"Great Dome," the Barker Engineering Library on the MIT campus (via MIT)
For 10 years, MIT has shared lectures and course materials online of over 2,000 classes free of charge. Using MIT’s OpenCourseWare, over 100 million people have experienced MIT classes through their computer. Now MIT is planning to launch a new site in January 2012 that will be geared towards further computerization of classes. The new system is designed to research and adapt to improved methods of online learning. This project, dubbed MITx, will give the curious mind achievements along their path of learning.
MIT students will see more integration of the MITx platform into their regular classes. Many interactive features, such as and online labs, will be available along with the social interaction of the class. Each person taking the classes have the ability to be individually assessed and possibly awarded certificates of completion through MITx. MIT students will have more access to parts of the site than the public. Through providing the MITx platform as open-source software, teachers or the able-learner can experiment and adapt it to improve the online learning experience.
In regard to furthering the development of online educational resources, MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif explained, “Students worldwide are increasingly supplementing their classroom education with a variety of online tools. 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… extremely important to the future of high-quality, affordable, accessible education. ”
Open-source learning is the reason for many software developments and innovations accomplished by the public. Continuing to explore the possibilities of open-source software, in this scalable platform, will undoubtedly improve the MITx infrastructure as well as the teacher’s capabilities of teaching through a computer medium that is still widely unexplored. OpenCourseWare will keep functioning as before, sharing course material from a wide variety of MIT classes.
For those who have barely stomached an online class will undoubtedly welcome any changed MITx brings to remote learning. I sure will.
I wonder if MITx certificates will look attractive on a resume.
Eavesdropper
