MIT OpenCourseWare Origins, Pathways, and Possibilities

it's preparing the live stream and then i'll just send the link i'll give give people like two minutes to settle in there's a link i'm going to click start webinar it's like mission control okay we're gonna get started good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are and uh thank you for joining us for this webinar about mit open courseware origins pathways and possibilities i'm kurt newton i'm a director of opencourseware and we're just so glad that you're joining us today to review you know where we've been how we got here and where we're going just a uh a couple of quick notes to get us started there is closed captioning available which you can access uh on the zoom toolbar and we also welcome your questions uh please use the q a feature and we will make sure to save a few minutes at the end uh to to take to take a few of those we also have people who are manning that q a and maybe answering some of the questions online as we go all right i want to start us off just by giving you a quick preview of the things we're going to talk through i'm joined by several of my colleagues on the ocw publication leadership team and they'll be talking through different aspects of of ocw how we work with faculty our technology our intellectual property approach our use of social media and other community building mechanisms how we use video and how we are focused in particular on educators these days and i'll wrap up come back and wrap up with a uh kind of a preview of several exciting things that are next in the ocw program and then again finally a few uh a few q a's at the end so i'm going to start off nearly 20 years ago almost to the day april 4th 2001 mit open courseware was announced to the world and that launch included a founding dual mission the first of which was to publish freely the materials from virtually all mit courses and that's what we're going to focus on today those are very important second component to that mission which was to use what we started at mit to help launch and build a resources movement and we're so glad that the oe global consortium is sponsoring this oe week event and and that movement is very very healthy and vibrant and we're just glad to be part of it we summarize our mission as unlocking knowledge and empowering empowering minds through sharing all these materials open courseware today is at its core a website with open education resource for thousands of mit courses syllabi lecture notes lecture videos and all kinds of content it represents a true collective achievement we have contributions at this point from 1735 mit faculty and lecture lecturers over 9 000 individual contributors who've granted permission to us to use their materials individual images and what have you and the collective achievement of of our team um we're really lucky at mit to be able to um to have you know this this staff that works with the faculty to bring these materials to you takes about 16 people you know kind of full-time effort right now you see some of their pictures here uh nine folks who are dedicated to the publication process the mechanics of individual faculty and their courses brought out to you media production technology our educator initiative intellectual property fundraising and myself as the director round out the team it truly takes a village to bring all this content to you beyond that core website for many years we've also been branching out experimenting with other other ways to uh to deliver content it's not just the mit curriculum from the classroom but also supplemental resources it's increasingly using the youtube channel as a as a as a way to meet people where they are looking for educational resources continuing to reflect the technology base that classroom education is happening in mit for instance our mechanisms to to support interactive assessments and telling not just what mit is teaching through our oer but also how we teach through instructor insights and the podcast and over the course of this hour you know you'll be hearing from other people in the ocw team about how some of these experiments and branching out programs are working [Music] in terms of impact opencourseware at this point 1.6 billion page views since our launch um 196 million almost 200 million unique learners and the largest.edu youtube channel in terms of subscriber base we're coming up on 3 million in the next couple months um over 430 copies of the complete ocw website on a hard drive shipped out to locations around the world that are lacking in enough internet bandwidth to uh to get to our servers these are some of the the reach and impact metrics that we feel really really pleased by and uh just so gratified by by uh the hunger for learning that's shown from around the world who are these users that are coming to mit ocw based on our last detailed user survey in 2015 fully half of them are enrolled students about 45 of them are independent curious learners as well you know uh people who are doing it for professional purposes or just driven by their curiosity and that five percent slice that's educators we think are particularly important because of the multiplication effect when we get content in their hands and they're using it with their students they have the greatest impact and it's truly a global audience well mit is a united states institution over 70 percent of our traffic this year came from outside the united states just an indication of the global hunger for this knowledge and people's use of open education resources [Music] those are numbers about our users but the stories are even more compelling and there's a number of these on our website which people can check out a couple that i'll highlight here people who are using ocw to get through disruptions in their in their course of study university students who are prevented from getting to class because of of conflict uh another really powerful story uh people are using ocw to change their