The disruption of higher education just got very interesting. It appears that the disruptors — private, online universities — are being disrupted at their own game. One of the pantheons of traditional on-site learning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has announced it will be launching online courses that will be free and open to the world. And, in the process, plans to offer certificates to students successfully completing the coursework.
The program, called MITx, will represent the next evolution in online offerings, extending the university’s already well-establishedOpenCourseWare, which provides materials on about 2,100 courses that has been accessed by more than 100 million people. OpenCourseWare will continue, but MITx will be more interactive and provide a greater virtual classroom experience, providing access to online laboratories, student-to-student discussions, and greater interactivity. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.
The new initiative matches a similar one now underway at Stanford University, in which professors ran three open, online courses this past fall semester, and will expand the program to include 10 more computer science classes beginning next month, including launching startups, technology entrepreneurship, software as a service, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction.
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