All Posts Tagged With: "Open Courses"
MIT announces free, open source courses
Certificates for a “modest fee”
Photo by liquene on Flickr
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) plans a spring launch of its ambitious new program, MITx, which includes a freely accessible suite of online courses that’s expected to attract millions of learners from around the world. MITx will allow students to learn at their own pace, participate in online labs and interact with fellow students online.
But most exciting is that MITx courses will come with a certificate of completion for students who have proven they’ve mastered the subject materials and paid “a modest fee.”
Open learning courses that come with credentials have proven enormously popular. When Stanford University professors offered an online course in Artificial Intelligence this fall with a “statement of accomplishment” and the possibility of interaction with professors through crowd-sourcing, 58,000 signed up by August. A similar Stanford course in machine learning drew nearly 100,000.
Free course materials have reached 100 million
MIT wants to reach one billion in next 10 years
MIT announced that its free OpenCourseWare has reached 100 million people in the first 10 years of the project. The group says its new goal is to reach one billion people over the next decade. “We aspire by 2021 to make open educational resources like MIT OpenCourseWare the tools to bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world,” they wrote in a press release. The plan includes making OCW available through mobile phones, making it more culturally-appropriate for different groups and “creating an [online] ecosystem” that will allow users to learn more from each other. Although MIT’s initiative is the largest of its kind, other top-ranked schools like UC Berkeley and Yale University also offer OCW. Capilano University in Vancouver gives away materials for 10 subjects from art history to computer science.
