Detective Nate the Great searches San Francisco for a lost joke book. He discovers that the wrong place can be the best place to look for a lost item.

What makes a ‘nation’ and what makes peoples strive for nationhood? This unit will provide you with an introduction to studying political ideas by looking at how people who see themselves as nations challenge the existing order to assert their right to a state of their own.

What makes a ‘nation’ and what makes peoples strive for nationhood? This unit will provide you with an introduction to studying political ideas by looking at how people who see themselves as nations challenge the existing order to assert their right to a state of their own. After studying this unit you should be able to: grasp the concepts of nation, nationalism and self-determination; have a better understanding of the role they play in current political disputes; think about the problem of how to take democratic decisions about secession; relate political theory to political practice more rigorously; take a more informed and active part in debates about national and international politics.

Students apply the concepts learned in the class by preparing two (2) term projects discussing two natural hazards and how they impact the area where the student lives (or an area the student might like to live in).

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In this jigsaw activity, students discover four different aspects of natural hazards on the Island of Hawaii. The goal for students is to design a hazard zone map that combines these four topics and that could be used for making land-use decisions before future natural hazards occur.

Students will first be assigned to one of four Hazard Specialties (lava flows, explosive eruptions, earthquakes, tsunami), where they complete an exercise and make a preliminary hazard zone map with their specialty group from a single hazard map.
Then the students will reorganize into Hazard Assessment Teams, with one student from each of the four Hazard Specialties, to develop a final hazard zone map based on information on all four hazards. Each Hazard Assessment Team will make a recommendation about the risks of natural hazards to existing and future development in Hilo, Kailua-Kona, and Kalapana on the Island of Hawaii.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This activity allows students to figure out how they can negatively impact wildlife without trying.

This activity illustrates the interrelationship between science and engineering in the context of extinction prevention. There are two parts to the activity. The first part challenges students to think like scientists as they generate reports on endangered species and give presentations worthy of a news channel or radio broadcast. The second part puts students in the shoes of engineers, designing ways to help the endangered species.

While current economic theory focuses on prices and games, this book models economic settings where harmony is established through one of the following societal conventions:

• A power relation according to which stronger agents are able to force weaker ones to do things against their will.
• A norm that categorizes actions as permissible or forbidden.
• A status relation over alternatives which limits each agent's choices.
• Systematic biases in agents' preferences.

These four conventions are analysed using simple and mathematically straightforward models, without any pretensions regarding direct applied usefulness. While we do not advocate for the adoption of any of these conventions specifically – we do advocate that when modelling an economic situation, alternative equilibrium notions should be considered, rather than automatically reaching for the familiar approaches of prices or games.

Play with a 1D or 2D system of coupled mass-spring oscillators. Vary the number of masses, set the initial conditions, and watch the system evolve. See the spectrum of normal modes for arbitrary motion. See longitudinal or transverse modes in the 1D system.

Students expand upon their understanding of simple machines with an introduction to compound machines. A compound machine a combination of two or more simple machines can affect work more than its individual components. Engineers who design compound machines aim to benefit society by lessening the amount of work that people exert for even common household tasks. This lesson encourages students to critically think about machine inventions and their role in our lives.

In this exploratory seminar, first-year undergraduate students learn the basic physics of nuclear energy and radiation, and learn to communicate their knowledge and perspective by writing a traditional Op-Ed piece. The technical content emphasizes the unique attributes and challenges of nuclear energy as a low-carbon solution as well as the peaceful applications of ionizing radiation to help humankind. The open-ended writing project combines personal creativity and technical knowledge to share important messages about science. The course employs blended learning, as students use the online course 22.011x, freely available on the MIT Open Learning Library, to learn the technical content, and meet together in person for the communication component, developing and polishing their Op-Eds.

This capstone course is a group design project involving integration of nuclear physics, particle transport, control, heat transfer, safety, instrumentation, materials, environmental impact, and economic optimization. It provides opportunities to synthesize knowledge acquired in nuclear and non-nuclear subjects and apply this knowledge to practical problems of current interest in nuclear applications design. Each year, the class takes on a different design project; this year, the project is a power plant design that ties together the creation of emission-free electricity with carbon sequestration and fossil fuel displacement. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
This course is an elective subject in MIT’s undergraduate Energy Studies Minor. This Institute-wide program complements the deep expertise obtained in any major with a broad understanding of the interlinked realms of science, technology, and social sciences as they relate to energy and associated environmental challenges.

Short Description:
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon and carbon-containing compounds. Since the core structural, catalytic, information storage, and retrieval systems of organisms are carbon-based macromolecules, organic chemistry is of direct relevance to the life sciences. Just as importantly, the properties of carbon make possible an amazing range of molecules with unique properties, from small molecules to complex plastics and even more complex biomolecules.

Long Description:
The essence of organic chemistry is how carbon atoms interact with other atoms and groups of atoms to produce an astounding array of complex and interesting molecules. The basics of bonding and intermolecular interactions are introduced in the general chemistry version of CLUE (Chemistry, Life, the Universe & Everything), along with how the structure of a molecule affects its properties, how the energy changes associated with chemical and physical changes can be predicted and explained, and how chemical systems can be stabilized or perturbed by changing conditions. These four core ideas (structure-property relationships, bonding and interactions, energy, and stability, and change) are continued on into OCLUE and are deepened and expanded as we discover and explain ever more complex chemical systems.

Word Count: 52755

ISBN: 978-1-62610-102-9

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This is an outline of our OER course. It is a enrollment fastrack designed to get students off our waiting list and into preliminary coursework sooner.

Short Description:
The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers was created to bring attention to the work that is involved in building and managing an OER program, from learning about open educational practices and soliciting team members to collecting and reporting data on your program’s outcomes. Regardless of your program's scope and your own experience with OER, we hope that the Starter Kit for Program Managers will have some tips to help you along your way. Join the community of practice!

Long Description:
The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers was created to bring attention to the work that is involved in building and managing an OER program, from learning about open educational practices and soliciting team members to collecting and reporting data on your program’s outcomes. Regardless of your program’s scope and your own experience with OER, we hope that the Starter Kit for Program Managers will have some tips to help you along your way.

The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers contains seven parts: A Quick Guide to Open Education Building an OER Program Program Management Training and Professional Development Supporting OER Adoption Supporting Open Textbook Creation Collecting and Reporting Data

Visit the project homepage to join the community of practice!

Word Count: 107835

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Conceptual Chemistry is a year-long course based on CK-12 OER instructional material and supplemented with limited commercially-available materials. The course is project-based, argument-driven inquiry. Each quarter begins with presentation of an intriguing phenomenon, followed by an essential question about the phenomenon, and a project centered on answering that essential question. Throughout the quarter, students conduct research and investigations to answer portions of the question. Each unit has a student "Task" at the end that serves as an assessment of the unit's concepts. At the end of each quarter, students assemble all of the unit tasks and synthesize a personal final project that answers the essential question in a personal context chosen by the student.