careers and when they're really motivated they can do amazing things teach yourself how to do software engineering in the course of six months and get a job at google it can be done just because all of this material is up there freely available for you to use we're only here also because of this global movement of open education resources we have such gratitude for all of the people who've who've joined us over the past past couple of decades to make this happen so whether you're an adapter and an adopter of open education resources you're producing tools repositories to help people find them jumping in and collaboratively working with content getting in the hands of students uh to lower their cost of curriculum um oer librarians taking you know increasingly strong role in this all the non-profits and companies that are helping get this material in the hands of learners and educators when they need it the funders and last but not least the all of this coming together in this consortium thank you oe global again for for hosting us here from the uh i think 2005-ish launch of the ocw consortium through its various incarnations we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this network of collaboration and we're so delighted to uh welcome the first president of the ocw consortium steve carson who's rejoined us here at mit uh steve would like to say hello yeah hi it's great to be here it's great to participate in this event and hello to all the colleagues around the world that i haven't talked to in some time just if i could say really quickly somewhere out there on the web there's a wonderful video on starting a movement that features uh a crazy guy dancing on a hillside at a concert and the video plays through where where all of the other people on the hillside said one at a time start to join and dance with this person and they make the point that a crazy person dancing on a hillside is not a movement it's just a crazy person dancing on a hillside and you know it's great that kurt is able to share these big numbers and you know we were proud of what ocw has achieved but when we started the oe movement or when the oe movement was getting started we were just a small uh project that really hadn't proven anything and it didn't become a movement until those brave uh first adopters stood up and joined us and said hey we want to do the same thing we see the value in this and it wouldn't have been a movement if it wasn't for all of the other organizations around the world who joined and turned what we were doing with opencourseware into a global phenomenon so i want to say thank you to all of those folks around the world who made this happen and again it's just great to participate in this event yeah thanks steve all right with it i'd like to hand it on to my colleague elizabeth dirienzo to talk about how we work with faculty thanks kurt um i am one of two publication managers on the open course routine and in fact i've been part of the team from the very start next slide so what i want to tell you about is how did we get faculty on board in the first place a little bit about how we maintain faculty relationships even now some about our publication process and team and a few ideas about changes and innovations in our work next slide so when opencourseware first started it was a new idea it was very highly supported by the mit community but it was a little bit hard to get it off the ground so what we did is we started by meeting with department heads and academic officers we really had to make sure they understood what was open course were about how would it benefit their department how would it benefit their faculty their students and you know and also the world we also looked for kindred spirits people who were already sharing openly one of those for example was professor gil strang and he had in 1999 actually recorded a full set of lecture videos for his famous lenny rogers course but once he heard about opencourseware he was ready and willing to share that on the open courseware site so those those things were really really useful what was um kind of a challenge was to clarify what sharing under our creative commons license was and what it wasn't there was a lot of fear that if you shared your material under this license you were giving up your rights under copyright and you'll hear more about about that later we also had to address concerns that were really not that hard to understand for example um what if i'm writing lecture notes that i want to someday turn into a book will i still be able to find a publisher or will they say this stuff is already out there so we had to provide some ideas about how to protect their interests going forward another concern for when we did videos was if i record this class will students even come well that wasn't really that hard to um to fix because we weren't sharing them in real time we were recording classes that would then be published later um we also needed to address concerns like um how much do i have to share and the answer was you can share as much as you're comfortable with or as little so for example there was a lot of concern about what if i share problem sets and solutions can i use those problem sets again in the future so you'll see a lot of our courses have problem sets with no solutions or limited solutions but one thing we did is we said could we find some older solutions and and put those up there as representative problems with solutions next slide please so i think we based our building relationships and maintaining relationships on this idea that we had a goal of keeping mit faculty time to less than five hours for the entire time we were working with them was that always the case no sometimes it was more sometimes it was less but we tried to clarify with people that they had these responsibilities the faculty were responsible for ensuring the quality and content of the pedagogy they had to license their course materials to us they had to help us identify third party