Harvard and MIT Create EDX to Offer Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Worldwide

in Harvard, MIT, Online Courses | May 2nd, 2012

It all start­ed ear­ly last fall. Sebas­t­ian Thrun went a lit­tle rogue (oh the audac­i­ty!) and start­ed offer­ing free online cours­es under Stan­ford’s ban­ner to mass audi­ences, with each course promis­ing a “state­ment of accom­plish­ment” at the end. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of stu­dents signed up, and uni­ver­si­ties every­where took notice.

Since then we have wit­nessed uni­ver­si­ties and star­tups scram­bling fair­ly mad­ly to cre­ate their own MOOCs (Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es), hop­ing to gain a foothold in a new area that could even­tu­al­ly dis­rupt edu­ca­tion in a major way. In Decem­ber, MIT announced the cre­ation of MITx, promis­ing free cours­es and a “cer­tifi­cate of com­ple­tion” to stu­dents world­wide. Sebas­t­ian Thrun left Stan­ford to cre­ate Udac­i­ty, and anoth­er Stan­ford spin­off, Cours­era, gained instant trac­tion when it announced in April that it had raised $16 mil­lion in ven­ture cap­i­tal and signed part­ner­ships with Prince­ton, Penn and U Michi­gan.

Now comes the lat­est news. MIT has teamed up with its Cam­bridge neigh­bor, Har­vard, to cre­ate a new non prof­it ven­ture, EDX. To date, Har­vard has bare­ly dab­bled in open edu­ca­tion. But it’s now throw­ing $30 mil­lion behind EDX (M.I.T. will do the same), and togeth­er they will offer free dig­i­tal cours­es world­wide, with stu­dents receiv­ing the oblig­a­tory cer­tifi­cate of mas­tery at the end. The EDX plat­form will be open source, mean­ing it will be open to oth­er uni­ver­si­ties. Whether EDX will replace MITx, or sit uncom­fort­ably beside it, we’re not entire­ly sure (though it looks like it’s the for­mer).

Class­es will begin next fall. And when they do, we’ll let you know … and, of course, we’ll add them to our mas­sive col­lec­tion of 450 Free Online Cours­es.

For more infor­ma­tion, you can watch the EDX press con­fer­ence here and read an FAQ here.

via The Har­vard Crim­son and MIT News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties: A Com­plete List

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Enroll in MIT’s First Free Certificate Course Today

in Education, MIT | February 14th, 2012

Note: You can now find through the fol­low­ing link a com­plete list of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs), many offer­ing cer­tifi­cates.

In the wan­ing days of 2011, MIT announced MITx, a new e‑learning ini­tia­tive that will offer cer­tifi­cates (find a list of Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es here) to stu­dents demon­strat­ing mas­tery of free MIT cours­es. The uni­ver­si­ty set a spring launch date for MITx, and they have now opened for enroll­ment the very first course. Taught by Anant Agar­w­al, Cir­cuits and Elec­tron­ics is an online adap­tion of MIT’s first under­grad­u­ate ana­log design course. Accord­ing the MITx web site, this pro­to­type course will run — free of charge — for stu­dents world­wide from March 5, 2012 through June 8, 2012. And stu­dents will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to demon­strate their mas­tery of the mate­r­i­al and earn a cer­tifi­cate from MITx. You can get more infor­ma­tion on the course, or sim­ply enroll in Cir­cuits and Elec­tron­ics, today. Just click here.

Many oth­er engi­neer­ing and com­put­er sci­ence cours­es can be found in our col­lec­tion of 400 Free Cours­es Online.

UPDATE:  MIT pro­fes­sor David Pritchard and his edu­ca­tion research group, RELATE are offer­ing an online MIT-lev­el course in Intro­duc­to­ry New­ton­ian Mechan­ics. The course is free and does not require a text­book.  Enroll­ment has just opened (it starts with an option­al pre­req­ui­sites test), and the course runs from March 1 — May 14, 2012.  Indi­vid­u­als who com­plete the course will receive a let­ter of com­ple­tion. This MIT course is unre­lat­ed to the MITx project men­tioned right above.

via Wired Cam­pus

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Cambridge Nights: Late Night TV-Style Show Takes Deep Look at Scientific Thinking

in MIT, Science, Video - Science | January 24th, 2012

Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts is one of the world’s great intel­lec­tu­al cross­roads. With Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty at one end of town and the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy at the oth­er, many of the most influ­en­tial thinkers of our time either work there or vis­it. That gave César Hidal­go an idea.

