Cambridge, MA, February 24, 2011 — The Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA) has launched a site containing Turkish translations of 16 MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) courses, becoming the sixth OCW translation affiliate. The initial publication includes Turkish versions of MIT math, chemistry, physics, and earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences courses. Several dozen more translations are forthcoming. TUBA has produced the translations with its own resources.
Professor Dr. Yücel Kanpolat, President of TUBA, said, "These translations further the exchange of ideas between the Turkish higher education community and leading universities around the world. Through these translations, and the open publication of educational materials from leading Turkish universities, Turkey is now a very active participant in the global OpenCourseWare movement."
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 TUBA is dedicated to providing Turkish 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 Turkish speaking populations. Our hope is to create fewer barriers, like language, in making MIT materials more widely used."
The Turkish Academy of Sciences joins Universia (Spanish, Portuguese), China Open Resources for Education (Simplified Chinese), Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (Traditional Chinese), Chulalongkorn University (Thai) and Shahid Beheshti University (Persian) as MIT OpenCourseWare translation affiliates. Together these organizations have created more than 900 translations of OCW courses. These translations have received more than 33 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.
The Turkish Academy of Sciences is an autonomous body which determines its organizational structure and activities on the principle of scientific merit. Its aims are to establish the criteria of scientific excellence in Turkey, to encourage and foster scientific endeavors, to ensure that scientific principles be applied in all spheres and to create an environment of debate so that basic social strategies may be defined in the light of scientific and technological data. The Academy strives to promote adoption of and strict adherence to scientific ethics both by its own members and by the whole of the Turkish scientific community; freedom of expression; culture of debate and the integration of the Turkish science with the international scientific community.
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.
