In April of this year, the School broke through an educational barrier when it launched its OpenCourseWare (OCW) site....And now, thanks to the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), a program that translates educational resources into Chinese, the language barrier is being broken as well. OOPS has replicated the School’s OCW site in simplified Chinese (the language of mainland China) and in traditional Chinese (spoken in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan)....
OOPS is the brainchild of Lucifer Chu. In 2003, Chu, known for translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into Chinese, read an article in Wired magazine that described Asian students trying to use MIT’s OCW.
“I was deeply touched,” he says. “After I read the article, I thought, what if?” Chu quit his job at a publishing house and founded the OOPS project to translate MIT’s OCW site for Chinese-speaking people. When the Bloomberg School’s OCW site went live, Chu knew OOPS had to translate it, too.
“Johns Hopkins and MIT are really generous,” Chu says. “The [OCW] materials are all in English, and what I’m trying to do is help give them to developing countries.” Part of the OOPS mission is to reach out to less fortunate people through the donation of knowledge, Chu says. OCW embodies that....
The translation, as well as the design and programming, is done by some 1,700 like-minded volunteers recruited largely by email and word of mouth. The “OOPSers,” as they’re called, include CEOs, professors, engineers, accountants, musicians, designers, lawyers, doctors and students.
After translation, the pages are reviewed by an editor and proofread. The pages must be approved by the OOPS review board composed of content experts in the field before being published on the site.
When Chu founded OOPS, he created a server with two old computers he hid in the dormitory of National Central University in Taiwan, where he is an alumnus. Last year, the university found out. “But I persuaded them that what we’re doing is a good thing,” Chu says. So much so that the university agreed to provide a server. Today, there are six or seven servers at different universities in China, all dedicated to posting translated course content from MIT, the Bloomberg School, Utah State University, and the Japan OCW Alliance. OOPs has completed 55 courses, and 1,020 courses currently being translated
Comment. I love the OOPS story and found a few more details in an article from the March 2005 Taipei Times. Chu made $27 million translating The Lord of the Rings into Chinese and now spends 16 unpaid hours per day making making open content available to Chinese readers.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/28/2006 12:13:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