materials and i will say over time people are getting better at giving proper credit or letting us know where they got source materials and then of course they had to review and approve the course before it was published everything else was up to the open course for a team that included collecting and formatting all the content identifying and clearing the third-party objects that's been a huge task and i am you're going to hear more about ip later we also sometimes provide content services such as recording video recording audio hiring students to help type up lecture notes things like that and then our team puts the content into our ocw systems we manage the website and we respond to user feedback you'll hear a little bit about user feedback later one of the things that was really great to realize is that right now we have i'm trying to think of the number about 60 percent i think is it sixty percent that we have participating something like that of the faculty that's about right yeah um and and sometimes they even come to us and say hey i just taught an interesting course would you be able to put that on opencourseware next slide this is just a general overview of our publication process it starts with recruiting faculty recruiting a course and it takes us all the way through preparing their content building the course site doing final qa and then publishing the course um ideally we would say any given course would be done within six months or less sometimes they're done really quickly a pretty straightforward course can be published within a month or two after we start building it however there are some courses that are much more complex have a lot of intellectual property objects that have to be cleared or dealt with a lot of content that has to be worked on or a lot of video that has to be edited and again you'll hear more about video later next slide so as i think about the future of working with faculty and and working on these courses i think about um all the technology that we've used over the years and how it needed to be improved and you'll hear more about next generation ocw content management system next up and we're trying out little experiments sometimes some of them work some of them don't but our latest one is to think about putting source files online not just pdfs so we want to put on word documents latex documents powerpoint files these be much easier for people to reuse and then we've also fairly recently launched the open learning library and you'll hear more about that but it's a way for open courseware to share some of its content where the course materials have interactive assessments and more so with that i will turn it over to joe mardis hello everybody my name is joe mardis i am the technical production manager for mit open courseware i've been with mit for about 11 years working to further open education through opencourseware mitx and now open learning library i just want to start off painting a little bit of a picture of what consumer technology was like back in 2001 uh could you go to the next slide please uh so in 2001 uh if you can imagine the ipod first launched and the big promise with the ipod was a thousand songs in your pocket just that was mind-blowing at the time imagine where we are now uh the first cell phones were launched with bluetooth and color screens uh first time a calendar appeared on a cell phone uh wikipedia was launched the xbox was launched windows xp itunes this was this was the beginning of a whole new technology movement and we were right there next slide please so in 2001 we had a goal of publishing 500 courses within two two years we needed a way to manage all this content we had to develop custom workflows a custom publication system a distribution system we needed to figure out how to get our content to people online offline everywhere we could in the world we needed it quickly we needed it to be discoverable we had a lot of needs around this next slide please uh so we chose the microsoft content management server 2002. uh that is the precursor to what is sharepoint today so if you can imagine what sharepoint is today imagine what it was like 20 years ago we chose the system because of its scalability its reliability its ease of deployment its ease of customization and a strategic partnership with microsoft there wasn't there weren't a lot of solutions out there at the time and this was definitely the most robust we could find next slide uh so i just wanted to show you really quickly about the foundation of the technology so it was microsoft content management system 2002 hosted at mit locally our distribution was handled by the akamai network offline distribution as kurt mentioned was done on the mir program uh our archiving is done uh in d space with mrt at the time we're running web trends and we use filemaker for all of our administrivia next slide uh 2003 we hit 500 courses we had about 500 000 visitors a month so things were picking up the heat was on uh next slide please uh 2007 we hit 1800 courses and we're about a million visitors a month so traffic was picking up our content was growing uh systems were starting to bulge at the seams next slide please uh 2009 video became a thing video wasn't really online very much before then uh so we got on the video video bandwagon um hosting was very very expensive at the time so we partnered with youtube uh which we still continue today we also partnered with jw player which at the time was an open source video player we employed google search appliance which gave us great much greater discoverability through google and at that time we employed google analytics as well next slide uh 2012. uh as i mentioned we were busting at the seams with content and uh and traffic so we went uh through a major effort to replace our content management system refresh the look and feel of the site re-architect the data model underneath and we chose plone 3 at the time it was chosen because it was open source and for all the other