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M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program

by Grace

M.I.T. has enhanced its long-standing free online course program.

But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions.

CREDENTIAL for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught!

While access to the software will be free, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential.

“I think for someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay something, but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will clearly state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”

The certificate will not be a regular M.I.T. degree, but rather a credential bearing the name of a new not-for-profit body to be created within M.I.T; revenues from the credentialing, officials said, would go to support the M.I.T.x platform and to further M.I.T’s mission.

Will employers buy it?

“It seems like a very big deal because the traditional higher education reaction to online programs was, yeah, but it’s not a credential,” said Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “So I think M.I.T. offering a credential will make quite a splash. If I were still in industry and someone came in with an M.I.T.x credential, I’d take it.”

Related:  Is higher education on track to lose its credentialing monopoly?

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Posted on December 20, 2011 at 5:02 am in online education, technology, trends   |  RSS feed |   Respond   |   Trackback URL

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16 Responses to “M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program”

    
  1. Bonnie
    December 20, 2011 at 5:48 am

    I hope they improve the course materials they put online, because what they have out there now is horrible.

  2. Grace
    December 20, 2011 at 6:17 am

    Didn’t know that. I’ve heard so much positive about it, but never heard it roundly criticized. I’ve never looked at a course myself.

  3. Bonnie
    December 20, 2011 at 8:28 am

    MIT Open Courseware is just a dumping ground for syllabi, some powerpoint notes, and the occassional assignment. There is no teaching going on. I use it mainly to see syllabi, as a point of reference when developing a course. See Mark Guzdial’s blog on MIT Open Courseware
    http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/mit-opencourseware-is-still-wikipedia/

    More interesting still is his post on the big Stanford AI course. This course was actually taught, and credit given. However, it is NOT EQUIVALENT to the real course because there are no projects. To me, that is no course at all. We don’t read about computer science, we *do* computer science. A student who has learned AI with no projects has not learned AI at all. Now, the interesting thing in his post is the description of a course that ran at another school (UMass, I think?) which was in collaboration with the Stanford class, but which added a real instructor and real assignments.
    http://computinged.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/teaching-the-on-line-stanford-class-at-umass-lowell-guest-post-from-fred-martin/

  4. kcab
    December 20, 2011 at 10:03 am

    The quality of the OCW courses varies by course (of course…), and I think it may vary by when the course was added to OCW. Anyway, turns out that OCW is most often used as a supplement to a course someone is taking elsewhere. That’s the way I used it last year when taking a class at a different university, and the way current MIT students use it as well.

    IMO, one interesting aspect to this MITx thing is that MIT is going to make the course software infrastructure open-source.

  5. gasstationwithoutpumps
    December 20, 2011 at 12:56 pm

    The Stanford online AI course was a stripped-down course (missing the projects where the students at Stanford actually did the learning), but the machine learning course was supposedly the full course.

    The state universities have been doing non-degree credentials for decades. I know that UCSC Extension has had a bioinformatics credential (which is very watered down from a bioinformatics degree and does not include any courses taught by UCSC bioinformatics faculty) for at least 10 years. These credentials are seen as valuable by industry, like continuing education credits for any professional. They don’t usually replace degrees, but serve as supplements to them, particularly for older engineers to show that they are keeping up with current technology.

  6. Grace
    December 22, 2011 at 5:51 am

    Bonnie, I checked out Gudzial’s posts and have two follow-up comments.

    1. Maybe MITx, with its online labs and student forums, is a step towards making Open Courseware closer to a real class, although I don’t see it actually replicating MIT’s traditional courses just yet.

    2. The whole “flipping the classroom” discussions keep bringing up how teachers no longer have to lecture and can spend time on more interesting stuff. In theory this may be attractive, but many of us fear that in practice it will simply mean teachers completely putting off the the responsibility to teach and instead focusing on wasteful class activities. Kitchen Table Math has a post on that and here’s one comment.

    I’ve complained before, and will again: does Khan REALLY THINK that the biggest problem in today’s schools is TOO MUCH LECTURE?

