This is the future of education: MITx
Building upon their OpenCourseWare program (which provides free public access to all of the schools’ undergraduate and graduate course materials), MIT has announced the upcoming 2012 launch of MITx, their new open-source, scalable learning program which will be free to anyone around the world with internet access. MITx will provide online teaching of MIT courses as well as certification for mastery of subjects.
From the FAQ about MITx
Beyond the MIT campus, MITx will endeavor to break down barriers to education in two ways. First, it will offer the online teaching of MIT courses to people around the world and the opportunity for able learners to gain certification of mastery of MIT material. Second, it will make freely available to educational institutions everywhere the open-source software infrastructure on which MITx is based.
From the MIT website’s official announcement:
MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.
“Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “An open infrastructure will facilitate research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and adapted.” Agarwal is leading the development of the open platform.
Via: my brother David
