Changing Higher Education

MITx and the transformation of residential education

    In short, to stay true to our educational values, we must seize the opportunity
to reimagine what we do and how we do it.
—President L. Rafael Reif

On December 19, 2011, MIT announced a new venture, MITx, that would offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform.

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. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.......

President Hockfield called this “a transformative initiative for MIT and for online learning worldwide. On our residential campus, the heart of MIT, students and faculty are already integrating on-campus and online learning, but the MITx initiative will greatly accelerate that effort. It will also bring new energy to our longstanding effort to educate millions of able learners across the United States and around the world. And in offering an open-source technological platform to other educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students the world over will together create learning opportunities that break barriers to education everywhere.”

Thus, MIT's leap into the then not-yet-named world of MOOCs from the outset has had a dual focus on how the growing field of online education could improve learning on its residential campus, and how MIT could project its education to new demographics. The perceived importance of MITx to the future of MIT was emphasized when President Hockfield stepped down, saying there were a few things on the horizon that would require decade-long leadership:

2013- the year of ups and downs for the MOOCs

The biggest thing in higher ed news during 2013 arguably was, as in 2012,  MOOCs. Some of the news was good, some was bad.

Much of the emphasis was on the continuing rise of the MOOCs. Coursera added university partners at a breakneck pace (107 partners), while edX expanded at a more sedate, ivy league pace (30 partners). Both expanded both domestically and globally, seeking out visible and prestigious partners wherever they might be. The English, meanwhile, counterattacked with their own MOOC, FutureLearn, which has 29 " leading UK and international universities" led by the venerable and highly respected online education expert The Open University. OpenupEd, an EU backed pan-European effort, brings together primarily open universities in the EU. The list of new MOOC providers is now very long, and very international, reflecting an apparently global enthusiasm for courses that enroll many tens of thousands of students.

From my perspective, another very important news item was that MOOC pioneer Udacity has teamed up with Georgia Tech and AT&T to offer a remarkably affordable ($6,600, about 1/6 of the campus-based program) Master of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. This low price master's from a highly respected institution in the field represents a sharp break from the traditional pricing structure of higher education. If this partnership is able to produces a high quality degree at this price point, it will provide a direct challenge to the online programs of other institutions that almost always are priced comparably to the on-campus programs. Depending on how this venture works out, this could be the first truly disruptive use of the MOOC approach.