Getting Started

last edited: 2025-08-21
time to read: 7 minutes

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Here you’ll find the essential points for deciding whether to work with SOUL to put your course materials online. I made this doc so my emails to professors can be a bit shorter.

The ask

Would you be open to putting any subset of your course materials online? SOUL’s goal is to put up enough materials up so that the course is realistically learnable, but incomplete materials are still very useful! Decisions about materials like lecture notes or homework can wait until the end of the semester. The time-sensitive questions are:

• (1) would you be open to putting up recorded lectures and/or recitations?
• (2) if not, would you be open to recording the lectures and/or recitations for internal reference only, and then having a student, myself, or someone else you approve of convert them into scribed notes in LaTeX that we share online? SOUL could potentially pay for this work.

We could prepare for (1) or (2) now and leave the final decision about publishing anything until the end of the semester. You always have the final say about which of your materials go up.

I’d like to pursue (1) or (2). How do we proceed?

• Follow the instructions in this MIT classroom recording handbook to set up auto-capture. I’ll provide you with the backup audio recorder mentioned in the handbook.
• If your room doesn’t have auto-capture (it doesn’t appear in the list of rooms in that handbook), I’ll send you other options over email.
• Add me to your course’s canvas page so I can follow along.
• Connect me with your TAs via email.
• I’ll do my best to come to your lecture the first week of semester to ensure recordings are going smoothly.
• Recording isn’t that hard, but it’s tricker than you’d expect, as described in this blogpost.

Why us over MIT OpenCourseWare?

We love MIT OpenCourseWare! I even worked there part-time for a year when I was a student at MIT. But there are some important differences in how SOUL operates that may make us a better fit for your course:

• Faster turnaround. OCW often has a large backlog of courses, so courses can take years to publish after materials are submitted (for example, I think 14.04 took more than two years). At SOUL, our focus is on publishing quickly and at scale, without sacrificing on quality. We can give you a fairly accurate estimate on when we’ll have your materials ready to publish.
• Scaling open education. Our mission is to scale up open education publication by thoughtfully combining AI, automation, and manual effort. We’d like to support publishing/updating hundreds of courses per year. Working with us directly supports this innovation and helps improve the tools we’re developing in our projects.
• Broader range of courses. OCW curates only certain courses that meet its standards for format and production quality, which means many classes never get published even though learners would benefit. We’d rather share valuable material in a more informal format than not share it at all. For example, recordings from certain auto-capture rooms may not be high-resolution, but they are still very useful for students. When lectures heavily rely on slides – which happens often – we can post-process the raw recordings by aligning them with the original slide PDFs and recreate a high-resolution lecture video, as described here. OCW has encouraged SOUL to process courses that they do not take on.

Additional notes:

• Working with us isn’t exclusive. Once we’ve published your course on SOUL, we can cross-post (usually via link) to OCW if you and OCW would like that. This gives you the best of both worlds: OCW’s large global reach plus SOUL’s faster and more flexible process. Some professors also appreciate that SOUL currently reaches a smaller, more targeted audience for courses that may not be intended for OCW’s very large stage.
• We’re not operating in a silo. We collaborate closely with MIT Open Learning. I meet regularly with Chris Capozzola, MIT’s Senior Associate Dean of Open Learning, to keep SOUL’s work aligned with MIT Open Learning’s broader missions. We see ourselves as a complement to OCW, not a competitor.

Our progress

At SOUL, we (1) curate courses and learning materials that already exist but are scattered across the internet, (2) crowdsource useful materials created by students, (3) work with professors to put up their materials, and (4) build tools and workflows to scale up the open education publication pipeline.

We’re making steady progress on our projects. While we want to move quickly, we don’t believe in rushing at the expense of building the right solutions. We’re mindful that technology alone isn’t a silver bullet for education and are attentive to Prof. Justin Reich’s Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Solve Education.

• Courses we’ve published on YouTube: YouTube channel
• Blogposts we’ve written: blogposts

We’re on track to finish putting up ~half of the courses in MIT’s undergraduate economics curriclulum (the other half are already up), in about a year. This will be the first time an entire college major is available through fully open resources.

Concerns about privacy, copyright, and ADA-compliance

(student) privacy

In the past, OCW has found it sufficient to post a notice on the classroom doors that a recording is underway for OCW and that if you don’t want to be in it, you can sit somewhere out of view of the camera (notification instead of explicit permission). More recently, I think they’ve been trying to get explicit permission from students to be in the videos, but that can be logistically hard. At SOUL, we’re just going to blur student faces so that they’re not personally identifiable from the videos alone.

copyright

We take great care in ensuring we don’t post third-party copyrighted materials. We follow a process similar to OCW’s. First, we try to claim fair-use. If we can’t, we either get explicit permission from the copyright holder or find/create a replacement. Happy to elaborate on our process over email or synchronous discussion. I’ll be writing a blogpost on it soon.

ada-compliance

We follow a process similar to OCW’s. We use 3PlayMedia (OCW uses them) or similar services to subtitle videos that we post, and we also manually review the subtitles to some extent. ADA-compliance requires super highly accurate subtitles – basically 99% accuracy. AI subtitling is getting better and better each year, and we’re currently exploring if we may be able to use AI transcription services somehow and still be ADA-compliant. Most transcription services (like 3PlayMedia) use a combination of AI and manual review.

Personal / Team

Just a bit of background about me and the team. I, Ashay, lead the efforts at SOUL. I did my undergrad and masters at MIT. I used OCW and open education resources a lot in high school. I really love and care about teaching: at MIT, I TAed undergrad-level machine learning for 3 semesters, undergrad-level probability for 2 semesters, graduate-level inference for 1 semester, and also codesigned/colectured MIT 2.S972: Hacking Higher Ed, a seminar course on redesigning higher education, with Ken Zolot. The SOUL team over the past few years has been composed of several MIT students and alums and a few contractors. At the moment, it’s just me until our next fundraising round later this year.