The Open Translation MOOC: creating online communities to transcend linguistic barriers

Abstract

Language can be a barrier to the reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER), so translation and localization might be a way to facilitate reuse or even a necessary preliminary step. One obvious solution to the considerable effort required to translate OER is to use crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing translation is already an established and successful solution to making content more accessible in some large-scale, high profile open projects such as Wikipedia (Wikipedia Translation) or TED talks (Ted Open Translation Project). In this paper we describe a MOOC in Open Translation Tools and Practices that was offered by the Department of Languages at the Open University UK in 2012. We examine participant expectations and outcomes, and consider the suitability of a MOOC for bringing together distributed communities around a common endeavor, in this instance, the translation of open content.