New features help visitors to better discover and access MIT course materials
Cambridge, MA, November 29, 2012 -- MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu) launched a new site design today intended to help visitors discover new courses easily and access course materials more efficiently. The design features a new home page layout that provides more opportunity for articles, has a rotating featured courses bar, and a new “Meet the Instructor” section. The OCW home page is currently viewed more than 600,000 times each month.
“Our previous design served us well,” said OCW Executive Director Cecilia d’Olivera in discussing the new design, “but our site has grown tremendously in the past few years. With more than 2,150 courses on the site, plus great features like Highlights for High School and OCW Scholar courses, we want to be sure it's easy and intuitive for our users to find exactly the content they are looking for.”
Perhaps the most important new feature introduced in the redesign is a course finder that replaces the master course list of all 2,150 courses. Instead of a long list, site visitors will access an interface that allows them to browse courses by topic, by MIT course number or by department, and filter the results according to the content type they are seeking, such as video or interactive simulations.
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Eventually, the site redesign will also update the course home pages, introducing a tabbed information section that will allow the OCW team to share more information about each course and how it is positioned within the MIT curriculum. All of the course content on the site will remain available as before the redesign, and URLs to the course pages will not change.
MIT OpenCourseWare makes the materials used in the teaching of substantially all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses—more than 2,150 in all—available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. OCW receives an average of 1.75 million web site visits per month from more than 215 countries and territories worldwide. To date, more than 100 million individuals have accessed OCW materials.
