Images from The Magic Behind OCW on Oct. 7, 2021. From the top: OCW team members Yvonne, Shiba, Sharon, and Brett.
A lot goes into getting a course ready for publication on OpenCourseWare, but the work doesn’t stop once a course or video goes live. As a member of the open education resources, or OER, community, a huge focus of OCW is on sharing resources to make them widely available to as many learners and educators around the world as possible to easily use, adapt, and reshare.
In that spirit, we’re picking up with more of your questions on what it actually looks like to reach out to different learning communities, and various ways of making OCW more accessible through translation, offline copies of OCW content, outreach to educators, and compiling stories from OCW users to help inspire others.
Some questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What are the strategies to make courses truly accessible worldwide by overcoming language barriers? -Mario
Because OCW materials are available for everyone to reuse, remix, and share (via CC BY-NC-SA), anyone can translate our course materials into other languages and share them online. Automated translation technologies continue to improve, for example, YouTube now has an automatic caption translation feature in a number of languages. We also include complete transcriptions of lecture videos, which can be useful for users who are not native speakers.
– Shiba Nemat-Nasser, Digital Publication Specialist & Feedback Lead
The free courses and resources we publish on OCW help empower learners around the world with the power of knowledge at their fingertips. Together, we can keep providing free access to knowledge from MIT. Please give today.
How can we collaborate to offer MIT OCW to young people in Africa? -Israel
OCW has the mirror site program to serve global learning communities with limited internet access. We currently have more than 440 mirror sites worldwide. We would appreciate our users helping us connect with these communities and extend MIT’s education outreach to serve more learners around the globe. To learn more about the OCW mirror site program, email ocwmsp@mit.edu.
-Sharon Lin, Digital Publication Specialist and Mirror Site Program Coordinator
Does OCW have an outreach program for teachers? – John
MIT OpenCourseWare loves educators! We see teachers as individuals who multiply the impact of open educational resources by sharing them with many students, who in turn share their knowledge with countless others. The OCW Educator initiative makes it easier to find OER for your classroom. We also connect you with OER through Chalk Radio, our OCW podcast. We share instructor insights through the podcast and on our website, too! If you’d like help finding OER for your curriculum, or if you’d like to share your open education story with Chalk Radio listeners, you can reach out to the OCW Educator project lead, Sarah Hansen. She always tells us that working with educators like you is the best part of her job!
-Brett Paci, Media Production Manager
Is there an alumni organization of OCW learners? Success stories of OCW learners? Jobs, progress in their professions, entrepreneurs? -Sittampalam
Thank you for asking these questions, Sittampalam. There is no alumni organization of OCW learners because we don’t offer credentials. People who use OCW can do so freely and openly. However, we hear from lots of learners around the world who tell us about the impact OCW has had on their lives. You can read those stories in the OCW stories section of our website.
Students, educators, and independent learners have also shared their thoughts through our Tell Us Your Story form. We’ve taken this lovely feedback and compiled a book of quotes we hope you find inspiring too.
-Yvonne Ng, Annual Giving and Donor Relations Officer
Curious to learn more? Check out some of the other recent answers in our community Q&A series: You Asked, We Answered, Part 1; Your Questions Answered. Or, ask us here.
