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Top 10 Chalk Radio Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Chalk Radio episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Chalk Radio for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Chalk Radio episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
01/27/21 • 19 min
Over the years, Sarah Hansen has interviewed the creator of the “Women of NASA” minifigure series as well as a professor of astronautics and former deputy administrator of NASA. Now, for the first time, she interviews an actual astronaut, Jeff Hoffman, who teaches aerospace engineering and systems engineering at MIT. In this episode, Prof. Hoffman describes his experiences in space and how one’s understanding of the world is changed by seeing it from the outside, as a finite sphere, with our seemingly boundless sky revealed as just a thin layer of breathable atmosphere. So far this broadening of physical perspective has been limited to a select few, but Prof. Hoffman tries to achieve an analogous broadening in his students’ mental perspective by introducing them to the Conceive Design Implement Operate (CDIO) framework, an approach to engineering education that uses student-designed-and-built projects to develop teamwork and professionalism and to help students envision the big picture of the systems being designed: what they are intended to be and how they will be used in the real world by actual people, whether on the ground or in the vacuum of space.
Relevant Resources
Professor Hoffman’s systems engineering course on OCW
Professor Hoffman’s aerospace engineering course on MIT’s Open Learning Library
Professor Hoffman’s full video interview with Sarah Hansen
Professor Hoffman’s faculty page
CDIO approach to engineering education
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
The Power of Experience with Dr. Ari Epstein
Chalk Radio
05/22/24 • 19 min
You thought Chalk Radio was a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT? Yes and no! “We don't do a lot of teaching,” says Dr. Ari Epstein, our guest for this week’s episode. Dr. Epstein is associate director of the Terrascope program, a learning community for first-year undergraduates. Each year the program focuses on one particular issue relating to sustainability, and participants in the program learn by direct experience, launching themselves into projects focused on solving complex environmental problems. The role of the program’s instructional staff, Dr. Epstein says, is to create an environment where learning can happen, rather than to impart knowledge or teach skills directly. Toward the end of the semester, the students create a website describing their proposed solutions in as much technical detail as they can. And then a week later, they present their proposals in front of an invited panel of outside experts. In the process of preparing for this presentation, students often come to realize that understanding the history and cultural implications of an issue are just as important as understanding the science behind it and the technology available for dealing with it.
Relevant Resources:
RES.12-002 Terrascope on MIT OpenCourseWare
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
10/16/24 • 29 min
Jae-Min Hong, our guest for this episode, is a hungry learner with wide-ranging curiosity and a distrust of groupthink. A native of South Korea, she has been fluent in English from childhood, which has opened up many educational possibilities for her. Aiming to widen her cultural horizons, she opted to attend high school in New Zealand; a few years later, she transferred from a Korean university to an American one so she could attend in-person classes during the Covid pandemic. With the help of lecture videos from MIT OpenCourseWare, Jae-Min was able to supplement her formal studies and pursue all the subjects that interest her, from chemistry and thermodynamics through data science and financial technology. She’s now back in South Korea, where she’s finishing a degree in economics at Yonsei University. She feels it’s time for her to really focus her attention on a single field and a single goal, a career in investment banking. But if that doesn’t work out, she says, she can always come back to MIT OpenCourseWare and dip once more into the wealth of resources it has to offer.
The Open Learners podcast is produced by Alexis Haut.
Relevant Resources:
5.60 Thermodynamics & Kinetics on MIT OpenCourseWare
15.401 Finance Theory I on MIT OpenCourseWare
18.06 Linear Algebra on MIT OpenCourseWare
Prof. Gilbert Strang (MIT faculty page)
RES.18-005 Highlights of Calculus (including “The Big Picture of Calculus”) on MIT OpenCourseWare
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Share Your Open Learning Story
To share your own open learning story with Michael and Emmanuel, send them an email at [email protected].
