Members of ESAi collaborated starting the spring semester of 2006, through the summer, and into early september to facilitate the sending and installation of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's course materials on over 1400 courses the Institute offers. The material delivered in eformat, through an external hard drive, so far has been installed at Arbaminch University and Addis Ababa University.

Mirror Site Installed

[img=right:f33067abdc]http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/images/mitopencourseware.gif[/img:f33067abdc]Members of ESAi were able to take advantage of a new corporate-sponsored program by MIT to distribute local copies of the website http://ocw.mit.edu including course materials from over 1400 MIT courses. This is particularly useful to students in Ethiopia as it mitigates the problem of limited Internet connectivity to access and download educational material that is relevant to their studies and interests from the MIT OCW materials.

MIT OCW IN A BOX CONTENTS


• NR (11.2 GB)- This folder contains half of the main content from the MIT OCW site, including PDF files for all the course section pages (course home, calendar, syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, exams, etc.)
• OCWExternal (117 GB)- This folder contains all of the enhanced content from the MIT OCW site, including video and audio files.
• OcwWeb (3 GB)- This folder contains the other half of the main content from the MIT OCW site, including HTML files for all the course section pages (course home, calendar, syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, exams, etc.)
• PromotionMaterials (5.7 MB)- This folder contains helpful information and templates about MIT OCW and the MIT OCW in a Box Program, which institutions can use to announce and promote their mirror site.
• Tools (84.3 MB)- This folder contains optional software tools and documentation that can be used, but are not required, to enhance the mirror site. Subfolders include:

o PDFReader
0 Perl
o Rsync
o Search
o UsageTracking
o WebTemplate


With appropriate configuration the two universities in Ethiopia should be receiving constant update to the contents of their mirror sites and local contents (There will be three more publication cycles until the site reaches steady-state at the end of 2007) over the web that will make the MIT OCW mirror site grow to about 300GB.

We hope this will inspire other ESAi members to formulate useful partnerships between their current universities/colleges and those in Ethiopia to help improve access to resources and opportunities for fellow Ethiopian students.

Special thanks to all people who provided contacts at Ethiopian Universities, helped with technical troubleshooting and leg work in Ethiopia to have the resources up and running. Our special thanks also goes to Farnaz Haghseta, External Outreach Liaison at the MIT OpenCourseware for her assistance in the effort.