MIT to add to online course offerings

Last December, MIT announced the creation of MITx, an ambitious project to recreate the MIT classroom experience online; in March, the MITx prototype course - “Circuits and Electronics,” or 6.002x in MIT's course-numbering system - debuted, MIT News reports.

In May, MIT and Harvard University jointly announced the creation of edX, an organisation that will further develop the MITx platform and enable other universities to use it as well.

As MIT and Harvard gear up to offer new edX courses in the fall, the edX team is taking stock of its experience with 6.002x and is beginning to incorporate what it learned into the system's design.

In the end, almost 155 000 people registered for 6.002x. Of those, roughly 23 000 tried the first problem set, 9 000 passed the midterm, and 7 157 passed the course as a whole.

It seems the prototype didn't just offer knowledge on electronics. Instead, the students bound and promoted a community - a support system that no doubt made it easier to continue and pass the course, ZDNet writes.

Spurred on, other learners worked to improve the MITx system; some creating online text viewers for mobile devices, whereas others developed a bolt-on video viewer so media could be streamed in sequence.

Taking this on board, the edX team is working to make it easier for students to customise their courses further. For example, one job on the list is to turn a semester-based course into a full year, to compensate for students with a lot of demands on their time.

A current change the team has made after student feedback is to post videos where teachers work out problems onscreen rather than simply presenting the complete solution.