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
04/15/20 • 16 min
What would Shakespeare have made of today’s popular television shows? He might or might not like them, but he wouldn’t dismiss them simply because they’re popular. In this episode, Professor David Thorburn, who has spent his career challenging conventional assumptions about what kinds of works have artistic merit, speaks eloquently about why popular art forms like film and television belong in the classroom. He explains that in his course 21L.011 The Film Experience, which he has taught at MIT for over 35 years, he strives to reframe classic works for modern audiences—with “classic works” in this context meaning everything from Charlie Chaplin comedies to Technicolor musicals, Hitchcock thrillers, and Japanese samurai movies. Professor Thorburn hopes that his lectures, which are available in full on MIT OpenCourseWare, will help as many students as possible to know how to enjoy the movies more richly, regardless of their intended major. In passing, he talks about topics as various as the usefulness of lectures as an educational technique, the difficulty of imagining a world without iPads, the universality of “All in the Family,” and his admiration for Claude Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral.
Relevant Resources:
Professor Thorburn’s course on OCW
A profile of Professor Thorburn
Knots, Professor Thorburn’s first book of poetry
Wikipedia article on Jean Renoir
Wikipedia article on Claude Monet’s cathedral paintings
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
05/14/25 • 30 min
Learn about Python, growth mindset, and the uses of rubber ducks in this interview with MIT lecturer Ana Bell. Dr. Bell, who has been programming since she was twelve and now teaches popular introductory courses in computer science, says that coding consists of almost equal parts creativity and logic. The creative part, she explains, gets exercised particularly when you have to come up with an algorithm to solve a given problem, because for any given complex problem there are many possible approaches to tackling it. The logical part comes into play when you sit down to translate that algorithm into an unambiguous sequence of rules in a programming language, and again when you discover that the code you’ve written doesn’t work exactly as you intended it to and you have to set about debugging it. Among the topics the conversation addresses are why everyone–even in the age of generative AI– ought to study at least the basics of programming, why it can be useful to speak to an inanimate object when your coding project is stuck in the debugging stage, and how programming can help you choose your own adventure.
Relevant Resources:
6.100 L Introduction to Computer Science and Programming using Python on MIT OpenCourseWare
6.0001 [now 6.100A] Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python on MIT OpenCourseWare
6.0002 [now 6.100B] Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science on MIT OpenCourseWare
Get Programming: Learn to Code with Python (book by Dr. Bell)
Doodle Debug (coloring book by Dr. Bell)
Video version of this interview on YouTube
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
12/02/20 • 11 min
First-year students who already plan to major in chemistry don’t require any special bells or whistles to motivate them to study the subject. But introductory chemistry is a required subject for all students at MIT, regardless of their intended major, and materials scientist Jeffrey Grossman has found that for many students in his course 3.091 Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, the subject becomes much more accessible if he takes conscious steps to make it real for them. He does this both inside and outside the classroom. First, he makes sure that part of each lecture he delivers explores the connection between the topic of the lecture and his students’ actual experience. Second, he gives students the chance to play around with real-world materials so they can learn the principles of chemistry firsthand. As Professor Grossman explains in this episode, it was by playing around with materials that the very first chemists began to learn about matter and its properties, and this kind of basic experimentation has an inherently multisensory quality that deepens and enriches students’ understanding of the concepts they learn.
Relevant Resources:
Professor Grossman’s course on OCW
Professor Grossman’s faculty page
MIT’s General Institute Requirements (GIRs)
“Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (PDF) (Richard Feynman’s lecture on atomic-scale engineering)
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617 475-0534
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep those programs going!
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
05/27/20 • 11 min
“We all hold dear certain attitudes about language,” Professor Michel DeGraff says in this episode centered on his course 24.908 Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities. Those attitudes can be positive for ourselves and for others, DeGraff says, but they can also have negative effects. His goal is to make linguistics accessible to a broader audience, to connect language to issues of culture and identity, and to show how language prejudices are rooted in hierarchies of power. Specifically, he seeks to increase public awareness that the creoles of the Caribbean, like his native Haitian Creole (or Kreyòl), are fully developed languages worthy of as much respect as higher-prestige languages like French or English. To pursue this goal, he promotes dual-language education for Haitian-American students, and he himself speaks Kreyòl in as many public forums as possible—including in the videos on the OpenCourseWare site for his course, and at various points in this podcast itself! At the same time, as he explains, he encourages his students to examine their own backgrounds to see how their attitudes about the languages they speak have been shaped by explicit or implicit attitudes about culture and identity.
