We grew up teaching ourselves online. When school didn’t satisfy us, we turned to the Internet: reading any computer science papers, physics textbooks, and philosophical texts we could find for free. But our reading often hit a wall; not from lack of curiosity, but lack of access. Paywalls or out-of-date material limited what we could learn. We have high hopes for Coursetexts. We want it to curate the highest quality education on the planet so anyone can be a true expert in their desired field. And, we want it to serve as a guide to frontier research as its being published.
We’re building the library we wish we had — we’re excited for the next generation of learners to do more than we could have imagined.
What is Coursetexts?
Coursetexts builds open source software that makes high-quality, accessible OER financially sustainable for universities to publish. Since MIT and Harvard came into compliance with disability law in 2015, the cost of closed captioning and detecting copyrighted material has tripled the cost of open sourcing course material. By building state-of-the-art AI pipelines for lecture transcription, privacy-preserving video editing, and copyright material detection, the Coursetexts platform enables professors to publish accessible course material at 1/300 the cost of traditional opencourseware. We’re in progress of bringing video and transcription support across courses.
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 partnered with Harvard faculty to open source their course notes. All our courses are open sourced with the professor’s explicit consent.
The Challenge
MIT open sources 3x fewer courses at triple the cost in order to meet accessibility requirements. Since NAD v. MIT established important accessibility requirements for open courseware, the volume of courses MIT can afford to publish has dropped from 132 courses per year (2015) to just 36 (2022). Each course is 3x more expensive, with copyright and closed captioning dominating increased costs
Essential compliance features like closed captioning and copyright auditing now represent over half of open courseware budgets. According to 3PlayMedia, which has transcribed for MIT OCW, captioning costs $165 per video hour. Several public reports put the cost of detecting and removing closed-source copyrighted material from open sourced content at 50% of total budget, but in private conversations with OCW providers we’ve heard number as high as 80% for copyright auditing alone.
Coursetexts by the Numbers
By making closed captioning and copyright detection cheaper and faster, Coursetexts enables OCW providers to publish more courses, more frequently, at a fraction of the cost.
- To date, we’ve open sourced 25 classes at Harvard.
- Each class we publish costs ~300x less to open source than MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) would spend without our software. We open sourced our first 23 classes for less than $10K (for comparison, OCW spent $3.9M to publish 18 new courses without our software).
- Open courses exist at the generosity of professors creating these classes. Coursetexts can publish classes within 24 hours of professor approval, with less than one minute of a professor’s time. With professor review, our median time to publication is 1 week. Traditional platforms require a multi-person team and months of effort.
- The average course on Coursetexts is from 2022. The average OCW course is from 2008.
Who’s 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 Anna, Liam, Rigo, Milo, Edward, and Ashay for their contributions, and especially to Raffi for open sourcing our first course.
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.