ABU DHABI, UAE: 25 November 2012: Taghreedat, a major Arabic e-content community initiative supported by twofour54, has announced a partnership with California based Khan Academy, a not-for-profit educational organization which provides free online study resources. The partnership will see Khan Academy's vast educational video library translated into Arabic, offering Arabic speaking learners all over the world, free access to a wealth of high quality, open educational resources in their native language.
In line with its highly successful use of online crowd-sourcing as a means to making content accessible to Arab learners, Taghreedat has kicked off its partnership with Khan Academy via its twitter account @Taghreedat. This will alert Taghreedat's active social media community of over 2500 volunteers to become active in localizing the Khan Academy content.
Khan Academy aims to change education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Commenting on this latest partnership with Khan Academy, Sami Mustafa Mubarak, co-founder of Taghreedat, said; "The goal of this partnership is to serve Arab students around the world, including those who can't afford supporting educational materials, and those who are eager to access online videos to complement their offline learning. Arab students can't always find free, open, credible, and high quality educational resources in Arabic, and this project with Khan Academy fills such an important gap."
The project is the first tangible outcome of Taghreedat's Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Meedan, the social translation and software NGO (also based in California), signed last month at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, as part of Taghreedat's mandate to arabize open, educational resources. It marks the beginning of a larger call-to-action to channel enthusiasm for making online content accessible to Arabic speakers.
The partnership comes at a time when the culture of crowd-sourcing is gradually being adopted by social media users in the Arab world as a means of localizing content. Taghreedat has exerted various outreach efforts throughout the year to encourage crowd-sourcing for translating educational content in this manner.
The Khan Academy partnership is Taghreedat's sixth global collaboration with key digital content players in the U.S. including Twitter, Inc., Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), Storify, the Wikimedia Foundation and Meedan.
For more information please contact:
Rachel Duffield
H+K Strategies
050 708 6352 / rachel.duffield@hkstrategies.com
© Press Release 2012
