MITx positions to offer certification for completing courses online

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-faq-1219.html

by troyastorino • 15 years ago

203 42 15 years ago

web.mit.edu

Mithrandir• 15 years ago

OCW provides course material for nearly all MIT classes. Will MITx offer interactive online courses at that same scale?

No. MITx will begin by offering a portfolio of selected courses, which will grow over time. The selection of courses will depend on the interests of MIT faculty and online learners and will be determined on a course-by-course basis.

I'm guessing that 6.00 will be one of those classes, but Stanford started with AI/ML/DB so I might be wrong. In any event, the prototype should pretty much correspond with Stanford's new batch of online classes.

blhack• 15 years ago

I really get the feeling, first from OCW, and now this, that MIT really just does want to promote knowledge.

This is seriously one of the coolest things I've heard about in a while.

(I wonder how much "mastery" in some of these classes could play into applying to the school, proper?)

MIT is one of my favorite things, period.

TechNewb• 15 years ago

Agreed. MIT is an amazing institution.

I hope to somehow use their open source video course infrastructure at the university that I work for.

MIT is being a leader for all universities in this field. And it's not like they are 'giving away the milk for free'; because the most valuable part of MIT, besides the diploma, are the people sitting next to you in class. Networking is king, and where better than to network at MIT?

tybris• 15 years ago

Stanford.

fvryan• 15 years ago

Another addition to the edu|tech disruption brewing.

Will be exciting to see whether the disruption comes top-down from the institutions or bottom-up from startups like codecademy/khanacademy.

I'm bullish on the startups at this point, but happy to see the institutions giving it a go.

pdonis• 15 years ago

Makes me proud to have MIT as my alma mater. They were ahead of the game with OCW and are staying ahead.

sim• 15 years ago

Stanford experimented and seemed to have found a right balance for effective online-learning, now MIT is fine tuning OCW. Exciting news.

  Keys needed:

  * quality teaching and teachers
  * highly relevant courses
  * learners in batch
  * online office hour weekly
  * feedback mechanism, sense of connection
  * discussion forums - e.g. reddit

Image MIT's 10-year OCW content.

e.g. Engineering and Computer Science: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#electrical-engineering-and-compu...

Awesome.

mattmanser• 15 years ago

Other key needed:

* A way to pay for it.

worren• 15 years ago

To a certain extent, a program like this can pay for itself. A school's influence greatly affects the attention (read: grants and contracts) that labs and faculty enjoy basking in. Conversely, competitors theories and techniques are left clawing their way out of obscurity for lucrative funding. Patents and spinoffs make it big business, and all is fair...

Djehngo• 15 years ago

Having non-assessment quizzes interleaved with the lectures was also fantastic.

learc83• 15 years ago

All of the teaching on the platform will be free of charge. Those who have the ability and motivation to demonstrate mastery of content can receive a credential for a modest fee

At last, the final piece of the puzzle. With a fee structure in place they can afford employees to grade more intensive assignments. It looks like we might finally get a viable competitor to traditional degrees.

You need to hire a programmer, well look, this guy took intro CS, algorithms, compilers, software engineering, Java etc... from MITx.

ernestipark2• 15 years ago

I am currently a CS student at MIT and heard that one of my classmates is actually not a student, but paid just to take one course while working full time at a big tech company. If efforts like MITx become very legitimate, it could be a good way to formalize training for employees and educating them on specific subjects. e.g CS generalist takes a graphics course to help in a new endeavor at his/her company.

wahnfrieden• 15 years ago

Which class is it?

ernestipark2• 15 years ago

6.172 Performance Engineering.

kokey2• 15 years ago

The potential for companies to use this to compliment their staff training is great. It could be a good additional source of income for MIT too, making sure their standards remain high.

eru• 15 years ago

Typo, but actually a nice idea on its one: You can not only use it to train your staff, but also to compliment them. Some people like application for its own sake, and it's a kind of bonus to them.

