 about MIT OCW Scholar. Sarah is a project manager for OCW Educator. And Joe is probably more familiar to many of you. He's a Publication Director at MIT OpenCourseWare. And they'll talk about why OCW Scholar is such an important program in open education. Now, so without further ado, let me hand over the microphone to Joe and Sarah. Thank you, Mina. OCW Scholar is a program that includes a bunch of courses that were developed expressly for independent learners. So the idea is that if you're an independent learner, you can go to these courses and learn without using any external resources at all. The courses are among the most robust on the OCW site. They have really lots of material. Pretty much all of them have full video lectures. And many of them have what we call recitation or problem solving videos. There's problem sets and solutions, exams and solutions, readings, and lecture notes and things like that. So it's a lot of material. The material is all these courses really are foundational courses in science and engineering taught at MIT. They're primarily in the first two years of an MIT students experience. And the materials come from those that were used in courses on campus, but they're supplemented with other things that we actually created in collaboration with graduate students and the instructors themselves. So they're really quite robust websites that anyone in the world can use at any time for free. So OCW currently offers 12 scholar courses. And those areas include biology, chemistry, computer science and electrical engineering, psychology, calculus, probability, linear algebra, engineering dynamics, and economics. And we have one more in the works, which is in biological chemistry. And our scholar courses are really among our most visited courses on the OCW site. People might be wondering about the relationship between MOOCs and OCW scholar courses. And really MOOCs and scholar courses have similarities and differences. So they're similar in that they're both sequential offerings of materials. They go in an order. And many of them offer video simulations and assessment opportunities. And then they differ a little bit because MOOCs are interactive in the sense that there is usually someone on the other side of the screen as you're engaging in the MOOC. There are usually things like discussion forums. You can often get a certificate. They have a start and an end date. And then the course materials are under an all rights reserved license. And that's a little bit different than the scholar courses, which are really independent learning experiences. We don't require any sort of registration. The materials are permanently available. There's easy downloading of materials. And all of the materials are offered under a Creative Commons license, which means they can be adapted and used. And in the Office of Digital Learning at MIT, we really see MOOCs and scholar courses as complimentary. And people and learners and educators might go to a MOOC or to a scholar course, depending on how they want to use them. So how do we make these courses? They are labors of love, that's for sure, because they take a lot of effort from a lot of different people. The time frame, it's nine months. That's pretty optimistic to 12 months or even longer. And a lot of people are involved. There's at least one professor, MIT professor, and often multiple professors. The OCW staff has what we call a department liaison, a publication manager, the publication director. We have our own production team, which there are three or four people involved in that. They do more technical stuff to see that things can work on the site. But we also use a site authoring team in India. These people work for Sapient, and they build the site themselves. We have video people too. We've done a lot of video work, so we don't do camera work anymore, but we usually contract out for that. So and then there's also a bunch of other people like TAs who can record, say, problem-solving videos. And it's a great opportunity for them to get a credential while they're doing something terrific for the world. So it takes a lot of planning and scheduling and coordination of a lot of different people to make one of these things happen. Everything we publish on the site has our Creative Commons license, which is BYNCSA, so that people can use it as broadly as possible. And we try to make the site as accessible as we can. The videos have subtitles and transcripts that you can download. And so it's an overall maximum effort project for OCW. Some of our latest work involves enhancing some of the select scholar courses with OCW Educator Pages. And Educator Pages allow the faculty member to share instructional insights about how they taught the course. And our goal in doing that is really to make material even more useful to educators who want to reuse the materials with other students. So we've recently added an educator section to 900 Scholar, which is Introduction to Psychology. And the instructor, John Gabrielli, shares insights about structuring a broad survey course, crafting lectures that inspire and inform, bringing demonstrations to the classroom. And we're currently building an educator page for 601 Scholar, which is Introduction to Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. And they share insights about their practice theory, practice approach, and formatively assessing students and in other such insights. So we're really excited about that. So I think that we'll end there. And if there is time, we're happy to take any questions that you might have. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Joe. Let's open the floor for some questions on the OCW Scholar program. You can use your microphone or type in the questions in the chat window. Thank you, James. It is gratifying to put up really, really high-quality content like this from MIT instructors. I have to say, the scholar courses are really, really popular. The most popular, I think they get about 90,000 visits a month, the most popular ones. Our course? Yeah, I mean, we get really great feedback from people. We get about, for the whole site, over 500 feedback emails a month. And many of them are really, they're quite flattering. People talk about how it's a transformative experience for them to be able to get access to this kind of material and to have this experience of studying with these top-flight faculty members at MIT. So it makes the effort worthwhile, that's for sure. Yeah. Una is remarking that 90,000 visits per month is impressive. Yeah, it is. I mean, not all our courses certainly get that kind of traffic. But the top courses are usually our introductory computer programming courses. But the mathematics courses are also very high on the list. And I think between number seven and 10 on our most popular courses is, believe it or not, our microeconomics course. So that's also a really popular course. Let's see, a question is from all the users. Do you have any idea of how many our future or past MIT students? Yes, we do track that. We track their URLs. And I've forgotten what the percentage is. It's not a huge number because we get so many people from around the world. But there is a lot of activity that happens on campus. And I've forgotten what the percentage is. I'm sorry about that. I could look that up if you want. Another question is, are high school students using this to prep for AP tests when their own high schools don't offer the courses any data on that? Well, that's definitely true in part because the scholar program is such as it is. But we also have a companion website to the MIT OCW website called Highlights for High School. And that website has an examination preparation component, which is broken down by topic in the AP curriculum that and those topics are linked to resources in on the OCW website. And many of those resources come from scholar courses. Another question is, is there a specific demographic where the participants are coming from? To scholar courses, I'm not sure that the traffic has ever been sorted out as different from the whole OCW site in general. But that has about 45% come from North America. And then the rest is broken down. I think it's about 15% from Europe, 15% from East Asia, and smaller numbers elsewhere. Those are the two big other groups, though. So happy to answer any other questions. The traffic overall to the OCW site is about 2 and 1 half million visits a month. It's really quite a lot. The age range, that's interesting. Yeah, we're going to have a survey that's going to come out actually in tomorrow, I think. Well, if you go to the site, you can see it. And it would be a help to us if you filled it out. So but I think the age ranges are really quite all over the place. The justification, well, the OCW scholar program is a grant-funded program. We got a grant in 2010 from the Frank Stanton Foundation, very generous grant, to make these courses. So I mean, this is different from the normal OCW approach to things. We had money to give stipends to teaching assistants, to faculty members and instructors. Usually that worked by us giving the department a chunk of money to pay them for time over the summer or something like that. But so we were doing this sort of outside of the normal OCW operation. But the other thing is we wanted to make these courses really as robust and standalone as possible. So to do that, we put a lot of effort into making a kind of complete educational experience, or at least as complete as we could do it. Any other questions? Kiri, are you sure you don't want to ask a question? OK, maybe you'll have another chance later. OK, so I always wondered about why you guys put so much effort into that. So I'll look forward to seeing the report on who's using it and how they're using it. It will be really interesting to see how it's different from other OCW courses. OK, well, thank you very much, Joe and Sarah. Our pleasure. Thank you.