When good things happen at OCW…

…you can be sure I wasn’t involved.  The MIT faculty rightly gets most of the credit for OCW—it was the faculty’s idea and the faculty provides the content—but there’s also an amazing group of people who put heart and soul into publishing the faculty materials, and they get far less attention than they deserve.  I had the privilege of working on the publication team early in the project, but now on the external relations side, I can only stare down the hallway in awe of the work that these folks do.

Today, they’ve completed what I personally think is the single most exciting thing we’ve done since completing the initial publication of the MIT curriculum, the publication of the first round of our new OCW Scholar courses.  These courses represent an additional level of involvement by the MIT faculty, but they also represent a huge amount of work by the publication team, many times the level of effort that goes into our other courses.

To get a full explanation of what the OCW Scholar program is about, please see this article, but in the mean time I have to take my hat off to Dan, Elizabeth, Curt, Janet, Kate, Joe and the rest of the crew.  I don’t know ultimately what the impact of these courses will be, but I do know that all of you have done your very best to create a remarkable new kind of open educational resource.   Congrats on bringing this one across the finish line.  It may escape notice outside our office how hard you worked for these, but know that those of us on the inside are amazed.