Hidal­go is a pro­fes­sor at M.I.T., where he stud­ies the rela­tion­ship between physics, net­work sci­ence and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment. Build­ing on his own inter­dis­ci­pli­nary curios­i­ty, Hidal­go thought it would be inter­est­ing to share a lit­tle of Cam­bridge’s intel­lec­tu­al wealth with the out­side world, so in Octo­ber he and the M.I.T. Media Lab launched a series of infor­mal Web inter­views called Cam­bridge Nights: Con­ver­sa­tions About a Life in Sci­ence.

Cam­bridge Nights is a lit­tle like The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, if Leno talked about things like frac­tal geom­e­try in the meta­bol­ic the­o­ry of ecol­o­gy. That’s the sub­ject of the dis­cus­sion above fea­tur­ing the renowned physi­cist Geof­frey West, pro­fes­sor and past pres­i­dent of the San­ta Fe Insti­tute, who gives a fas­ci­nat­ing account of the uni­ver­sal scal­ing laws that per­vade all life, from sin­gle-celled organ­isms and com­plex species to whole ecosys­tems.

What sets Cam­bridge Nights apart from oth­er Web forums, like Big­Think, is that guests are under no pres­sure to com­press or “pop­u­lar­ize” their ideas. “We invite them because we want to hear what they have to say, and we want to give them the time to say it com­fort­ably,” writes Hidal­go. “There are many high-speed for­mats out there. Cam­bridge Nights is an alter­na­tive where thoughts can be devel­oped and reflect­ed upon with­out the need to rush.”

In the first sea­son, Hidal­go talks with six schol­ars from fields span­ning the nat­ur­al and social sci­ences, includ­ing physi­cist and net­work sci­en­tist Albert-Lás­zló Barabási, biol­o­gist Marc Vidal and inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ment expert Lant Pritch­ett. A num­ber of guests are already lined up for Sea­son Two, includ­ing exper­i­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist Steven Pinker.

To view all six videos from Sea­son One, and to learn more about the project, vis­it the Cam­bridge Nights web­site.

Cours­es from MIT can be found in our col­lec­tion of 400 Free Cours­es Online.

via The New York Times

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MIT to Offer Certificates to Students Taking Free Courses on the Web

in MIT, Online Courses, Stanford | December 20th, 2011

It hap­pens at least a few times a day. Stu­dents look through our list of 400 Free Online Cours­es, and ask us whether they can get a cer­tifi­cate for tak­ing a class. And, unfor­tu­nate­ly, our answer has been no — no, you can’t. But that may be about to change.

Ear­li­er this fall, Stan­ford launched a high­ly-pub­li­cized series of free cours­es that offer stu­dents some­thing nov­el: the abil­i­ty to take tests and receive a “state­ment of accom­plish­ment” from the instruc­tor — though not the school itself — if they pass the class. (Stan­ford will launch 14 more cours­es start­ing in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary. Click link for details.)

Now, MIT wants to up the ante on the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of free cours­es. Start­ing next spring, the uni­ver­si­ty, already famous for its Open­Course­Ware project, will launch MITx, an e‑learning ini­tia­tive that will offer cer­tifi­cates to stu­dents demon­strat­ing mas­tery of free MIT cours­es. Accord­ing to a new set of FAQs, the cer­tifi­cates won’t bear MIT’s name. Rather, “MIT plans to cre­ate a not-for-prof­it body with­in [MITx] that will offer cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for online learn­ers of MIT course­work. That body will car­ry a dis­tinct name to avoid con­fu­sion.” The cours­es will be free; the cer­tifi­cates will cost just a “mod­est” sum. It’s all a big step in the right direc­tion.

UPDATE: You can find a list of free cours­es offer­ing cer­tifi­cates from great uni­ver­si­ties here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MIT Intro­duces Com­plete Cours­es to Open­Course­Ware Project

Down­load The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Cre­den­tial (Free eBook)

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M.I.T. Camera Captures Speed of Light: A Trillion-Frames-Per-Second

in MIT, Physics, Technology | December 15th, 2011

Think of it as the ulti­mate slow-motion movie cam­era. Researchers at M.I.T. have devel­oped an imag­ing sys­tem so fast it can trace the motion of puls­es of light as they trav­el through liq­uids and solids. To put it into per­spec­tive, writes John Markoff in The New York Times, “If a bul­let were tracked in the same fash­ion mov­ing through the same flu­id, the result­ing movie would last three years.”

