MIT and SapientNitro Celebrate 15th Anniversary of OpenCourseWare

Global Program Equips 200 Million Educators and Students with Courses, Textbooks, and Learning Materials

Cambridge, MA, April 4, 2016 – MIT and SapientNitro, a leader in helping businesses transform for the digital age, celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), a web-based program designed to share materials used in the teaching of MIT's 2,300 undergraduate and graduate courses openly and freely with the world. Since the program’s launch in 2002, OCW course materials – including more than 100 courses with lecture videos, over 60 free online textbooks and more than 60 courses where faculty share in-depth insights on the art and science of teaching – have been accessed by more than 200 million educators, students and self-learners worldwide.

“MIT’s OCW program enables educators, students and self-learners around the world to access resources and educational materials through a web-based experience that is highly-accessible and designed around the needs of users,” said Michael Maione, Director – Client Services, SapientNitro. “SapientNitro has been proud to support OCW and MIT’s faculty for the past 15 years and we look forward to continuing to help millions more harness the power of this groundbreaking program.”

SapientNitro, part of the Publicis.Sapient platform, is providing extensive creative services to promote the anniversary, including anniversary brand identity creation, web development and design, and video production, to showcase the program’s impact, reach, and innovations.

Because OCW is Creative Commons licensed, anyone can download and save OCW content, adapt and remix it to meet their needs, and share freely with their friends and colleagues. Through the program, OCW has distributed 368 copies of the site on hard drives to universities in bandwidth constrained regions, and translation partners have created more than 1,000 translated versions of OCW courses.

SapientNitro has been instrumental in the design, construction and implementation of the publishing platform for sharing MIT faculty’s educational resources, as well as the creation of a seamless and intuitive user experience for the program’s global network. The agency will continue to deliver technical support and web services for OCW’s course publishing group.

OCW has also been sustained by the generous support of MIT itself, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ab Initio Corporation, MathWorks, Telmex, Dow, Lockheed Martin, Accenture, thousands of individual donors, and other foundations and corporate sponsors.

About MIT OpenCourseWare

At MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), we make the materials used in the teaching of MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses—more than 2,300 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. Our website receives an average of 2.3 million website visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 200 million individuals have accessed, downloaded, remixed and shared OCW materials, which are available under a Creative Commons license.

About SapientNitro

SapientNitro®, part of the Publicis.Sapient platform, is a new breed of agency redefining storytelling for an always-on world. We’re changing the way our clients engage today’s connected consumers by uniquely creating integrated, immersive stories across brand communications, digital engagement, and omni-channel commerce. We call it our Storyscaping® approach, where art and imagination meet the power and scale of systems thinking. SapientNitro’s unique combination of creative, brand and technology expertise results in one global team collaborating across disciplines, perspectives and continents to create game-changing success for our Global 1000 clients, such as Chrysler, The Coca-Cola Company, Lufthansa, Target and Vodafone, in 31 cities across The Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit www.sapientnitro.com.

SapientNitro and Storyscaping are registered service marks of Sapient Corporation.