formation and the Role of Sleep
- The Formation of Internal Modes for Learning Motor Skills
- Look and See: How the Brain Selects Objects and Directs the Eyes
- How the Brain Wires Itself