The research was direct­ed by Ramesh Raskar of the Cam­era Cul­ture group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. In an abstract, the research team writes:

We have built an imag­ing solu­tion that allows us to visu­al­ize the prop­a­ga­tion of light. The effec­tive expo­sure time of each frame is two tril­lionths of a sec­ond and the resul­tant visu­al­iza­tion depicts the move­ment of light at rough­ly half a tril­lion frames per sec­ond. Direct record­ing of reflect­ed or scat­tered light at such a frame rate with suf­fi­cient bright­ness is near­ly impos­si­ble. We use an indi­rect ‘stro­bo­scop­ic’ method that records mil­lions of repeat­ed mea­sure­ments by care­ful scan­ning in time and view­points. Then we rearrange the data to cre­ate a ‘movie’ of a nanosec­ond long event.

You can learn more by watch­ing the video above by Melanie Gonick of the M.I.T. News Office, or by vis­it­ing the project web­site.

via Kot­tke

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The MIT “Checker Shadow Illusion” Brought to Life

in MIT, Science, Video - Science | August 19th, 2011

The video you’re watch­ing is a real-life demon­stra­tion of an opti­cal illu­sion devel­oped in 1995 by Edward Adel­son, a pro­fes­sor in MIT’s Depart­ment of Brain and Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences. The Check­er Shad­ow Illu­sion, as Adel­son calls it, shows that our “visu­al sys­tem is not very good at being a phys­i­cal light meter.” But more impor­tant­ly, the opti­cal illu­sion offers impor­tant insight into how our visu­al sys­tem tries to break down “image infor­ma­tion into mean­ing­ful com­po­nents, and there­by per­ceive the nature of the objects in view.” Adel­son’s full expla­na­tion of the illu­sion and what it reveals appears below the jump (or here). H/T 3 Quarks Dai­ly

(more…)

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The Birth of a Word: Deb Roy at TED

in MIT, Science, TED Talks | March 16th, 2011

Deb Roy is the direc­tor of the Cog­ni­tive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab. For the first few years of his son’s life, Roy installed cam­eras in every room of the fam­i­ly home. Now he jokes that he has the “largest home video col­lec­tion ever made” – rough­ly 90,000 hours of images and footage of the grow­ing baby’s world. The pur­pose was to con­sid­er and ana­lyze all the fac­tors impact­ing his son’s first words, includ­ing the 7 mil­lion words that the boy heard from his father, moth­er, nan­ny, and oth­er vis­i­tors to the house.

Roy’s talk made one of the biggest splash­es at TED this year, not only for what he learned about ear­ly lan­guage acqui­si­tion, but also for his breath­tak­ing data visu­al­iza­tion maps. Even by TED stan­dards, it’s an idea-packed 20 min­utes: Impres­sive. And when you con­sid­er that Roy is now on sab­bat­i­cal and employed by the AI com­pa­ny Bluefin Labs, work­ing on, among oth­er things, social media and mar­ket research, it all becomes more than a lit­tle bit fright­en­ing.

On a brighter note, Roy’s son turned out to be an ear­ly talk­er.

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Vari­ety, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

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MIT OpenCourseWare Launches iPhone App

in iPhone, MIT, Online Courses | February 8th, 2011

Last week, MIT Open­Course­Ware offi­cial­ly released its Lec­ture­Hall iPhone app. Put sim­ply, the free app gives you mobile access to MIT video lec­tures. It even lets you down­load lec­tures straight to your phone (handy for times when you may not have con­nec­tiv­i­ty). Anoth­er plus: the Lec­ture­Hall iPhone app adds a social dimen­sion to the learn­ing expe­ri­ence. Face­book inte­gra­tion, dis­cus­sion forums, rat­ings & reviews of indi­vid­ual videos – they’re all lay­ered in. And, just in case you’re won­der­ing, an Android ver­sion of the Lec­ture­Hall app is in the works.

Now a quick plug: Feel free to down­load our Free iPhone app, which includes free audio books, online cours­es, for­eign lan­guage lessons, and intel­li­gent pod­casts. Or, bet­ter yet, sim­ply vis­it Open Cul­ture with your smart phone and get lots of smart media wher­ev­er you go…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

350 Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.