aangjie• 15 years ago

Hmm.. Think it is a good idea indeed... But does remind me of Stanford's online courses effort. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/august/online-computer-sc...

robryan• 15 years ago

Theses online courses are the way of the future. In times when governments look to try and get better results for investments made in education they just make a lot more sense. Rather than giving 100 students a solid base in say AI you are giving 20000+ a level of learning almost as good a similar amount of academic time spent.

gazrogers• 15 years ago

Interesting that as US institutions are ramping up their online education offerings, the UK government is cutting funding for the Open University (open.ac.uk) which is probably one of the pioneers in the area. A microcosm of the UK's involvement in technology in general I think.

kokey2• 15 years ago

Open University is quite expensive if you're not a local tax payer. They could probably do well by dropping their prices to foreign students to increase volume. From what I have seen, their courses are good and I tend to recommend them to others.

goviheintz• 15 years ago

This news has made my day!

tlammens• 15 years ago

I guess this is a response to the classes some Stanford professors have been teaching:

http://www.ai-class.org/

http://www.ml-class.org/

http://www.db-class.org/ and more to come in January.

I took part in two of them and it was a great experience, so I welcome the competition :-)

amirmc3• 15 years ago

I doubt it was a 'response' per se. MIT OCW has been going for 10 years, whereas Stanford's offerings are more recent (from 2008, I believe).

Perhaps they've been encouraged to say something publicly about existing plans, since profs at Stanford have just opened a slew of new courses from next Jan onwards.

Aside: It would be really interesting to know how the profs at MIT felt about the Stanford courses. AFAIK, Stanford wasn't 'officially' involved in the online courses and it was primarily driven by the profs themselves.

SiVal2• 15 years ago

The cost of an American university education is ridiculously more than its value. It should be crystal clear that most of what you are paying for is the credential, not the education. The first elite university to break up the monolithic credential into an a la carte system of finer-grained credentials, with high standards backed by the reputation of the institution but open to all, regardless of how they learned the material, will change the world of education forever. Each narrow credential will move independently to its true market value (sorry, lit crit professors), people will pay much less by paying only for what they need, yet people who would never go back to get another whole degree will frequently go back for additional narrower credentials over the course of a career. Elite institutions can stay elite by keeping their standards high and may end up making more money than they ever did under today's absurd system.

The article made it clear that MIT was desperate to avoid diluting their own brand equity ("we'll grant certifications using a subsidiary with some other name so there's NO confusion"), but it looks to me as though the industry is heading in the direction I'm talking about one way or another.

moonchrome2• 15 years ago

That's assuming that they don't enforce government regulated requirements for certification. I'm sure that when this gains any significant traction there will suddenly be quality concerns and we will need to "protect" the students and regulate to prevent chaos. There is only one way cartels succeed without breaking up internally - when they can enforce the contract on the offenders.

crx• 15 years ago

I created an account just to upvote you.

This is a very brave step in the right direction. In the long run they can NOT justify to give those remote learners not a "real" MIT degree (and I am sure they know this).

amirmc3• 15 years ago

> In the long run they can NOT justify to give those remote learners not a "real" MIT degree

Why can't they justify it? If the deal is MIT degrees for residential students and 'distance' degrees from an MIT subsidiary, that's just fine.

Edit: It's trivial to argue that a 'real' MIT degree includes the experience of being resident and directly interacting with profs and other students.

moonchrome2• 15 years ago

Sure they can, but if the students that receive MITx accreditation match the standards of certified MIT students then ideally there shouldn't be much difference, it will just take the job market a while to recognize this.

Anechoic2• 15 years ago

In the long run they can NOT justify to give those remote learners not a "real" MIT degree (and I am sure they know this).

