CAMBRIDGE, MA, March 25, 2013 -- Shamsuna Al-Arabia has entered a pilot agreement with MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) to create Arabic translations of OCW course video lectures. The initial publication includes Arabic versions of MIT physics and math courses and will be freely available online. Several dozen additional translations are forthcoming and Shamsuna Al-Arabia has produced the translations with its own resources.
H. H. Sheikha Sheikha bint Saif Al Nahyan, Shamsuna Al-Arabia’s President, said, "Our mission is to promote and increase the availability of premium educational resources in the Arab World, with an emphasis on higher education and improving undergraduate education. We recognize the language barrier that face Arabic students and want to make content more accessible to these students. These translations will also connect them with high quality materials that will provide them with more opportunities to learn."
MIT OpenCourseWare materials are published under a Creative Commons license that permits users to download, modify and redistribute content for non-commercial purposes, provided they cite MIT relevant faculty as the source of the content and any derivatives—including translations—are made available under an identical license. This license permits any site user to make and publish translations. OCW translation affiliates, whose translations are linked to from the OCW site, have undergone a quality assurance review by the OCW staff.
"We are very pleased that Shamsuna Al-Arabia is committed to providing Arabic translations of our content," said Cecilia d'Oliveira, the Executive Director of OCW. "Our hope is to create fewer barriers, like language, in making MIT materials more widely used and Shamsuna Al-Arabia's efforts will go a long way in making OCW available to Arabic speaking populations."
Shamsuna Al-Arabia joins Universia (Spanish, Portuguese), China Open Resources for Education (Simplified Chinese), Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (Traditional Chinese), Chulalongkorn University (Thai), The Turkish Academy of Sciences (Turkish), Shahid Beheshti University (Persian), and Sookmyung Women's University’s SNOW (Korean) as OCW translation affiliates. Together these organizations have created more than 1,000 translations of OCW courses. These translations have received more than 135 million visits to date, accounting for roughly 40% of worldwide access to MIT OpenCourseWare content.
Translations of OCW content are part of MIT OpenCourseWare's efforts to extend our reach tenfold in the next decade. Read more about OCW's Next Decade Initiatives.
Shamsuna Al-Arabia project aims to promote and increase the availability of premium educational resources in the Arab World, with an emphasis on higher education and improving undergraduate education. The project is one of the initiatives of His Highness Sheikh Doctor Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan Humanitarian and Scientific Foundation.
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 initiatives typically do not provide a degree, credit, or certification, or access to instructors, OCW 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 2,150 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. OCW receives an average of 2 million website visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 150 million individuals have accessed OCW materials.
