Drawings of human retina and the human ear with a cochlear implant .

The human retina and the human ear with a cochlear implant. (Retina image by MIT OpenCourseWare; ear image courtesy of NIH.)

In this blog, we’ve highlighted how OpenCourseWare and MOOCs can play complementary roles in learning.

For instance, OCW courses can support you with “just-in-time” refreshers on prerequisite knowledge for a MOOC. On the other hand, after a MOOC has piqued your curiosity, OCW courses are great ways to keep learning.

Here’s an example of the latter. Starting on November 18, MITx on edX will be running a 4-week MOOC that introduces the fascinating neuroscience of vision. 9.01.1x Light, Spike, and Sight: The Neuroscience of Vision is “a journey through the eye, retina and brain, revealing how light translates into nerve signals that encode the visual world.” The course is geared toward a general audience, requiring no specific prerequisites. Here’s a video introduction:

To learn more about the neuroscience of vision, and also explore the sense of hearing, check out OCW’s new course 9.04 Sensory Systems. At MIT, this course is a follow-up to introductory neuroscience courses, usually taken in the junior or senior year. It dives deeply into the neural bases of visual and auditory processing for perception and sensorimotor control.

Co-taught by Professors Peter Schiller and Chris Brown, this OCW course has a complete set of lecture videos. Here’s the introductory lecture: