MITx-Final Thoughts

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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MITx- At Last it Begins

A few turns back I blogged about the concept of Open Courseware and how it plans to usher in an era of social learning. As a reminder,  I'm pleased to announce that in just three short days MITx will launch its first class; Circuits and Electronics. This class serves as the prototype for the MITx courseware framework that is to be rolled out in the Fall and as such, will allow students to take the final exam outside of an approved testing center. Moreover, students who pass the class will receive a certificate verifying their mastery of the topics learned in the class. Best of all, in keeping with MIT's Open Courseware philosophy,  MITx offers these "extended" classes at no charge to the students who enroll.

Despite my already busy schedule, I have taken it upon myself to enroll in this pilot course and encourage anybody who reads this and has a sincere interest in Electrical Engineering and/or Computer Science to do the same. Remember, the pursuit of knowledge is not about going to class just so you can walk away with an A. No, the pursuit of knowledge is far more fundamental than such a perverse concept. Instead, embrace the Open Courseware framework, and pursue what it has to offer for the sake of expanding your own personal knowledge. With that said, click the image below to be directed to the MITx main page!