Now that the semester is finally at its end, I can finally turn my attentions to my own personal projects that I've been meaning to work on. Among these is my continued pursuit of open courseware developments. This past semester I had the pleasure of tinkering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MITx open learning platform. MITx piloted its revolutionary system through its Circuits and Electronics class. The class itself isn't for the faint of heart. It is taught by Professor Anant Agarwal, who is the director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (
CSAIL), and much of the content was way over my head at this time. But I wasn't taking the class to necessarily learn about EE. Rather I wanted to have the opportunity to delve into the inner workings of MITx.
The system is elegant in a way that only MIT can deliver. The courseware itself is laid out so that things are easy to find. The lectures are made available via embedded Youtube videos and those videos are transcripted such that you can click on a section of the transcript and actually jump to that section in the video on the fly. This is a useful feature because it makes it much easier to backtrack through a lecture to find some nugget of information that the student might have missed or needs to review further. Finally, labs, assignments, and quizzes are embedded directly into the UI which gives that truly structured and linear feel a classroom should have. I'm currently studying for my certification in Health IT Process Workflow and Redesign and one of the most frustrating things about the classes isn't the content, but the tragedy that is
Sakai's poorly designed UI.
There is a great deal more I could say that is positive about MITx, but I have one fundamental criticism. The lab spaces are clunky which is unusual since the sandbox feature is so elegant. I think MITx should implement a trashcan feature to delete components off the lab space, and also make it so that when you click on the lab space, the lab space takes the focus and the mouse then dwells in the lab space. As it stands, the mouse can roam freely around the page which may seem inconsequential, but it gets annoying from time to time. All the same, the ability to sandbox circuit diagrams proves invaluable as students complete coursework.
And it is on this note of improvements to MITx that I turn to the latest and most exciting announcement. I've said that 2012 shall be
The Year of Open Courseware, and the world of academia seems to agree. With the advent of MITx, MIT's number one rival school has joined the initiative. Harvard University isn't particularly well known for it's ocw framework, but it does over a few courses under its open courseware platform. Harvard has sought to take its initiative a step further by teaming up with MITx to form a revoluttionary joint partnership known as edX. edX will offer both Harvard and MITx courses. It will use the MITx platform, and invites any and all institutions to pick up the platform and use it to supplement that institution's courses. Below I've embedded the press conference that was held recently. Check it out. These are exciting times we are living in.
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