Projects

Projects can be organized first into MIT-related or not-MIT-related. MIT-related projects can be organized further into one of the three main stages of the publication pipeline: (1) recruitment, (2) collection, and (3) processing. Below we mention some of our main project areas. Each of these project areas contain several projects that we have not detailed on this website yet.

Recruitment

• Figuring out what’s missing from online open education materials (on MIT OCW, and elsewhere), and recruiting MIT classes (later, also classes at other universities) to put online to fill those gaps.

• Creating better incentives for people to contribute to OER by creating awards for students/TAs/profs and sending out a newsletter to each department each semester that details the impact their online course materials are having.

• Creating demos and documentation that clarifies what kind of content we collect and the different options we have for how to collect it to make recruitment discussions go more smoothly, especially through providing clear expectations on what kind of content (with regard to quality, and level of polish) is appropriate to put online.

Collection

• Innovating technologies and workflows to record {lectures, recitations, etc.}, packaging these into easy-to-use solutions with good documentation, and training TAs and other relevant parties on these workflows.

• Hiring students or additional TAs to create OER (e.g. lecture notes, recitation notes, improved homework solutions, curated questions-and-answers, …). This is particularly important for classes in which the professor does not want their lecture video online but is ok with a textbook-like scribed version of their lecture going up online.

• Experimenting new ways to teach laboratory classes and discussion-based classes to online students.

Processing

• Building specialized tools to speed up (through automation) video editing and copyright/IP handling for courses, allowing us to massively increase course publication throughput.

Other

• Creating a space for brainstorming and discussion through a reading group that meets every two weeks and a book club.

• Interviewing students, administrators, professors, and employers, and using what we learn to inform the design of open education materials.

• Sharing our thoughts and what we’ve learned with the world through blogposts, interviews, podcasts, etc.