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MIT Professor Shigeru Miyagawa named award recipient by the OCW Consortium

Professor Miyagawa recognized with other leaders of the global OpenCourseWare movement.
Shigeru Miyagawa, professor and head of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section.
Caption:
Shigeru Miyagawa, professor and head of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section.
Credits:
Photo: Melanie Gonick

MIT linguistics professor Shigeru Miyagawa has been selected to receive the President's Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE) for his contributions to the global OpenCourseWare and Open Education movements. Miyagawa, who is also head of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, has been a key member of the faculty team that has nurtured the development of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), has contributed a significant amount of his own course materials to the site, and has traveled extensively to spread the practice of openly sharing educational materials globally.

"I am honored and deeply humbled by this recognition," Miyagawa says. "MIT OpenCourseWare and the many other projects around the world are the result of the generosity of thousands of educators who have shared their teaching materials, and all deserve to be recognized. I am glad to have helped to make this sharing possible."

Miyagawa, who holds the endowed Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture chair, served on the committee that proposed MIT OpenCourseWare in 2000. Since the program's inception, he has been a member of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee, and he currently serves as chair of that body.

When OCW published its proof-of-concept site in fall 2002, Miyagawa contributed materials from two courses, CMS.930 Media, Education and the Marketplace and 24.946 Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language. In the following year he contributed materials from 24.953 Argument Structure and Syntax and 21F.027 Visualizing Cultures, one of the richest and most visually engaging of MIT OpenCourseWare's offerings.

Miyagawa has also been a tireless advocate for the global OpenCourseWare movement. In 2005, he provided assistance to six of Japan's top universities in forming the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium, which has since grown to include 24 Japanese universities and 20 associated organizations. In support of the global movement, Miyagawa has traveled to locations including Cameroon, Korea, Portugal, Israel, Taiwan and Zambia to advocate to for the creation of OpenCourseWare programs at universities around the world.

Honored with Miyagawa by the OCW Consortium are Dr. Oladele Ogunseitan from University of California, Irvine, and José Vida Fernández of University Carlos III of Madrid. Chair for the Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention, Program in Public Health, Dr. Ogunseitan is the recipient of the OpenCourseWare Consortium's Leadership ACE for his role in building the prominence of the UCI OCW site within that institution. Professor for the Department of Public Law and Deputy Director of the Telecommunications Law Master Program of the University Carlos III, Dr. Vida has been awarded the Educator Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence in recognition of the outstanding body of content he has published through that university's OCW site.

The Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding individuals, courseware and OpenCourseWare sites in the OCW Consortium community. The awards are presented each year at the global OpenCourseWare Consortium's annual conference, to be held this year April 16-18 in Cambridge, U.K. The Consortium's Board of Directors selects individual award recipients; an awards committee populated from the Consortium membership selects site and course awards. The Educator ACE was previously given to MIT physics professor Walter Lewin in 2011.

"We're very pleased to honor these three individuals," said OCW Consortium Executive Director Mary Lou Forward. "Each of these recipients embodies the commitment widely shared throughout the OCW community, and each has made a remarkable contribution."

The OCW Consortium Awards for OpenCourseWare Excellence are sponsored by KNEXT, an education software and solutions provider that focuses on learning assessment, ePortfolio development and higher education advisory services.

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