The remote learner won't be getting the same experience as the residential learner. If nothing else, the remote leaner will be missing out on the lab work (remember "Mens et Manus") which is just as important as the academic work. As an MIT ME my lab work involved transducer work (accelerometers, strain gauges, microphones, LVDTs, DAQs, filters, etc) and manufacturing processes (CAD/CAM, injection molding, welding, machine shop, vacuum forming, CNC, etc) and actually having hands-on experience greatly assisted in my understanding of the academic work - for example, it's one thing to look at the calculations for plastic shrinkage, it's another thing to actually see how shrinkage can vary in your freshly-injection molded part, especially when the dyes used for color can affect shrinkage rates.

Random_Person3• 15 years ago

This post hits home for me. I joined the education industry a few years ago and learned quickly that to advance, I need a degree. Having never gone to college, and in my thirties, I was discouraged... but, nevertheless, enrolled anyway. Since no one cared what my degree was in, or where it was from, I enrolled in University of Phoenix for an AA in IT. I've got the GI bill to thank for my eventual pay raise (I'm done in 3 weeks) but really, I just spent ~18k on almost no useful knowledge. I learned a few things about academic writing, and forced my way through some upper level algebra which I will likely not use again, but overall, it was truly a waste of time for me. If it wasn't 100% paid for, I would have never completed. I only continued out of stubbornness.

The sort of content that MIT offers is exactly what I would rather have. Task-based learning about subjects that interest me. Generalized learning is a waste of my time and effort. "Professional Certifications" like the A+ or Net+ are highly regarded pieces of paper that prove the holder knows how to read a book and take a test which requires no practical knowledge of the material. If the employment industry can embrace this type of learning, and focus on the candidates abilities instead of resume, open learning could have a very bright future.

colkassad2• 15 years ago

I'm in my late 30s and four classes away from my BS in Computer Science. If you find yourself at a career-related impasse again, consider the community college to 4-year school route. Through Pell Grants and employer assistance, it was extremely affordable (18k for an AA seems excessive).

Also, I have found my education to be very useful in my work, both at home and for my employer. Mainly the math though (discrete, linear algebra, and stats). The programming not so much, as I already knew how to program.

henrik_w• 15 years ago

Probably a response to the Stanford courses. I took the course Introduction to Databases, and it was really great. I wrote about the experience here: http://henrikwarne.com

Vivtek• 15 years ago

That was the key missing component. MIT may well end up changing the world.

johnohara• 15 years ago

Under the FAQ for MITx:

If credentials are awarded, will they be awarded by MIT? As online learning and assessment evolve and improve, online learners who demonstrate mastery of subjects could earn a certificate of completion, but any such credential would not be issued under the name MIT. Rather, MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within the Institute that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.

The true paradigm shift in education will happen when a student takes an "independent certification exam" related to a specific subject and is recognized as proficient regardless of how it was learned.

MITx is taking one more step in this direction.

The CollegeBoard's Advanced Placement Program does this now. High school students are allowed to take an AP exam whether they have taken an AP course or not. Their score on the exam (1 - 5) is a "recommendation" value that colleges agree to use to grant course credit.

It costs AP students $80 to take an exam. What would happen if MIT adopted this approach and charged $99 to "take the final?" Or consider the Machine Learning course at Stanford with 100,000 registrants. Were 1/3 of them to pay $99 to take the final, the benefit to Stanford would be north of $3.2M dollars! One course. They posted 20 new courses in November alone.

Compare that to what universities make by offering a residential class and the model gets clearer.

Miserlou57• 15 years ago

I am going to ask a really selfish question here.

I've begun working on something in my spare time that is extraordinarily similar to this MITx. It's not exactly the same, but the model essentially is; all content is free and always will be. Paying for certifying that it was you is the only optional cost. Considering it's so similar, though ideally my version is more open in a number of ways, what does a lowly student trying to build something like this do in light of this news?

Even though this is good news for education overall, I'm literally sitting here, somewhat devastated, hearing that this precise model and idea I've been obsessing over for months is gaining so much talk as 'the final piece to the puzzle,' etc. Do I continue with it and make it better than theirs?

Any advice would be awesome.

MITx positions to offer certification for completing courses online

Related Stories