MIT fosters online learning through its MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). OCW, a web-based publication, virtually shares MIT course content to not only MIT students, but also the rest of the world at the convenience of people’s homes. The videos on OCW, for the most part, are directly recorded from lecture. OCW succeeds in giving students the opportunity to stop and start the lectures to learn concepts at their own pace. However, OCW makes it difficult for students to quickly learn or review a specific concept. They must search and playback through the lecture videos or just watch the full hour lecture to learn that specific concept.

 

The Mechanical Engineering Department aims to pioneer a new form of online learning for students to use in addition to OCW. The ultimate goal is to create an online archive of 3 to 6 minute innovative and high quality video tutorials on specific concepts for the current and future MIT curriculums. The tutorials are dynamic and feature videos of real life situations, in which that specific concept occurs. For this UROP project, I created a tutorial focusing on angular momentum for the 2.003, Dynamics and Control I.

 

In this UROP I frequently met and interfaced with Professor David Gossard. For the first half of project, I familiarized myself with the concepts, filmed real-world examples, wrote the script for the voice over, created virtual models, found relevant equations, and gathered all the parts necessary to make the tutorial. For the second half of the project, I put the parts together and spent the majority of time editing and testing the tutorials to ensure the message and concepts were clear and ready for publication.

 

To make these tutorials, I worked primarily with modern movie post-production software—AdobePremier, photo editing software—Adobe PhotoShop, and digital motion graphics and compositing software—Adobe After Effects. I loved the UROP freshman year because the topics dealt with content in my major, mechanical engineering, while utilizing my interest in using computer editing software.