As the new academic year begins the biggest news the biggest milestone is
something that we foreshadowed in my previous message and that is that we now
have two million subscribers to our YouTube channel. Two million is a lot and
it's growing by several thousand per day. Another really big number is if you add
up the number of minutes that those two million subscribers have watched, we're
now over a billion. And so that's more than a billion minutes people learning
from what we share from the MIT classroom and better still any people
once they're on our YouTube channel that's how they find their way to the
full OpenCourseWare site where they can, in addition to the videos, they can get
the problems they can get the syllabus they can get the reading list they can
really see the full array of materials from the MIT classroom that we're
sharing with the world. OCW continues to build new courses every year we now have
more than two thousand four hundred and fifty courses on the OpenCourseWare site.
Many of them are innovative approaches to core subjects that are central to
an MIT education and many of them are also unique little gems from the MIT
classroom. Gil Strang is a beloved teacher on OpenCourseWare his courses
have been visited more than 10 million times in total and he now has a brand
new course just off on OpenCourseWare in which he uses matrix methods to teach
about signal processing about data analysis and about machine learning. So
Gil Strang is bringing machine learning into his teaching and that's something
which a lot of people are very excited about. I can give you an example of
something that's really timely, Roger Peterson from our political science
department, he has a new course on OpenCourseWare on emotions and politics.
To pick an example of something that's uniquely MIT a little gem as I refer to
Norvin Richards from a the Linquistics department has a brand new course on how
to construct a language. The most exciting new capability and new
opportunity for you that I want to tell you about is MIT's new open learning
library. At present, it's in its prototype stage but we would love for you to
explore the prototype. Learn from what you see there and give us feedback as we
build a prototype out. So what is it? Well it's a huge new array of content
available to you open, free, there forever, for you to learn from at your own pace
just like everything on OpenCourseWare. Some of this content comes from
OpenCourseWare. In the future some will come directly from the MIT classroom and
a lot of it comes from MITx and so what that brings into your learning
experience is that you will now have the kinds of interactive auto-graded
problems that are the hallmark of MITx available to you in this OCW style.
You'll also be able to track your progress, see how you're doing on the
course as a whole and this will be a new way for you to learn even better from
what we offer you. So what's driving the future of OCW is the same thing that has
been driving us for 18 years and that is what a privilege it is to serve our
global community of learners and educators. And each educator who uses our
materials multiplies the impact of the learning that we offer you from MIT by
sharing it with their learners. And in fact, we've just made a book of messages
that we've received from learners like you and if you'd like to see that book
to see what others are saying about the learning opportunities that OCW offers
them, it's available online. The most important way that you can support OCW
is simply by using our materials. Use the learning opportunities that we're
sharing. Use them to advance your education. Use them to satisfy your
curiosity. Use them to open new doors for you and your career and as you're doing
that tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. Spread the word so that more
people are using OCW in the way that you already are. Tell us how OCW has made a
difference in your lives how its advanced your education. How it's opened doors
for you. We want to hear from you. Lastly, we would be incredibly grateful
for a donation, because it's donations from people like you that support our
free and open courses. And it's donations from people like you that will
allow us to continue doing what we do even better sharing the best of MIT with
a global community of learners and educators.