From an E-Mail Announcement:
To date, we [MIT OpenCourseWare] have published 1,933 courses, and expect to have reached the 2,000-course milestone by the end of the year. MIT faculty continue to openly share their time and materials, allowing us to keep the site growing and updated. Our translation affiliates have also been hard at work, producing 100 new translations of our courses in Chinese, Thai, and Persian.
The OCW site now attracts 1.2 million visits each month, and our content reaches far beyond the ocw.mit.edu domain through YouTube, iTunes U, and our mirror site program. More than 7 million downloads and views of our materials have been recorded on iTunes U and YouTube, and we have distributed complete mirror copies of our site to more than 200 universities in bandwidth-constrained regions.
The cost of operating OCW this fiscal year is $3.6 million USD, a 10% reduction from last year’s budget. We were able to lower our expenses through use of free video hosting services, changes in our video production process, and realignment of staff.
What’s Coming?
In the next few weeks, you’ll notice some changes to the course home pages on our site that we hope will make them easier to use. Navigation elements, links to translations and archived versions of the course, as well as interactive features such as our zip downloads, feedback link, and “Add This” button will be accessible in the left-hand margin. This places all the user controls in the same section.Information will also be grouped more effectively on the rest of the page. All course content will be drawn together in the center content column. The faculty name and course level information will appear next to the course home page image, and immediately below will be a series of links to course features, to help you find the key content in your course quickly. The right hand column will be devoted exclusively to messaging related to OCW sustainability initiatives.
Source: MIT OpenCourseWare
