Khan Academy has launched an effort with Taghreedat, the regional and international Arabic digital content community initiative, to localize its educational video library into Arabic, offering an opportunity for all Arabic speaking learners worldwide to access a vast amount of quality open educational resources in their native language for free.
Coinciding with this blog post, Taghreedat has kicked off the project on its twitter account @Taghreedat. In line with Khan Academy’s emphasis on the power of crowd-sourcing to transform education and enhance access, Taghreedat’s partnership with the Academy comes at a time when the culture of crowd-sourcing is gradually being adopted among social media users in the Arab world. Taghreedat has already collaborated with key global digital content players in the US including Twitter, Inc., TED, the Wikimedia Foundation, Storify and Meedan.
The project comes as the first tangible outcome of Taghreedat’s MoU with California-based Meedan, which was signed last month at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, opened by Microsoft Founder Bill Gates. The partnership directly falls into Arabizing Open Educational Resources and marks the beginning of a larger call to action to channel Arab users’ enthusiasm to enrich Arabic content online into more areas than interface localization.