FAQ

You asked me if I'm open to putting the materials on soul.mit.edu and/or ocw.mit.edu. What exactly are my options?

After the class is over, SOUL can get your course materials ready to put online -- including editing your lecture/recitation/etc. videos -- very quickly. We'll make you a course page under our list of courses (for example, see 14.41) and put any edited videos on our YouTube channel. Additionally, we can ask OCW to create a course page on their website that links to SOUL's whenever they have time to do so.

If your course materials don't contain any copyrighted media, we can get everything done in a few days. If your course materials do contain copyrighted media (e.g. copyrighted images in lecture slides), it'll probably take us a few weeks.

Alternatively, you can ask OCW to process and host your course materials. But I've found that OCW often has a large backlog of courses and will not have the bandwidth to process your course materials quickly.

Are you a non-profit?

SOUL currently operates under the fiscal sponsorship of The Hack Foundation (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499). Fiscal sponsorship enables us to receive tax-deductible donations, and our fiscal sponsor provides us with administrative support. Note that "fiscal sponsorship" does not mean that our fiscal sponsor is donating money to us. We'll probably get our own 501(c)(3) non-profit status at some point in the future.

How do you ensure the privacy of people in recorded videos?

We manually review each video recording, blurring faces and adjusting audio to ensure that no one is personally identifiable.

How do you get permission to use copyrighted materials?

We first try to obtain explicit permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder. If that's not possible (e.g. if there is no contact information we can reasonably find), we use a thorough process to determine if fair use applies.