reasons that we chose microsoft in the beginning we hired an external firm called embolden to work on look and feel with us and that is the site we have today next slide please 2018 we ran into some major problems we were still tied to physical hardware and that started failing um so at that time we moved to virtualize everything um so we virtualized our entire authoring platform and moved our hosting to a a new cdn and this has given us stability and gotten off the physical hardware that'll get us through next slide and so here we are 21 20 years later uh we've had hundreds and hundreds of code releases made hundreds of enhancements to the site ux changes added countless features and uh now it's time to sunset the current platform and start working on a new one that we refer to as next generation ocw and you'll be hearing more about that in the in the coming months so thank you very much and i think we are on to intellectual property hi thanks joe um i'm lindsay weirmuni i'm the intellectual property manager for opencourseware at mit as well as mitx my tenure on this project goes all the way back almost to the very beginning in 2003 that was when i came on board next slide the very first initial launch of mit open course where um we pegged intellectual property right off the bat as something that was a problem that needed to be solved or figured out or how the heck are we going to handle this so we were we were aware of it as an issue and we started to think about how to handle it at the same time the creative commons uh was being founded simultaneously now this wasn't um a joint founding project but there was a venn diagram overlap there that was in the shape form of mit professor hal abelson who was both on the founding team for mit open courseware and the creative commons so they both emerged into the open space that was slowly taking shape right at the same time next slide in response to the new york times article we had to figure out what to do about copyright we had to come up with workflows and come up with policy what it uh came down to right off the bat was a lot of scanning the content that came from the faculty we licensed what we could we scrubbed much more content than we wanted to but it was the best that we could do at the time with what we knew we could do we knew that licensing what we could expanded the commons so that seemed like an asset for us but we knew there were limitations so in 2010 i led a project to release the code of best practices for fair use in open courseware that the benefits of that were immediate in that we were able to publish richer more complete courses that were more authentic to what the students were getting in the classroom it still wasn't 100 but you know because copyright and it never will be um looking into the future we hope to explore the possibility of expanding our use of different creative commons licenses we also know that we need to find efficiencies to be able to scale up for more projects like uh next gen but also other projects that might come down in the pipeline in mit in the future next slide please so there were some big questions that i saw bubbling up over the years some of them were long simmering others came out of um nowhere by some very smart people there was a question of do we want to balance permission cultures against fair use is that a mutually exclusive space or is it to everyone's benefit that we license as much as possible in order to expand what's available in the commons and in 2008 there was a question at open ed that was raised by hal plotkin and he raised for the first time that i had heard the question of accessibility he described it as this is the thing that could make the wheels come off the bus for mit that meant captions for the videos that we were capturing and filming and producing because without accessibility implementations like captions for example we were leaving out a whole host of the community of users around the world that really needed our content and oer in general the following year at the plenary of open ed i remember i don't recall his name but he raised the question of colonization what is it that we are actually doing and producing putting out there in the world um should we shift our resources and energies to support open educational resources that are coming out of the global south rather than pushing our materials out from the united states and europe um to you know without a lot of regard at the time at least from mit's perspective of what was locally useful and appropriate um and his recommendation was really you know think about this we ought to get out of our ivory towers and open up our minds and the definition of what a truly global open educational movement can be next slide so there are gaps in our evolution as well as opportunities um translations have been an interesting outcome of what we've published we've had several partners over the years formally but we certainly don't know what we don't know about translation projects i don't know whether putting a lot of energy around translations is necessarily a good thing see colonization but we are really really glad that creative commons exists to enable that for folks who think that is appropriate and need that for their communities um as was mentioned earlier we have opportunities around publishing more source files fewer pdfs because pdfs are really hard to make accessible they're really hard to reverse engineer and make more readily shareable um and that's a goal that we have an opportunity for growth and the last thing i wanted to say is to like give a shout out to this movement as a whole for elevating the issue around copyright and elevating librarians in this space to turning and inventing oer librarian it's an actual role in academic libraries now and that was something that nobody even thought anyone needed back in the day so well done us um as a librarian i'm pleased to give a shout out to all my colleagues in the in the world um so that is the story of