The OU’s Department of Languages is planning the OT12 MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course on open translation tools and practices.
The pilot will run for eight weeks from 15 October to 7 December 2012 with the accompanying course website onow open. If you’re are interested in taking part, go to the "Get involved" tab on the OT12 website.
Not sure what this is all about?
MOOCs are free online courses, open to anybody and everybody anywhere in the world. They usually bring together large numbers of learners and instructors across a common field of knowledge. While MOOCs provide weekly topics, activities, discussions and resources, learners actively engage in all aspects of the experience, sharing ideas in forums, undertaking collaborative or reflective activities, and using a variety of social media.
Open translation tools and practices
Open translation practices rely on crowd sourcing, and are used for translating open resources such as TED talks and Wikipedia articles, and also in global blogging and citizen media projects such as Global Voices.
There are many tools to support open translation practices, from Google translation tools to online dictionaries like Wordreference, or translation workflow tools like Transifex. Some of these will be explored in the OT12 MOOC.
Bridge to success (B2S) ... in more than one language!
The content (translations into Spanish and potentially also other languages through the MOOC), includes the highly successful B2S modules available in the free, standards based OpenLearn Labspace:
There will also be captioning and subtitling activities using a variety of videos in English and Spanish.
