1993, National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan. A student majored in electrical engineering sat idly in a classroom. This is the class of Electro-Magnetism, which offered tons of new equation, the playground jumps from 3-dimension to 4-dimension using highly advanced calculus skill. This is a little too much for this student, the teacher always wrote all kinds of equation across the blackboard, but not many people really understand that means. Since there’s no other resource this student can drew on, this part of the story ends with he flunked twice in this course, when he go to the class in his fifth year in the university, his former classmates is his TA. He finally passed this course, but you and I both know that he can never get a job in the electrical engineering field, this is not a very happy ending for him.
2003, TVBS news channel, Taiwan, ten years later, the same student grew older. He is a professional translator now, and he earned over 1 million U.S. dollars from the royalty of the Lord of the Rings. So he was taking a part time job hosting 10- minute technology news 5 days a week. He introduced a lot of the idea and story happened on internet, but the audiences were not very interested in it, and the ratings was real low, so the program was stopped after the summer vacation. During that two months, there only one time that the audience showed the smallest interest. One mother called in to ask what is the link of MIT’s OCW introduced in the program. She didn’t know, and probably will never know, this phone call changed a lot of things.
February, 2004, in the same student’s bed room in Taiwan, he decided that he wants to change something. After waiting for 6 months, no government officials, or any higher education institutions did anything about OCW. He realizes that no promotion and no localization means no education. So he quit his job, and started to translate the whole MIT OCW’s website. There were only 2 men who know about his project at that time. One is Lucifer Yang, they built up one of the biggest fantasy literature web-site in Taiwan together, so he kind of get used to this request.(which this time later will lead to him lost thousands of hours of sleep) The other one is Jeffer Tang, he also get used to this weird guy’s weird project, so he agreed to provide a computer salvaged from several old computer.(This computer was hide in the internet center without any official agreement from the school.)The MIT OCW which cost MIT over 20 million dollars, but the Chinese localization project just started on an old computer saved from junk yard.
The lousy student is me, Lucifer Chu. After 3 years, OOPS(Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System) has become a project with over 2,200 volunteers from 22 different countries. We are also the third organization signed the official translation affiliate agreement with MIT. Only in 2005 and 2006, we had over 3 million users, the number of daily visitor searched 10,000 per day. The course we had came from MIT, Harvard, JHSPH, Cambridge University, USU, Japan OCW alliance. In June, 2007 we will join force with III to hold the first International Conference of Opencourseware and e-Learning. And Lucifer Chu and Lucifer Yang’s alma mater National Central University and National Chiao Tung University already built up their own OCW project.
Besides simply translation, OOPS now also tried to redesign and re-assemble the OCW offer from different institution, to allow more people to use and enjoy the great knowledge.
On April 2, 2007, in an article in New York Times, “LUCIFER CHU, a 31-year-old from Taipei, Taiwan, is as good an example as any of the shrinking distances between East and West….”So, sometimes, it requires a bad student to make differences. But for me, the really great thing is not to get the applause or media coverage. The best thing is now I can sit back to enjoy the MIT course 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism offered on MIT OCW. Finally, I can re-learn the Electro-Magnetism course……..