copyright i will hand it off to my colleague charles next who will talk about community thank you lindsay um hi i'm cheryl um i'm one of the uh publication managers along with elizabeth and my other hat that i roll that i wear um is the uh social media coordinator so i'd like to talk to you today about community and how we build community so as you've heard we've had we have really amazing content that we put out there um but how do we get that content to you and how do we hear back from you um and how do we create this this community of that's just a website um so we have from the very beginning we've had a newsletter that we put out monthly as well as an email feedback system where we have people answering your emails every single day we get thousands and thousands of them um and so we're able to have a nice back and forth there but the main way is social media which is a job that i started a few years ago i luckily inherited a very robust uh facebook and twitter account um so we have about 500 000 and 200 000 uh followers respectively um so that um definitely helped but we had to start from the ground up in 2019 i made the decision to join instagram because so many of our followers uh lived there you know we have such great visual content um so um yeah we've been doing well there we have about 7 000 followers there we are also on linkedin um to help professionals connect and to foster workplace learning next slide please so as i've just said we've had tremendous amount of growth we started from zero just like you know when anybody opens up an account and then slowly it started to gain traction we in 2009 was when we started facebook and twitter and it turns out youtube as well and that was a very different field than it is now it was a lot less crowded um so eventually we would get a few hundred joining us a month then it became thousands and then it snowballed from there was an avalanche um so the things that we do to to engage and to grow our audience is to constantly put out interesting content and i'm very lucky because my colleagues you know do all that great work that you know videos and lecture notes and reading lists that i can put out there there's no lack of material for me to work with i also like to re-share content that other people uh other kindred spirits on the internet uh put out there and so we can have you know a discussion and not just about ocw it also has helped to have influencers bigger groups um share our content to their audience and that has really helped gain um our followers so for one instance years ago bill gates mentioned how he liked watching ocw videos and so as you can imagine that did a lot for us but ultimately it was the um putting some money towards growing our audience that really really helped next please so um it's really important to know your audience um what makes them think what makes them laugh and then more importantly how do we get them to our site so they have the opportunity to experience all of our great stuff so with the social media connection that we have and the newsletter and feedback emails enables us to hear from you and understand how we can help you learn and what kind of content you want the answer is video everybody wants more video we hear you um so we like believe it or not we like getting feedback um about what we could do better um we even sometimes have people tell us the link is broken or there's a typo um and but honestly the best part of my job is that some of the most heartwarming comments uh inspiring comments come over social media so keep those coming please um i know having been in this job for a few years that our audience loves to learn they love science and math and nerdy humor and um so much good work comes out of our office and i really love finding ways to make sure it's seen um and i have a pretty good sense of what it will inspire people i hope that you know it keeps getting honed but i have an idea and sometimes the most popular things are not even ocw related but they create a sense of community shared interest so for instance the other day i posted a video about a teenager making this extensive crazy rube goldberg machine and so we all got to bond over that even though it wasn't necessarily getting people to our site uh next please so we have lots of different kinds of posts um you know we have informational posts new courses new podcast episodes the kinds of services and materials that we offer next please we also have funny posts at least i hope they're funny so trying to um stay current with memes or what the most popular things are like stranger things on the left that's steve's hair and uh may the fourth is always a very popular holiday at mit um next we also have outreach and funding kind of posts where we want to hear from you about how ocw has changed your learning journey also you know we have fundraising because free the cost of free is not nothing for us so next please and the challenges uh for social media is that social media platforms are getting very very very crowded and it's they're over saturated especially facebook so how do we continue to stay current and relevant in this really busy space and how do we start you know continue being useful to our learners um another challenge is that the current platforms keep changing but right when you think you learn them they change so the algorithms the formats the technology changes um and then new platforms seem to pop up every single day whatsapp and tick tock and clubhouse and how to know if that's the right space for us and when to join so you know instagram is sort of the newest uh iteration for us um and finally um we love hearing from you and sharing with you so thank you so much and i feel really privileged to be able to connect with you in this way and so next we're going to talk about video and i turn it over to my esteemed colleague brett thank you cheryl there's a lot to talk about with ocw video so all i'm going to do is a brief whirlwind tour through where we've