First MITx Course Has 120,000 Students Worldwide

The first offering — a course dubbed 6.002x, or “Circuits and Electronics” — is running from March 5 through June 8, modeled after one of the introductory courses taught in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

Some people taking 6.002x are students at other universities who are using the course to supplement their own educations; others are professionals whose long-running interest in the subject has been fired anew by the course. MIT News recently canvassed students from around the world who are enrolled in 6.002x to see what their experience has been like — so far, at any rate. _MIT

MITx offers MIT credit for online courses, for a fee. The fact that its very first course enrolled 120,000 students around the world suggests that the demand for high quality online engineering training is immense -- and likely to grow.

...As the MITx website notes, students hoping to succeed in 6.002x must have taken an advanced physics course in electricity and magnetism, must know basic calculus and linear algebra, and must have experience working on differential equations. There is an optional portion of 6.002x, during the first half of the course, in which students can do remedial work in differential equations.

All told, the expected time commitment for 6.002x is about 10 hours per week. “Students are putting a lot of effort into the course,” Agarwal says. “Some are putting in 20 hours a week.”

For his part, Muñoz Coronel, who is in his eighth semester of studying electrical engineering, calls 6.002x “rigorous academic study.” And Murray Pearson, a software engineer from Montreal, notes that the coursework “strongly encourages students to actively calculate and think and perform the steps, rather than passively browsing information.” _MIT

The demand for such an education is quite large, but not infinite. There is a limit to the number of people who can assimilate this type and level of knowledge -- even from the best teachers and with the most skilled assistance.

But talented engineering students and tinkerers around the world will indeed benefit from MIT's efforts. Remote engineering schools that could not possibly recruit this level of instructional talent, will be able to offer credit to their better students for successful documented completion of MITx courses. Working engineers long out of school will be able to brush up on rusty knowledge or even break into entirely new areas of engineering.

For now, the possibilities are not endless, but they are broad. For young and lifelong learners around the world, "this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

In order for the possibilities to be endless, we will need to perfect ways to make people smarter.

MITx: Another Disruptive Educational Technology

Besides the revolutionary educational startups Udacity and Coursera, MIT's new educational platform MITx is designed to disrupt and evolve education itself. MIT professor Anant Agarwal is in charge of MITx development -- and Agarwal intends for MITx to "change the world."

MITx is not just a tool for democratizing education; it’s also a tool for education research. “I want to disrupt how education is done,” Agarwal says — not just online but on campus as well.

For instance, he says, if lectures and grading could be automated, professors and TAs would have more time for working directly with students, perhaps on open-ended research projects that mimic — much better than problem sets do — the way in which science and engineering are done in the real world. Similarly, web tools developed through MITx could enable students to learn in a more interactive fashion, at their own pace — and on their own schedule. “There’s no way I would get up for an 8 a.m. class,” Agarwal says. “But I do a lot of work at night.”

Ultimately, Agarwal says, part of the appeal of working on MITx is that “no one knows how it’s going to evolve. But it has the potential to change the world.”

_MITNews

Blogger Brian Wang is also starting to look at this phenomenon

"Free Online Higher Education as a Force for Human Progress"

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

...Now MIT has decided to put the two together—free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­—and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much.

...The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something—you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it.

...Already, the elite Indian Institutes of Technology has announced plans to join MIT's open-education consortium. Building MITx on an open platform could make the university the global nexus of online higher education, which is the way most people are likely to access higher learning in the future. In the hunt for the best and brightest students around the globe, MIT won't need to guess who's in the top 1 percent of 1 percent—it can simply pick them out of the millions of students who will enroll in MITx. _Chronicle Higher Education

Not everyone can single-handedly use freely available materials in a way to master difficult material. Many people will need assistance with sticky concepts and mental blocks at certain points in particular courses. This need for additional coaching and tutoring will open the door to private coaching -- both personal and online, both for-profit and non-profit. An entire new industry is likely to arise to help facilitate the online education revolution that MITx is helping to spawn.

H/T Carpe Diem