[LINK] New free MIT learning platform 'with a virtual community of learners worldwide'

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

M.I.T. Expands Its Free Online Courses (also certificates)

By TAMAR LEWIN www.NYTimes.com Published: December 19, 2011 


While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands 
of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on 
Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of 
charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for 
demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught. 

"There are many people who would love to augment their education by 
having access to M.I.T. content, people who are very capable to earn a 
certificate from M.I.T.," said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, in a 
conference call with reporters Friday. 

M.I.T. led the way to an era of online learning 10 years ago by posting 
course materials from almost all its classes. 

Its free OpenCourseWare now includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been 
used by more than 100 million people. 

But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go 
further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments 
and student-to-student discussions. 

Mr. Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and 
Artificial Intelligence Lab, said M.I.T.x would start this spring — 
perhaps with just one course — but would expand to include many more 
courses, as OpenCourseWare has done. 

“The technologies available are much more advanced than when we started 
OpenCourseWare,” Mr. Agarwal said. “We can provide pedagogical tools to 
self-assess, self-pace or create an online learning community.” 

The M.I.T.x classes, he said, will have online discussions and forums 
where students can ask questions and, often, have them answered by others 
in the class. 

While access to the software will be free, there will most likely be 
an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential. 

“I think for someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay 
something, but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif 
said. “The most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will 
clearly state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained 
mastery.” 

The certificate will not be a regular M.I.T. degree, but rather a 
credential bearing the name of a new not-for-profit body to be created 
within M.I.T; revenues from the credentialing, officials said, would go 
to support the M.I.T.x platform and to further M.I.T’s mission. 

Educators at other universities applauded the M.I.T. move. 

“It seems like a very big deal because the traditional higher education 
reaction to online programs was, yeah, but it’s not a credential,” said 
Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at 
the Georgia Institute of Technology. “So I think M.I.T. offering a 
credential will make quite a splash. If I were still in industry and 
someone came in with an M.I.T.x credential, I’d take it.” 

M.I.T. said its new learning platform should eventually host a virtual 
community of learners around the world — and enhance the education of 
M.I.T.’s on-campus students, with online tools that enrich their 
classroom and laboratory experiences. 

The development of the new platform will be accompanied by an M.I.T.-wide 
research initiative on online teaching and learning, including grading by 
computer. 

And because the M.I.T.x platform will be available free to people around 
the world, M.I.T. officials said they expected that other universities 
would also use it to offer their own free online courses. Mr. Reif said 
that M.I.T. was investing millions of dollars in the project, and that it 
expected to raise money from foundations and others. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/education/mit-expands-free-online-
courses-offering-certificates.html?src=me&ref=general
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Also..

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html>

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative 
internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses 
through an online interactive learning platform that will:

•organize and present course material to enable students to learn at 
their own pace

•feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student 
communication

•allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow 
students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate 
of completion awarded by MITx

•operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to 
make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational 
institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational 
experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that 
supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT 
also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of 
millions of learners around the world.

MIT will couple online learning with research on learning

MIT’s online learning initiative is led by MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif, 
and its development will be coupled with an MIT-wide research initiative 
on online teaching and learning under his leadership.

“Students worldwide are increasingly supplementing their classroom 
education with a variety of online tools,” Reif said. “Many members of 
the MIT faculty have been experimenting with integrating online tools 
into the campus education. We will facilitate those efforts, many of 
which will lead to novel learning technologies that offer the best 
possible online educational experience to non-residential learners. Both 
parts of this new initiative are extremely important to the future of 
high-quality, affordable, accessible education.”

Offering interactive MIT courses online to learners around the world 
builds upon MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free online publication of nearly all 
of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials. Now in its 10th 
year, OpenCourseWare includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses and has been used 
by more than 100 million people.

MIT President Susan Hockfield said, “MIT has long believed that anyone in 
the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should 
have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience 
that Internet technology enables. OpenCourseWare’s great success signals 
high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond 
making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to 
online teaching.”

OCW will continue to share course materials from across the MIT 
curriculum, free of charge.

MITx online learning tools to be freely available

MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so 
that others — whether other universities or different educational 
institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same 
software for their online education offerings.

“Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities 
of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” 
said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and 
computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial 
Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “An open infrastructure will facilitate 
research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be 
easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this 
way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and 
adapted.” 

Agarwal is leading the development of the open platform.

President Hockfield called this “a transformative initiative for MIT and 
for online learning worldwide. On our residential campus, the heart of 
MIT, students and faculty are already integrating on-campus and online 
learning, but the MITx initiative will greatly accelerate that effort. 

It will also bring new energy to our longstanding effort to educate 
millions of able learners across the United States and around the world. 

And in offering an open-source technological platform to other 
educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students 
the world over will together create learning opportunities that break 
barriers to education everywhere.”

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Cheers,
Stephen