been with video at ocw and where we're going next slide please at the beginning when we started out video wasn't a big part of what we did at ocw um but it has as it's been touched on um it's grown exponentially over the years when we started uh my colleague jason and i who uh he's monitoring the youtube chat right now for this live stream we would just work on video part time wearing many hats as we do we would edit videos we would even apply a technique called pan and scan for anyone who knows what that's about we don't do that anymore but it's grown and now we are approaching three million subscribers which will probably happen in in april or may of this year and it's really exciting to see that many people finding our content that way um in terms of how we get the video we get we get that asked a lot how do we choose what we're going to publish on opencourseware how do we make that work it comes to us in a lot of different ways sometimes enterprising faculty and students and tas or whoever else at mit will come to us with finished polish videos that we can just put up online and process uh caption which i'll talk about later other times we kind of go from scratch next slide please where somebody wants their course filmed and so we we work with different video vendors who will bring cameras into the classroom if if need be this is a photo from just over a year ago when we used to have packed classrooms and that was a very packed class this is a little tease of a course that's coming soon on ocw which is intro to algorithms which people are already asking us for we know that'll be very popular other rooms at mit next slide are already equipped with with everything you need to to film a class including whoops including live switching capabilities built-in cameras even tracking cameras that follow the faculty around as they teach and some rooms even come equipped next slide with their own dogs named chester so this is sort of the exciting thing that we miss seeing on campus but it's a lot of fun it's uh it's very hectic sometimes getting up a class set up to be filmed but we see how grateful people are to have these resources shared by mit faculty especially on youtube where where most people find them then we have a sort of extensive post-production process and that's really where a lot of our work lies of having the videos edited having the content reviewed for ip and other things and also metadata so metadata is a very important thing the keywords tags things that will help people find the content that they're actually looking for find specific topics even within a lecture that they're looking for on youtube and also accessibility is is very very important so we make sure uh that all of our videos are captioned day and date so as soon as you see them on youtube they're already going to have captions so that they're accessible to everyone at the same time next slide this is uh the team that makes video specifically happen not even all of these people are on the ocw staff but they also help out and we have fun and we wouldn't be able to do it without them jim on the bottom right corner for example is responsible for setting up light boards at mit which are increasingly used by faculty especially during the pandemic to teach their classes and share them with students online next slide so our content is usually a mix of things that we get in the classroom probably mostly mostly video that we shoot in the classroom but sometimes we do things like this this is our beloved professor gil strang who millions and millions of people around the world have learned from and we receive comments about gil all the time so this is something that we did in a studio a more prepared scripted direct to the online audience type of content so we look looking to the future we hope to do more things like this there are some projects some very ambitious uh in the works that are this more studio uh style video uh for the for the online audience specifically uh also we'll be doing more podcast episodes as was already mentioned i have the the privilege and the pleasure of working with sarah hansen on that and that's been very rewarding too to sort of reach a different audience where people can't walk around walk down the street looking at youtube on their phone but they can listen to a podcast and so that's given us another avenue to uh to share what the faculty have to say about how they teach their classes so with that i'm going to turn it over to sarah who's going to talk about our commitment to educators hi thank you um yes i'm sarah hansen and i lead the ocw educator initiative next slide please mit open course where as kurt mentioned really positions educators as multipliers because we see them as individuals who take up open educational resources and then share them with multitudes of people it's really creating the ripple effect in action next slide please so very early on mit faculty committed to making ocw even more valuable to educators and they did this by launching the ocw educator initiative and part of this initiative was sharing not only the what of mit teaching or the content but also the how or the teaching approaches next slide please they began to share things like how did they engage learners how did they teach novices in a large lecture setting how did they develop community how do they teach science communication all sorts of things that might make the content more useful to educators using the oer with students out in the world next slide please mit faculty share their teaching approaches in a section of their ocw courses called instructor insights and they typically do that in three ways currently one way is by text in a section of their course another way is through videos and brett and i work together on those and more recently it's in podcast form next slide please next slide please i'm sorry something is glitched out here um there we go yeah um we launched chalk radio back in february 2020 so just about a year ago um and it