    Because if KA is just going to be used by schools so that conventional schools can do even more charades, puppetry, and baking than they do already, I’m against it.

    http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2011/12/flipping-classroom-hot-hot-hot.html

    And I also posted this. http://costofcollege.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/more-classrooms-trying-khan-academy-finding-it-better-than-group-projects/

  7. Grace
    December 22, 2011 at 6:00 am

    gasstation – In addition to being seen as valuable by employers, apparently this new MIT development has piqued the interest of some overachieving high school students (or should I say overachieving parents!) who can now promote an MIT credential in their college applications. Have you ever run across something similar with the state school credentials?

  8. Bonnie
    December 22, 2011 at 8:02 am

    Yeah, I see the kitchen table people are all flipping over flipping now. I am not sure what Khan has to do with flipping, but I have to laugh – first they all loved Khan and now they seem to hate him now that the educational community has embraced him. I don’t think any of these people have a good idea of what the “flipped classroom” is about, and I don’t have the time to get into it. It is actually closer to what a lot of those people on kitchen table advocate than they might imagine.

  9. Bonnie
    December 22, 2011 at 8:10 am

    BTW, I am going to be doing what is essentially an inverted class this coming semester. It is a hybrid class, so we meet once a week. Students will be responsible for readings, and will take online quizzes based on those readings. In class, we will be working on mobile phone app development. I will have to do some lecturing and demo, but most of the time will be spent with them working on various projects. I think this method is appropriate for this particular course because the reading material (healthcare data) is dull, dry as dust, and strictly all about factoid transfer. When I taught it face to face, it was horrible. I was basically just plowing through the factoids in the book. It is far more efficient for the students to read the material directly. I am going to be doing assessments, so I can report on whether this works well at the end of the semester.

  10. gasstationwithoutpumps
    December 22, 2011 at 2:33 pm

    I’ve not seen high schoolers touting UC extension courses or certificates—probably because most people realize that continuing education units are of highly variable content and quality. I have seen a lot taking community college classes, for a variety of reasons, one of which is to show that they are capable of doing “college-level” work (especially home-schoolers and those in schools with inadequate AP offerings).

    Of course, some of the “college-level” courses at the community college are really high-school level. I recently met one home-schooler doing Algebra 2 there—I didn’t have the heart to tell her or her parents that it was quite likely a remedial course for students who had not taken or failed algebra 2 in high school, and so likely to be at a lower level than a high-school course with the same number.

  11. Grace
    December 22, 2011 at 4:40 pm

    I don’t remember reading that the Kitchen Table Math group all loved Khan. In fact, there seemed to have been a lot of skepticism expressed, along with some optimism that the data collecting and videos could create efficiencies. Now that we realize it’s being used instead of a teacher’s direct instruction, it’s raising red flags.

    Flipped classrooms?

    It is actually closer to what a lot of those people on kitchen table advocate than they might imagine.

    Oh, that would be nice, but I don’t think so. At least, not in the ways I’ve seen, where videos replace teacher instruction and class time is taken up with hands-on projects that many of us consider wasted time. But, I haven’t looked at it too closely. I mean, I’m unsure what the commonly accepted definition of “flipped” actually is, if there is one.

  12. Bonnie
    December 23, 2011 at 6:36 am

    There was a brief time when everyone seemed to love Khan because they thought teachers could be replaced. I don’t think people had looked too closely at what Khan was actually about at that time.

    The idea of flipped (or inverted) classrooms has been around for a long time in higher ed, at least since the 90′s. It is most useful, I think, in science and technology. The traditional way that these subjects were taught in academia was that a professor would stand for 90 hours basically regurgitating the textbook to the students, who dutifully transcribe the material and then go home and read it. The material, though, is usually just an outline of the textbook. The students would also be given homework – problems or programs or whatever. They would dutifully go off and try to work these (or not so dutifully as the case may have been), usually fail at the task, and then trudge off to recitation sections, where a TA who couldn’t speak English would walk through the steps of the problems. But, watching someone walk through the steps is not the same as getting it yourself. So eventually, the students get to the exam and half of them fail.

    Now we all like to think we don’t teach that way, but anyone who has been through a STEM major can look back and realize that this was how most classes were run.

