AI-enabled translations initiative empowers Ukrainian learners with new skills | MIT News

With war continuing to disrupt education for millions of Ukrainian high school and college students, many are turning to online resources, including MIT OpenCourseWare, a part of MIT Open Learning offering educational materials from more than 2,500 MIT undergraduate and graduate courses.

For Ukrainian high school senior Sofiia Lipkevych and other students, MIT OpenCourseWare has provided valuable opportunities to take courses in key subject areas. However, while multiple Ukrainian students study English, many do not yet have sufficient command of the language to be able to fully understand and use the often very technical and complex OpenCourseWare content and materials.

“At my school, I saw firsthand how language barriers prevented many Ukrainian students from accessing world-class education,” says Lipkevych.

She was able to address this challenge as a participant in the Ukrainian Leadership and Technology Academy (ULTA), established by Ukrainian MIT students Dima Yanovsky and Andrii Zahorodnii. During summer 2024 at ULTA, Lipkevych worked on a browser extension that translated YouTube videos in real-time. Since MIT OpenCourseWare was a main source of learning materials for students participating in ULTA, she was inspired to translate OpenCourseWare lectures directly and to have this translation widely available on the OpenCourseWare website and YouTube channel. She reached out to Professor Elizabeth Wood, founding director of the MIT Ukraine Program, who connected her with MIT OpenCourseWare Director Curt Newton.

Although there had been some translations of MIT OpenCourseWare’s educational resources available beginning in 2004, these initial translations were conducted manually by several global partners, without the efficiencies of the latest artificial intelligence tools, and over time the programs couldn’t be sustained, and shut down.

“We were thrilled to have this contact with ULTA,” says Newton. “We’ve been missing having a vibrant translation community, and we are excited to have a ‘phase 2’ of translations emerge.”

The ULTA team selected courses to translate based on demand among Ukrainian students, focusing on foundational subjects that are prerequisites for advanced learning — particularly those for which high-quality, Ukrainian-language materials are scarce. Starting with caption translations on videos of lectures, the team has translated the following courses so far: 18.06 (Linear Algebra), 2.003SC (Engineering Dynamics), 5.60 (Thermodynamics & Kinetics), 6.006 (Introduction to Algorithms), and 6.0001 (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python). They also worked directly with Andy Eskenazi, a PhD student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, to translate 16.002 (How to CAD Almost Anything – Siemens NX Edition).

The ULTA team developed multiple tools to help break language barriers. For MIT OpenCourseWare’s PDF content available through the ULTA program, they created a specialized tool that uses optical character recognition to recognize LaTeX in documents — such as problem sets and other materials — and then used a few large language models to translate them, all while maintaining technical accuracy. The team built a glossary of technical terms used in the courses and their corresponding Ukrainian translations, to help make sure that the wording was correct and consistent. Each translation also undergoes human review to further ensure accuracy and high quality.

For video content, the team initially created a browser extension that can translate YouTube video captions in real-time. They ultimately collaborated with ElevenLabs, implementing their advanced AI dubbing editor that preserves the original speaker’s tone, pace, and emotional delivery. The lectures are translated in the ElevenLabs dubbing editor, and then the audio is uploaded to the MIT OpenCourseWare YouTube channel.

The team is currently finalizing the translation of the audio for class 9.13 (The Human Brain), taught by MIT Professor Nancy Kanwisher, which Lipkevych says they selected for its interdisciplinary nature and appeal to a wide variety of learners.

This Ukrainian translation project highlights the transformative potential of the latest translation technologies, building upon a 2023 MIT OpenCourseWare experiment using the Google Aloud AI dubbing prototype on a few courses, including MIT Professor Patrick Winston’s How to Speak. The advanced capabilities of the dubbing editor used in this project are opening up possibilities for a much greater variety of language offerings throughout MIT OpenCourseWare materials.

“I expect that in a few years we’ll look back and see that this was the moment when things shifted for OpenCourseWare to be truly usable for the whole world,” says Newton.

Community-led language translations of MIT OpenCourseWare materials serve as a high-impact example of the power of OpenCourseWare’s Creative Commons licensing, which grants everyone the right to revise materials to suit their particular needs and redistribute those revisions to the world.

While there isn’t currently a way for users of the MIT OpenCourseWare platform to quickly identify which videos are available in which languages, MIT OpenCourseWare is working toward building this capability into its website, as well as expanding its number of offerings in different languages.

“This project represents more than just translation,” says Lipkevych. “We’re enabling thousands of Ukrainians to build skills that will be essential for the country’s eventual reconstruction. We’re also hoping this model of collaboration can be extended to other languages and institutions, creating a template for making high-quality education accessible worldwide.”

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