takes listeners behind the scenes some of the most of some of the most interesting courses on the mit campus and it brings them into conversation with the faculty who make them happen and we see this as a commitment to educators because it's really amplifying the importance of teaching on a global scale but it's also encouraging the uptake of oer because all of our guests share their oer on our mit open courseware website and then we link directly to those oer in the show notes so we're really reaching a lot of people and increasing the discoverability of the oar themselves next slide please and educators are really tuning in since the educator initiative was launched in november 2013 instructor insights have been viewed over 1.3 million times which is incredible and the podcast has been listened to over 200 000 times in just the year since it was launched so we're just like so pleased to be able to bring these resources to people who are eager to take them up next slide please but we know we can't stop here and we don't want to stop here we want to refresh our commitment to educators so what are we thinking about in the near future we're thinking about exploring collaborations whereby we could take our our oer on ocw to the platforms where teachers are already going we also as many of my colleagues have mentioned are interested in how to make source files more readily available so we can accelerate the oer cycle and finally i'm really interested in figuring out how we might make ocw a site where educators can share back the adaptations that they're creating so that when people do discover them on our site they have access to the work of all the incredible oer educators out there i think that would be great um it's a future that i'm really excited about um and kurt i'm going to hand it back to you so you can share some information about nextgen thanks sarah yeah picking up on this theme of where we're heading in the future so ocw's 20th anniversary of our of our launch uh is coming up in about a month and over the course of the coming year um a lot of our attention is is being uh directed at the launch of a new platform and the refresh of the program picking up on some of the things sir that you and others have been talking about here um just quickly uh there was a question earlier i think it was during lindsay your talk about the new york times article so that that was an article that came out on the announcement date of april 4th 2001. um anyway we're coming up on that 20th anniversary and you know the the components of this next generation program include you know a renewed commitment to sharing the complete mit curriculum you know we're taking advantage of some uh platform and technology advances and other ways of refining how we do our work to keep pace with the rapid evolution of that curriculum and in particular to bring to the world um you know the best knowledge that we can about grand challenges like how the world is grappling with social justice issues with uh the imperative to um improve our sustainability of our societies the the future of computing and all of the all of the ways that that intersects with our world that new platform for our users offer will offer a number of really exciting things first and foremost a seamless experience for all of you who are working off your mobile devices or going back and forth between mobile and desktop but in particular for people for whom their phone is their only device uh having ocw work well on smartphones is is really an equity issue and that is you know really a core of where we're trying to head in our in our in our upcoming uh upcoming program that progression from giving access to knowledge to really really driving towards educational equity is is at the center of it um for the educators amongst us uh integrations with learning management systems and new learning platforms is another thing that we're putting some attention on uh and i just want to wrap up with with again kind of musing on um how exciting it is to be part of this ever expanding ever evolving uh ecosystem working with oer so things like the the continuous cycle of how people discover content adopt it adapt it feed it back into the commons you know there's i think there's some really exciting things that we can be doing together in collaboration uh to move that forward and uh from an equity perspective we're putting some putting attention on how to how to collaborate with others to create more effective on-ramps into the content that we've already got you know have that have materials you know be customized and individualized for for the needs of individual learners and their communities and build those things back up into uh really well-tuned learning pathways and this is all about progress from you know the the uh the first bunch of years of ocw has been primarily about the the power of access we've we've gone a long way with that but we know there's there's a there's a lot more we need to do in order to build a truly equitable educational opportunities for everyone so we we know that we can't do this alone not even close and so really the question is what what are the sort of collaborations that we might be able to create to to take us into the future uh and i and i ask you to to think and to let us know about how can mit open courseware the things that we're able to bring help support your open education resources goals we are eager to hear from you um if you uh and you can start by dropping some observations like that into the into the q a here um and definitely reach out to us as well through our website to contact us through our social media feeds i thank you very much for uh for your attention we've delivered a lot of information and i want to turn our attention now here in the last few minutes to some of the q a that we've received and there are a couple people who are asking about translations and how we view that uh lindsay you in particular focused on um you know the um the complexities or