Coursera is excited to welcome Guokr as our newest Chinese translations partner. A popular social networking site in China, Guokr currently has a community of 150 users (and growing) to help translate select courses into Chinese (and vice versa as we begin to launch more courses taught natively in Chinese!). Volunteers, who are often enrolled in the courses themselves, work together to translate and proofread lectures and course materials as they are released each week.
For Guokr, this partnership is part of a MOOC initiative the site launched in 2012 with the mission to help spread the benefits of the MOOC movement to Chinese society. To date, Guokr has a MOOC self-study group with 43,000 members as well as a page on Weibo (one of China’s largest social networks) with over 1 million followers. Guokr shares our belief that knowledge should be easily accessible to people around the world regardless of financial means, country, or language spoken.
To start off, the Guokr community has begun translating the following courses:
- Social Psychology, Wesleyan University
- Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, Duke University
- Probability, National Taiwan University
- Chinese History and Icons – Qin Shihuang, National Taiwan University
- Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, Rice University
- Introduction to Public Speaking, University of Washington
- Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade, Mt. San Jancinto College
In addition to building a community of Coursera translators, Guokr will be conducting a survey of Chinese Coursera users to help us gain more insight into their unique learning patterns and reasons for taking a MOOC.
Guokr is the second Chinese partner to join Coursera’s Global Translation Partners Program (following Yeeyan.org). Last week, Peking University joined Coursera as our first university partner from mainland China. We look forward to serving the needs of more Chinese students as we work to expand our course options for non-English speakers!