Skip to main content

MIT to Offer Unofficial Certification Upon Completion of Free Online Courses

MIT today announced that it will be launching a new online learning initiative called MITx that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform. MITx will be based upon MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free online publication of nearly all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials, that’s been available for the last 10 years. MITx hopes to take OpenCourseWare a step further by offering certification to online learners who complete MIT’s coursework. These certifications will be different from MIT degrees awarded to students who attend MIT classes, and will be offered by a new non-profit body that MIT plans to form.

graduation

Aside from organizing the materials already available under OpenCourseWare into courses, MITx’s online learning platform feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication, enable 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.

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.

OpenCourseWare includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses, but apparently not all courses will be available through MITx in the beginning. From the FAQ:

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.

Even though MITx will be for non-profit and open to all, MIT hasn’t ruled out revenue generation from fees for certification.

MIT plans to launch an experimental prototype version of MITx in the spring 2012. Once the open learning infrastructure is in stable form, MIT will also release the open-source software infrastructure and will establish ways for other universities, as well as interested individuals, to join MIT in improving and adding features to the technology.

Photo credit: BigStockPhotos

[via Reddit]

Related: 11 places to get University courses for free - Instant Fundas

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: