As mentioned in a previous post, OpenCourseWare is a project which aims at providing high quality educational material on the web for free. Lucifer Chu, a man who became wealthy by creating Chinese translations of fantasy novels, is helping promote MIT courses available through this media, to the Chinese speaking world. To date, Mr. Chu, along with four full-time editors and a number of volunteers have completed translations for 178 courses and are working on about 600 more. CORE, China Open Resources for Education has also contributed to translations with versions in simplified Chinese. Opensource OpenCourseware Prototype System (OOPS) has contributed translations in traditional Chinese.
When MIT decided to join OpenCourseWare, some feared that making their course content available for free on the web would discourage potential students from actually coming to the university and paying tuition. Instead the university has notices that these free courses have served to pique people’s curiosity about what is available at the university, so plenty of students from all around the globe are still enrolling every year.
You can find the NY Times article on the matter here.