Relevant Resources:
Professor DeGraff’s course on OCW
Professor DeGraff’s faculty page
English / Haitian Creole dual-language kindergarten in Boston
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
04/29/20 • 17 min
You might imagine that fluency is an inherently good thing in teaching. But Dr. Christopher Terman, Senior Lecturer Emeritus at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, explains that breaks in the flow of the classroom can actually make the learning experience more memorable. This is just one of the insights Dr. Terman has gained in twenty years of teaching the course 6.004 Computation Structures. “If you’re going to spend 40% of your time in the classroom,” he says, “you might as well teach well.” He and the rest of the teaching team for 6.004 are always seeking to optimize their students’ learning experience, adapting the course through repeated iterations to include as much as possible of what they’ve found works best. Among the details Dr. Terman shares in this episode are how the course engages students from different backgrounds by offering a “buffet” of learning materials through the use of the MITx learning platform, how creating hands-on browser-based digital design lab experiences help students internalize the material, and how online forums reduce student frustration by offering quicker answers to questions that arise outside of class.
Relevant Resources
Enhance your teaching at MIT with the MITx Residential Platform
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
03/04/20 • 27 min
“How has Africa been made to mean?” For a long time, Africa has been depicted in the arts and media as a place of famine and dysfunction. More recently, the continent has been increasingly portrayed as the next frontier for business and artistic innovation. In this episode, we talk with MIT Professor of African Studies M. Amah Edoh about how Africa, as a concept, is produced through cultural practices--things like music, film, theatre, clothing, etc. She shares how she engages MIT students with this concept in 21G.026 Global Africa: Creative Cultures, a course she’s shared on MIT OpenCourseWare. Topics include how her own experiences with formal education shape how and why she tries to value students’ voices in the classroom, redefining students’ relationships to scholarly texts to make academia feel less alienating, giving students language to articulate relationships of power, encouraging students to experiment with creative cultural production, getting off campus to experience cultural performance in a social context, and living the life of a new faculty member (spoiler alert: it’s a lot like engaging in marathon improvisational theatre, and it’s exhausting!).
Relevant Resources:
Professor Edoh’s course on OCW
“The Price of Love” [PDF] (Wedding Project) by Nwamaka Amobi and Gabrielle Ballard
Blog post on Professor’s Edoh’s approach to creating a supportive academic culture
Faculty profile: 3 Questions with M. Amah Edoh on Africa and Innovation
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
03/08/23 • 19 min
In this episode we meet Haynes Miller, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, who in his 35+ years of active teaching at MIT has done much to shape the institute’s math curriculum. Prof. Miller’s special focus is algebraic topology, but his teaching has encompassed a wide range of other topics from differential equations to number theory, and he has a special interest in teaching undergraduates. Join us as Prof. Miller discusses math education with guest host Paige Bright, a current MIT third-year student who was one of his students in a first-year seminar and who has since acquired teaching experience of her own as the instructor for the course Introduction to Metric Spaces during the Independent Activities Period in January 2022 and 2023. Among the topics they cover in this discussion are the importance of communication in mathematics, Prof. Miller’s use of computer manipulatives (which he calls “mathlets”) to engage students more actively, what “lab work” means in the context of pure mathematics, how instructors from different institutions have come together online to discuss ways to improve undergraduate math education, and what happens when you ask students to switch roles and become teachers.
Relevant Resources:
18.03 Differential Equations on OCW
18.821 Project Laboratory in Mathematics on OCW
18.915 Graduate Topology Seminar: Kan Seminar on OCW
Paige Bright’s course 18.S190 Introduction to Metric Spaces on OCW
Prof. Miller’s “manipulatives” at mathlets.org
Online Seminar on Undergraduate Mathematics Education (OLSUME)
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
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FAQ
How many episodes does Chalk Radio have?
Chalk Radio currently has 57 episodes available.
What topics does Chalk Radio cover?
The podcast is about Computer Science, Learning, Humanities, Teaching, How To, Courses, Podcasts, Finance, Education, Engineering and Programming.
What is the most popular episode on Chalk Radio?
The episode title 'Sustainability Education Across Learning Environments with Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Chalk Radio?
The average episode length on Chalk Radio is 22 minutes.
How often are episodes of Chalk Radio released?
Episodes of Chalk Radio are typically released every 14 days.
When was the first episode of Chalk Radio?
The first episode of Chalk Radio was released on Feb 1, 2020.
Show more FAQ
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