CAMBRIDGE, MA, March 22, 2012 — MIT Linguistics professor Shigeru Miyagawa has been selected to receive the President’s Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE) for his contributions to the global OpenCourseWare and Open Education movements. Professor Miyagawa has been a key member of the faculty team that has nurtured the development of MIT OpenCourseWare, has contributed a significant amount of his own course materials to the site, and has traveled extensively to spread the practice of openly sharing educational materials globally.
“I am honored and deeply humbled by this recognition,” remarked Professor Miyagawa. “MIT OpenCourseWare and the many other projects around the world are the result of the generosity of thousands of educators who have shared their teaching materials, and all deserve to be recognized. I am glad to have helped to make this sharing possible.”
Professor Miyagawa, who holds the endowed Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture chair, served on the committee that proposed MIT OpenCourseWare in the year 2000. Since the program’s inception, he has been a member of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee, and he currently serves as chair of that body.
When OCW published its proof-of-concept site in the fall of 2002, Professor Miyagawa contributed materials from two courses, CMS.930 Media, Education and the Marketplace and 24.946 Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language. In the following year he contributed materials from 24.953 Argument Structure and Syntax and 21F.027 Asia in the Modern World: Images & Representations, one of the richest and most visually engaging of MIT OpenCourseWare’s offerings.
Professor Miyagawa has also been a tireless advocate for the global OpenCourseWare movement. In 2005, he provided assistance to six of Japan’s top universities in forming the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium, which has since grown to include 24 Japanese universities and 20 associated organizations. In support of the global movement, Professor Miyagawa has traveled to locations including Cameroon, Korea, Portugal, Israel, Taiwan, and Zambia to advocate to for the creation of OpenCourseWare programs at universities around the world.
Honored with Professor Miyagawa by the OCW Consortium are Dr. Oladele Ogunseitan from University of California, Irvine and José Vida Fernández of University Carlos III of Madrid. Chair for the Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention, Program in Public Health, Dr. Ogunseitan is the recipient of the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s Leadership ACE for his role in building the prominence of the UCI OCW site within that institution. Professor for the Department of Public Law and Deputy Director of the Telecommunications Law Master Program of the University Carlos III, Dr. Vida has been awarded the Educator Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence in recognition of the outstanding body of content he has published through that university’s OCW site.
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 April 16-18 in Cambridge, UK. The Consortium’s Board of Directors selects individual award recipients; an awards committee populated from the Consortium membership selects site and course awards. The Educator ACE was previously given to MIT physics professor Walter Lewin in 2011.
“We’re very pleased to honor these three individuals,” said OCW Consortium Executive Director Mary Lou Forward. “Each of these recipients embodies the commitment widely shared throughout the OCW community, and each has made a remarkable contribution.”
The OCW Consortium Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence are sponsored by KNEXT, an education software and solutions provider that focuses on learning assessment, ePortfolio development and higher education advisory services.
Professor Shigeru Miyagawa has been at MIT since 1991, where he is Professor of Linguistics and holds the endowed chair, Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture. In linguistics, he has published numerous books and monographs, and has nearly fifty articles on syntax, argument structure, and East Asian and Altaic linguistics. He also runs a laboratory that creates interactive educational programs. JP NET, which has the entire MIT Japanese program on the web, was one of the first online projects in the world to place an entire academic program on the Internet (1993-1994). Visualizing Cultures, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize historian John W. Dower, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as an outstanding humanities educational website. He was on the original team that proposed OpenCourseWare, and has helped to start opencoursewares in Japan and elsewhere. He serves on the MIT OpenCourseWare Advisory Board. Miyagawa received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Arizona in 1980, and his B.A. from the International Christian University in Tokyo in 1975.
Dr. Oladele Ogunseitan is professor of public health and founding Chair of the department of Population Health and Disease Prevention at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also professor of Social Ecology. Since 2009, he has served as the Co-Director of the UC Irvine Framework Program in Global Health funded by the National Institutes of Health’s John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences. He is the Director of Research Education, Training and Career Development for the NIH- funded Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. He is a member of the steering committee for the UC Irvine Environment Institute and he serves on the executive committee for the Urban Water Research Center. He earned his doctorate in microbiology at the university of Tennessee, and his Master of Public Health at the university of California, Berkeley, where he also earned a certificate in International Health. He is the author of Microbial Diversity (Blackwell-Wiley, 2005) and editor of Green Health (Sage, 2011).
Professor José Vida Fernández graduated magna cum laude from University of Granada (Spain). He is also European PhD from the University of Bologna (Italy). He is a noted legal scholar on telecommunications law, health care law, poverty and welfare state. Vida teaches administrative law at the University Carlos III of Madrid and has lectured abroad (US, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Perú). He is Deputy Director of the Telecommunications Law Master Program of the University Carlos III and fellow of the Institute Pascual Madoz (University Carlos III) and Residential Scholar at the Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study. Prof. Vida has broad research experience as director of public and private funded projects. He has also received awards from Spanish and international organizations for innovative teaching projects and OpenCourseWare publications (University Carlos III, 2007; Universia, 2010; OCW Consortium, 2011).
KNEXT, which is part of Kaplan, is an education software and solutions company focused on helping higher education institutions build or enhance prior learning assessment offerings and online portfolio management. By enabling individuals to translate their prior learning into college credit and track their progress through online portfolios, KNEXT helps institutions recruit engaged adult learners and increase both persistence and graduation rates. For information about KNEXT, the Learning Recognition Program, self-assessment quizzes, the PATH courses, and more, visit http://www.knext.com.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 250 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.
Contact:
Stephen Carson
External Relations Director
MIT OpenCourseWare
617-253-1250
scarson@mit.edu
