MIT OpenCourseWare will not succeed without the support and contributions of MIT's world-class Faculty. Because MIT OCW is a strictly voluntary activity, we must minimize the amount of time that faculty are required to plan, build, and publish their course materials on the MIT OCW Web site.

There are four MIT OCW Faculty Liaisons (FL), assigned to the individual schools, who help manage the process for faculty. These FLs work in MIT OCW headquarters and report to the MIT OCW Program Manager. They act as project managers and coordinators, working with the faculty and MIT's 33 department heads to achieve both the faculty's individual, and the department's overall, publishing goals.

The FLs also manage a team of Department Liaisons (DLs) who are funded by MIT OCW, hired by the department, and are physically located in the departments. These DLs directly assist faculty in preparing digital course materials for their teaching, ready materials for Web publication, and with the FL, coordinate MIT OCW planning and course publication strategies.

The benefits of this distributed workforce are:

• Faculty: Resources in the departments act as first point of contact with MIT OCW, help faculty locate digital instruction resources at MIT, and assist in the planning of MIT OCW course sites.
• Departments: Participation increases the department's Web presence, and provides an overall improvement in the use of the Web as an instructional tool, meeting MIT student expectations.
• MIT OCW: Strategic involvement of the FLs and DLs in the course planning process increases the overall amount of digital materials, and makes those materials more publishable for MIT OCW in the end.

The FLs and DLs, as part of this planning and process assistance, help faculty put their courses online for teaching by:

• Consulting on site design and content management system
• Coordinating content collection, conversion, and input
• Offering graphic assistance

"I am in Linguistics, and also in Media Studies and Japanese studies, and I have been very curious about chemical engineering. What are the chemical engineers doing? So I have been looking at their sites, at their courses, and I have been looking at Electrical Engineering courses. That has been a real eye-opener for me - that a nonspecialist can go in and take a look at the lecture notes, even exams. It is remarkable." -- Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics, and Japanese Language and Culture

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