the nuances about you know translations um the the colonization aspect about what's worked and what hasn't um i wanted to maybe start by asking you lindsey to just unpack your your thinking on that a little bit more sure i think translations um they're enabled by the license that we use they're enabled by almost all creative license creative commons licenses and i think translations are fabulous i think that they can share the same space of people that are putting energy into translations as they are making their own materials for their own local communities our experience with translation partners while their projects were fully active were really really great but those translation sites aren't always persistent and they're hard to sustain i encourage folks to take advantage of the derivative work capability of the cc license and to translate our materials however works for them i'm not anti-translations i think that they should be a complement to the development of localized oer and hopefully what we find in other parts of the world and in other communities can be translated and licensed in such a way that that can be translated to our own communities and and sort of perpetuate that circle of life if you will for materials yeah yeah thanks it's i think it's really important uh for us to be viewing this as a not a one-way here's the stuff y'all translate it but you know a thing that provides feedback and just continuous evolution for everybody involved um yeah uh there was a there was another question about the translation specifically about you know working through kind of institutions or or other mechanisms uh the formal translation partners that we had you know some of them were the brainchild of individual people some of them were were affiliated with institutions it's been kind of a range of things um uh um and we appreciate hearing from people who are just offering as individuals to um to help us with translations and we you know encourage you to uh to go for it you know we've got the creative commons license there and you're uh you're you're free to run with it um there's another question about when can i have more video um yes that is i think as brett mentioned maybe others mentioned probably the most frequent bit of feedback that we get i know we recognize how powerful video is as a as a as a as a learning uh learning content um video is it's more expensive to produce it's more uh time and resource intensive we're doing everything that we possibly can to to add more video all the time um but you know any uh i'll put it to my uh my colleagues here anything that uh that you'd like to share about how we're thinking about video in this moment and going forward anybody brett who is i can weigh in on that um yeah i mean you know we would love to have more video we'd love to have video for all of our courses if that were possible i mean obviously the cost of video is a barrier to that but also availability and and and the way um the way we end up connecting with faculty and certain faculty that are willing to to have their have their courses recorded and others aren't for various reasons but yeah we're always looking out for it and we do try to uh to take these factors into account we try to look at where we might have gaps in our content and sort of target specific courses and see if what people are willing to share so we'll you know we continue to do that as best we can and people people's contributions people's donations to ocw also help with that of course in enabling us to uh to film more courses yeah yeah i would add that um oh sorry go ahead liz i was just gonna mention that you know this really unusual time that we've been living in where the students are not able to be on campus and things are happening remotely i know in my own experience with the courses and departments that i work with there have been three courses that have come to my attention that have full video that we will be sharing and those that's simply because all of the classes were recorded from the instructor's homes and there they were uploaded to a website that the students used and so we're able to use those too so um you know actually three full courses is a lot for us to process at one time given our limited staff but we're working our way through them yeah i would say that we're uh we're including video in roughly 20 20 of the courses we're publishing these days which is uh which is quite a lot more than we uh than we did in our in our first few years um and i expect that faculty producing videos you know for blended learning or flip classroom teaching some of these things are going to stick after after we come out of the pandemic shutdowns and we'll you know you know as a as an ongoing thing have more video coming our way so we look forward to bringing that to you um let's see we're coming right up on the end of the hour um uh there's one additional follow-up question about uh translations and colonization about um things like wiki schools um yeah i think that's um you know the the structures that are out there the settings for people to come together and recognize a need you know for adaptation more broadly customization localization um i i think the better we can do at at fostering those collaborations the better off we'll be you know um and you know translation is just one of one of a number of you know uh mechanisms for for making that kind of um you know localization uh customization we want to we want to be supporting that and we we love to hear from you about situations where you're seeing it work and you know specific suggestions for places that that we can we can help you with all right um well in closing i just want again to thank you for joining us i know for um preparing to celebrate ocw's 20th anniversary the future is bright uh we're so appreciative for you know the the collaboration and the community that we've got around us here and we look forward very much to uh to the years to come all right thank you all bye everyone bye