CAMBRIDGE, MA, November 5, 2012 — Sookmyung Women's University's SNOW (Sookmyung Network for an Open World) has launched a site containing Korean translations of 88 MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) course video lectures, becoming the seventh OCW translation affiliate. The initial publication includes Korean versions of MIT math, chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering and computer science courses. Several dozen more translations are forthcoming. SNOW has produced the translations with its own resources.
Dr. Kisuk Lee, SNOW's Dean of Knowledge and Information Technology, said, "Our mission is to share world class educational content online for more people around the world. We recognize the language barrier that face Korean 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 so pleased that SNOW is dedicated to providing Korean translations of our content," said Cecilia d’Oliveira, the Executive Director of OCW. "It’s an important step in making OCW available to new audiences and specifically to Korean speaking populations. Our hope is to create fewer barriers, like language, in making MIT materials more widely used."
SNOW 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) and Shahid Beheshti University (Persian) as MIT OpenCourseWare 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 reach a billion minds in the next decade. Read more about OCW's Next Decade Initiatives and the celebration of our 10th anniversary here.
SNOW started as a way to promote the active sharing of intellectual contents online in knowledge-based contemporary society. As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free at a rapid pace, we searched for the key factors on why Korean students had difficulties making use of this content. First, the barrier of language making them far from accessible. Second, the trouble of finding proper content among the immensely scattered material. Third, the lack of guidelines to find and to utilize the content. Now, we march to overcome these difficulties with sharing knowledge.
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 teaching most of MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses—more than 2,100 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. OCW receives an average of 1.75 million web site visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 125 million individuals have accessed OCW materials. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by donations from site visitors, grants and corporate sponsorship, including underwriting from our Next Decade Alliance sponsors Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin and MathWorks.