    So, in the 90′s, we all seized upon the idea of having the students actually do work in the classroom. It seemed like a good idea – that way, we could work directly with the struggling students and see where they were having trouble. I remember adding this sort of lab time in my courses. It was great – except there was a problem. The students were showing up completely unprepared. They were so used to having the professor outline the textbook for them that many of them had given up on even reading the book themselves. But we had a problem – there was simply not enough time in the standard college semester to both completely outline the textbook orally for students AND have them do in class assignments. So what to do? We could double the amount of class time – but the administration rarely would go for that. We could cut the material covered in half – but that would play havoc with the course sequence and possibly increase the amount of courses that students would need to take. Or, gasp, we could ask the students to read the textbook on their own, and put teeth in it. And that was where the idea was born. It wasn’t called a flipped classroom back then – I think that is a recent term – but I did start hearing the term “inverted course”. You need a fancy term to help convince the students that they will have to work differently in a course.

    I was starting to do this in the late 90′s, but I left for industry. When I came back 12 years later, it seemed that far more people were doing this in STEM, the term “flipped” had arrived, and people were using videos in addition to asking the students to read the book. I guess the idea of the videos is that since students seem to so badly want that outlined version of the text, give it to them in video form, outside of class, so that we can still work on problems in class. It is also useful to do how-to videos in many fields – how to use the Eclipse IDE, how to install Java on your laptop, how to run the debugger. I could imagine in chemistry or physics, how to videos on lab apparatus might be appropriate. Also, practices such as requiring students to pass a quiz before they could work on a lab had become more common. I haven’t been that draconian, but I do have a weekly online quiz on the assigned readings, to make sure they are keeping up.

    There are other models out there as well. Some people are having success with a mix of brief lectures and in class short assignments that reinforce the concept just taught in the mini lecture. I’ve tried that scheme as well, and it can be good, but it take a LOT of class time just getting the students organized and working, and I am not convinced it is as effective for computer science, where the big obstacles are concepts not so easily divided into brief mini lectures and short exercises. I prefer having an entire hour long class period where the students work on a larger problem.

    So, I would say that I use a modified or partial inverted classroom – some lecture and mini assignments one day, and a larger class problem another day.

    Ugh, I have to run, can’t finish this!

  13. Bonnie
    December 23, 2011 at 7:55 am

    See June 29 and June 30 2010 on KitchenTableMath.

  14. Grace
    December 23, 2011 at 3:08 pm

    Bonnie, the way you and others in college science courses are flipping classes makes sense.

    I still disagree that a few complimentary posts and comments about KA over at KTM means that everyone loved it. Catherine was expressing some doubts even in the comments of that first post.

    The way I view it is that the idea of using KA videos (which are being described as direct instruction) to supplement class instruction was considered as a promising, positive innovation. They do work, after all, for many. But when schools started to (mis)use the videos as a way to let teachers escape direct instruction and use class time for “fun” but useless project work, the KTM crowd started to view this with great skepticism.

    Many people are labeling schools that use Khan videos as flippers, so I guess this term means different things to different people. But the originators of the term wrote this:

    The traditional definition of a flipped class is:

    Where videos take the place of direct instruction
    This then allows students to get individual time in class to work with their teacher on key learning activities.
    It is called the flipped class because what used to be classwork (the “lecture” is done at home via teacher-created videos and what used to be homework (assigned problems) is now done in class.

    But from our perspective, as successful flipped teachers, we believe it is so much more. We also realize there is a lot of mis-information about the Flipped Classroom and quite a bit of controversy about whether or not this is a viable instructional methodology. Thus the purpose of this article is to list out what we believe it is and what we believe it is not.

    And then they go on to clear up misconceptions.

    And this:

    When you read anything about The Flipped Classroom mentally substitute “a class that uses screencasts as an instructional tool” for The Flipped Classroom and all will be well.

    http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-flipped-class-conversation-689.php

    http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-flipped-class-shedding-light-on-the-confusion-critique-and-hype-801.php

  15. Grace
    December 25, 2011 at 10:19 am

    Yup, dumb projects are dumb projects. For example, I completely oppose creating a portfolio of artwork featuring medieval figures for a college prep high school global history course. Yes, some students will learn from such a project, but drawing is not the core college/life skill that writing is. And for many students, these drawing projects are a complete waste of time.

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