MIT starts enrolment today for the first course in its enhanced online platform, where students around the world can take classes and get a certificate upon completion.
The first class, 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics will be free, though subsequent courses will come with a small fee. The three- month course will begin March 5.
For the past 10 years, MIT has provided documents and lecture notes online for more than 2,000 courses through its OpenCourseWare program to more than 100 million people. Through its new MITx initiative, non-MIT students will, for the first time, have their performance assessed and receive certificates if they show mastery in the subject, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school said in a statement.
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.”
Students will have video lectures, midterm and final exams, weekly deadlines to complete homework and labs and access to discussion forums. They can expect to spend about 10 hours a week on the course, MIT said.
While enrollment in the first course is unlimited, the college isn’t making predictions on how many students may sign on. The introductory course calls for an advanced mathematics and physics background.
“Our estimate could be off by orders of magnitude on the lower or higher end,” Anant Agarwal, the lead instructor of the class, said on a conference call. More courses will begin later this year.
The circuits and electronics class will focus on the inner- workings of smart phones and other “cool gadgets,” Agarwal said.
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.”
MIT News Office
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