We grew up teaching ourselves online. When we wanted to explore beyond school, we turned to Phd field reading lists and MIT OpenCourseWare. But our reading often hit a wall: paywalls or out-of-date material limited what we could learn. We have high hopes for Coursetexts. We want to make the highest quality education available so anyone can be a true expert in their desired field. We want students to be limited only by their curiosity, not by access to materials. Coursetexts is the library we wish we had, and we hope you can learn from it too!
What is Coursetexts?
Coursetexts builds open source software that makes high-quality, accessible OER financially sustainable for universities to publish. We’re currently developing state-of-the-art AI pipelines for privacy-preserving video editing and detecting third-party copyrighted content. We hope our software provides a financially sustainable solution for opencourseware providers (OCWs) to continue open sourcing at the pace of teaching, with material that’s accessible to all learners.
As a proof of concept, we’ve previously published 30+ courses at universities without existing open access initiatives. All our courses are open sourced with the professor’s explicit consent.
Coursetexts by the Numbers
By automating onerous workflows but focusing on quick manual review, our software helps publish more courses, more frequently, at a fraction of the cost and time.
- Quick publication with minimal effort from professors: Our median time to creating a course preview after receiving professor consent is under 1 week. Compiling and formatting materials can otherwise require months of review.
- Low overhead and cost effectivity: We’ve previously published 31 open access courses on a total budget of $11k, for an average cost of $354 per course. Open sourcing with manual auditing costs $3.9M for 132 courses, which is $29.5k per course (including overhead).
Who is the Coursetexts team?
Coursetexts is a small team led by volunteers from Harvard and MIT. Here’s more on Selena and Aayush. Thank you also to Jeremiah, Eesha, Anna, Ezra, Liam, Rigo, Milo, Edward, Raffi and Ashay for their contributions.
We’re a 501(c)3 nonprofit fiscally sponsored by Hack Club, and donations are tax deductible.
We’re generously advised by professors Lawrence Lessig, Peter Suber, and Justin Reich. Thank you also to Brewster Kahle, Adam D’Angelo, and Michael Nielsen for their support and advice.