5 Ways That edX Could Change Education - Online Learning - The Chronicle of Higher Education
abernard102@gmail.com 2012-10-03
Summary:
"Since MIT and Harvard started edX, their joint experiment with free online courses, the venture has attracted enormous attention for opening the ivory tower to the world. But in the process, the world will become part of an expensive and ambitious experiment testing some of the most interesting—and difficult—questions in digital education. Can community-college students benefit from a new form of hybrid learning, based on a mix of local instruction and edX content? Can colleges tap alumni as teaching volunteers? Can labs be reinvented in the style of online video games? EdX and its collaborators are developing tools and teaching models to answer those questions. And they view the project as a means to study even deeper problems, like understanding how people forget—and creating strategies to prevent it. 'It's a live laboratory for studying how people learn, how the mind works, and how to improve education, both residential and online,' says Piotr Mitros, edX's chief scientist.
That laboratory remains a work in progress. When a Chronicle reporter visited edX's offices here, in a low-slung brick building on the edge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, the front entrance lacked even a sign, and staffers had engineered a conference table and bookcase from empty cardboard boxes. But with a $60-million investment announced in May and seven courses going live this fall, things are kicking into high gear. What follows, based on interviews with more than a dozen people affiliated with edX, is a closer look at what that could mean for students, scholars, and other colleges."