The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called ‘MITx.’
MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will organise and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace. It will feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication that will allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work, and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx. The platform will operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.
MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MITx is expected to eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.
The online learning initiative is led by MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif, and its development will be coupled with an MIT-wide research initiative on online teaching and learning under his leadership.
MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.
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