Online courses directory (19947)

This is a course about how research knowledge and other types of knowledge come to be actionable and influential in the world — or not. The course explores ways to make research knowledge more accessible, credible, and useful in the realm of public policy and practice, a project in which the course faculty collectively bring decades of professional experience, in both academic and non-academic roles.

The course addresses the politics of the policymaking process, the power of framing and agenda-setting, fads and paradigms in the design professions and society in general, how knowledge diffuses along knowledge and influence networks, and how varied types of knowledge (rational, craft, other) and deliberation shape decision-making and action. The course engages a number of guests to present case studies of research in use (and abuse) in varied fields, highlighting rich areas for potential research contributions, along with major conflicts in public values, political interests, ethical obligations, and more. The resulting dilemmas confront scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and others as they look to research — sometimes — for useful guidance, influence, or both.

By Kenji Hakuta, Jeff Zwiers and Sara Rutherford-Quach

By Patricio Del Sol, Ph.D. Stanford

In this engaging and action-oriented course, you will explore and practice the concepts of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, and how these three concepts come together to create the future of the business world. You

By Joshua Rauh

By Dariush Rafinejad

In analyzing fiscal issues, conventional public finance approaches focus mainly on taxation and public spending. Policymakers and practitioners rarely explore solutions by examining the fundamental problem: the failure of interested parties to act collectively to internalize the positive externalities generated by public goods. Public finance is merely one of many possible institutional arrangements for assigning the rights and responsibilities to public goods consumption. This system is currently under stress because of the financial crisis. The first part of the class will focus on collective action and its connection with local public finance. The second part will explore alternative institutional arrangements for mediating collective action problems associated with the provision of local public goods.

The objective of the seminar is to broaden the discussion of local public finance by incorporating collective action problems into the discourse. This inclusion aims at exploring alternative institutional arrangements for financing local public services in the face of severe economic downturn. Applications of emerging ideas to the provision of public health, education, and natural resource conservation will be discussed.

This three-week module, centered on a focal case, represents the second part of the Department's introduction to the challenges of reflection and action in professional planning practice. As such, it builds on the concepts and tools in 11.201 and 11.202 in the fall semester. Working in teams, students will deliver a 20-minute oral briefing, with an additional 10 minutes for questions and comments, in the last week of the class (as detailed on the assignment and posted course schedule). The teams will brief invited guests ("briefees") taking the roles of decision makers. DUSP faculty and fellow students may also be in attendance.

In this course, we will investigate popular culture and narrative by focusing on the relationship between literary texts and comics. Several questions shape the syllabus and provide a framework for approaching the course materials: How do familiar aspects of comics trace their origins to literary texts and broader cultural concerns? How have classic comics gone on to influence literary fiction? In what ways do contemporary graphic narratives bring a new kind of seriousness of purpose to comics, blurring what's left of the boundaries between the highbrow and the lowbrow? Readings and materials for the course range from the nineteenth century to the present, and include novels, short stories, essays, older and newer comics, and some older and newer films. Expectations include diligent reading, active participation, occasional discussion leading, and two papers.

During the last fifteen years, nations across the globe embarked on a historic transformation away from centrally planned economies to market-oriented ones. However, in the common pursuit for economic growth, these transition countries implemented widely different reform strategies with mixed results. With over a decade of empirical evidence now available, this new course examines this phenomenon that has pushed the discourse in a number of disciplines, requiring us to reconsider fundamental issues such as:

• the proper relationship between business, government, and the public interest
• the possible synergies and tensions between economic growth and equity
• how economic transition has reshaped cities

The premise of the course is that the core issue in transition involves institution-building and re-building in different contexts.

By Leticia Britos Cavagnaro

​This course introduces the fundamentals of technology entrepreneurship, pioneered in Silicon Valley and now spreading across the world. You will learn the process technology entrepreneurs use to start companies. It involves taking a technology idea and finding a high-potential commercial...

By Shahid Ansari and Jan Bell

By David Bradford and Allan Cohen

This course is being offered in conjunction with the colloquium The Politics of Reconstructing Iraq, which is sponsored by MIT’s Center for International Studies and Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Fundamentally, the course focuses on contemporary post-conflict countries (or in-conflict countries) and the role of planning and reconstruction in building nations, mitigating conflicts, reshaping the social, spatial, geopolitical, and political life, and determining the country’s future.

This class is intended to introduce students to understandings of the city generated from both social science literature and the field of urban design. The first part of the course examines literature on the history and theory of the city. Among other factors, it pays special attention to the larger territorial settings in which cities emerged and developed (ranging from the global to the national to the regional context) and how these affected the nature, character, and functioning of cities and the lives of their inhabitants. The remaining weeks focus more explicitly on the theory and practice of design visions for the city, the latter in both utopian and realized form. One of our aims will be to assess the conditions under which a variety of design visions were conceived, and to assess them in terms of the varying patterns of territorial "nestedness" (local, regional, national, imperial, and global) examined in the first part of the course. Another will be to encourage students to think about the future prospects of cities (in terms of territorial context or other political functions and social aims) and to offer design visions that might reflect these new dynamics.

Citizen participation is everywhere. Invoking it has become de rigueur when discussing cities and regions in the developing world. From the World Bank to the World Social Forum, the virtues of participation are extolled: From its capacity to "deepen democracy" to its ability to improve governance, there is no shortage to the benefits it can bring. While it is clear that participation cannot possibly "do" all that is claimed, it is also clear that citizen participation cannot be dismissed, and that there must be something to it. Figuring out what that something is — whether it is identifying the types of participation or the contexts in which it happens that bring about desirable outcomes — is the goal of the class.

This course focuses on the land use-transportation "interaction space" in metropolitan settings. The course aims to develop an understanding of relevant theories and analytical techniques, through the exploration of various cases drawn from different parts of the world. The course begins with an overview of the role of transportation in patterns of urban development and metropolitan growth. It introduces the concept of accessibility and related issues of individual and firm travel demand. Later in the semester, students will explore the influence of the metropolitan built environment on travel behavior and the role of transportation on metropolitan land development. The course will conclude with an examination of the implications of the land use-transportation interaction space for metropolitan futures, and our abilities to forecast them.

By Carl Spetzler, Ph.D.

Decision Quality (DQ) is a practical and systematic approach that methodically breaks down barriers and improves the quality and speed of important decisions.In this five-week introductory course, you’ll work in teams to learn the DQ approach, which draws from the disciplines of business,...