7th March 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
MIT has announced that it will deliver a course online for the first time, and that this course will be freely available to any student anywhere in the world. Part of what they are calling MITx, the prototype electronics course will require roughly 10 hours work a week, and will run until June 2012. If the course is successful then MIT will look to develop similar courses in Maths and Science.
Many universities already publish their lectures online, but the difference with MITx is that students from anywhere in the world will be able to receive accredited certificates from the leading university, with all the assessment also done over the internet. Students in the US can pay more than $50,000 a year for their undergraduate degree, and this new type of course calls into question whether it is fair for the fee-paying students. However, a spokesperson from MIT said that there will be a clear distinction between an online course, and the course which students study on location. Although the MITx courses are not watered down, they are not comparable to the more common undergraduate degrees.
MIT say that the reason for the introduction of the online courses is because they can currently only teach a tiny fraction of the people who want to study at the university, and that online courses open up many more possibilities. They have earmarked ‘a few million dollars’ to the experiment, but this is not a significant proportion of the university’s existing endowment ($8.5 billion).
The initial electronics course will be assessed using an honour system, but eventually there will be sophisticated checks to ensure that the course taken online is genuinely the work of the student receiving the award.