Recognized with other leaders of the global OpenCourseWare movement.
CAMBRIDGE, MA, March 8, 2011 – MIT Physics Professor Walter Lewin has been selected to receive the inaugural Educator Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE) for his world-renown Physics courses available through the MIT OpenCourseWare site. Professor Lewin's courses, including 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics, 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism, and 8.03 Physics III: Vibrations and Waves, have consistently been among the most visited courses on MIT OpenCourseWare, and have been collectively visited more than 5 million times.
In total, more than 100 lectures from Professor Lewin's courses are available on the web, through MIT OpenCourseWare as well as through iTunes U and YouTube. His videos receive more than one million views a year through these outlets. Fans send Professor Lewin dozens of e-mails daily, all of which he answers himself. Professor Lewin was a pioneer of open education sharing well before OpenCourseWare, with his recorded lectures appearing on Seattle public television starting in 1995.
Honored with Professor Lewin by the OCW Consortium are Pedro Aranzadi Elejabeitia and Catherine Casserly. Managing Director at Portal Universia, S.A, Aranzadi is the recipient of the OpenCourseWare Consortium's Leadership ACE for his efforts in organizing Spanish and Latin American OpenCourseWares. Creative Commons CEO, Casserly has been awarded the President's Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence for her work in developing the Open Educational Resources program at the Hewlett Foundation.
The Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding individuals, courseware and OpenCourseWare sites in the OCW Consortium community. The awards are presented each year at the global OpenCourseWare Consortium's annual conference, to be held this year May 4-6 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Individual award recipients are selected by the Consortium's Board of Directors; site and course awards are selected by an awards committee populated from the Consortium membership.
"We're thrilled to recognize these outstanding contributions," said OCW Consortium Executive Director Mary Lou Forward. "Each of these individuals embodies the commitment to open sharing that has allowed this movement to grow so dramatically."
The OpenCourseWare Consortium Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence are sponsored by KNEXT, a learning assessment and advisory service. KNEXT is owned and operated by Kaplan Higher Education Corporation, a division of Kaplan, Inc., a world leader in education and training services.
A native of The Netherlands, Professor Walter H. G. Lewin received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Delft (1965). In 1966, he came to MIT as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Physics and was invited to join the faculty as an Assistant Professor later that same year. He was promoted to Associate Professor of Physics in 1968 and to full Professor in 1974. Professor Lewin's honors and awards include the NASA Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1978), twice recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Award (1984 and 1991), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), MIT's Science Council Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1984) and the W. Buechner Teaching Prize of the MIT Department of Physics (1988). In 1997, he was the recipient of a NASA Group Achievement Award for the Discovery of the Bursting Pulsar. He is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (elected 1993), Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Currently managing director for Universia Spain and CIO for Universia Holding, Pedro Aranzadi Elejabeitia has worked in a number of roles at Portal Universia since 2003 to further the open sharing of educational materials on the web. From 2004 to 2005 he led the translation of MIT OpenCourseWare courses into Spanish and Portuguese, and from 2006 on he has coordinated the development of OCW sites at more than 100 Spanish and Latin American universities. Prior to his work at Portal Universia, he was the founder and managing director of Spaindustry, the first B2B Marketpace online in Spain. He also served as marketing director and associate managing director of Camerdata, S.A., a pioneer company in the telematic information business prior to the internet era.
Catherine Casserly is currently CEO of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation; Creative Commons licenses support the open sharing of many Consortium member course materials. In her prior role at the Carnegie Foundation, Cathy served as Senior Partner & Vice President, Innovation and Open Networks, spearheading Carnegie’s work in the area of open education and supporting the creation of alternative mathematics pathways for community college students. She also served as director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she guided more than $100 million in support to increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge sharing worldwide and worked to raise global awareness of resources, participants and their projects. She served as program manager for Hewlett's grant to MIT in support of MIT OpenCourseWare.
An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials – often including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and exams – organized as courses. While OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiatives typically do not provide a degree, credit, or certification, or access to instructors, the materials are made available under open licenses for use and adaptation by educators and learners around the world.
MIT OpenCourseWare makes the materials used in the teaching of substantially all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses—more than 2,000 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. OCW receives an average of 1.5 million web site visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 100 million individuals have accessed OCW materials.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance formal and informal learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality education materials organized as courses.
Activities of the OpenCourseWare Consortium are supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, member dues, and contributions from sustaining members including: African Virtual University, China Open Resources for Education, Delft University of Technology, Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Korea OpenCourseWare Consortium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NetEase Information Technology, Open Universiteit, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Tufts University, Universia, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan, and University of the Western Cape.
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Contact:
Stephen Carson
President
OpenCourseWare Consortium
617-253-1250
scarson at mit dot edu
http://ocwconsortium.org
