At edX, Distance Learning Moves to an Open-Source Honors Track

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15. I'm a proponent of open educational resources and MOOCs. Excerpt below:

Without peerless grades, record setting SATs, and about $60,000 a year in tuition and fees, the closest many of us will get to seeing the inside of a Harvard or MIT classroom is to rent “The Social Network,” “Good Will Hunting” or “21.” But this fall, the opportunity to experience for yourself what it takes to pass a class at these prestige college brands got real—or virtual, to be more precise. Whether in a bedroom in Lincoln, Neb., on a commuter bus in Atlanta, or an office in New Delhi, anyone with an Internet connection can not only sit in on lectures of PH207 at Harvard or CS184.1 at University of California at Berkley, but can go through chronologically during the terms all of the same tests, assignments, and interactions with faculty as the freshmen and sophomores at these otherwise selective institutions. This is distance learning taken to a new level. Welcome to edX.

In a bold and costly experiment in new educational techniques, Harvard and nearby MIT in Cambridge, Mass., invested $30 million each last spring to launch edX. This not-for-profit group has built a software platform that aims to bring the classroom experience even closer to students than distance learning has in the past, and to do so for free. Enrollees view the same lectures as their high-paying classmates at the schools, take the same tests, get grades and even share ideas with classmates. But these students aren’t paying (at least not yet), and they aren’t getting formal college credit. Many of the classes will offer “certificates of mastery” upon completion of the course, but the edX experiment is grounded for now in the notion that a great education does not necessarily need to lead to a degree.

The two schools were joined soon after by UC Berkeley and will welcome the University of Texas in the Summer of 2013. edX began as an “MITx” experiment to bring Professor Anant Agarwal’s electrical engineering class to a broad audience for free. After 150,000 students from 160 countries registered for the course, other schools took notice. The platform for edX is based on the original MITx system but the organization regards it as open source. A base of tools for self-paced learning, wiki-based collaborations, grading, etc. are already in place, but the enterprise is expecting the platform to grow as new professors and institutions add and share features. In addition to being free virtualizations of real courses taught by some of the best professors at the leading schools in the world, edX is also designed as a lab for online learning. The institutions are trying to learn how students learn online, with the goal of creating better hybrid models of live and virtual learning environments for students actually attending the schools, as well. In the CS50 course we started, for instance, the professor and his teaching team created new video modules expressly for the edX implementation that also benefited the 700+ live students in the lecture hall.

Because all edX work is done remotely, at massive scale, and without direct contact between instructors and students, the platform has in place special tools and procedures for managing the unique experience. Many of the classes such as Agarwal’s engineering course, use “autograding” that automates in real time the grading of quizzes. Students get immediate feedback on whether they are getting the answers right. Also, enrollment requires that all users agree to an online “Honor Code” to ensure against abusing the virtuality of the system. Enrollees pledge at the outset that all the work they submit is their own, that they do not share their account username and password with anyone else and that they do not post any answers to testing materials publicly for others to use. Finally, and perhaps a nod to the possibility of artful hackers, the pledge includes a promise “not to engage in any activity that would dishonestly improve my results, or improve or hurt the results of others.” And in a new feature that will launch in 2013, edX is hoping to enhance the legitimacy of the remote experience by offering live final exams. In partnership with educational technology and testing company Pearson VUE, at least one course in the edX curriculum will offer a proctored live exam at testing facilities the company runs in 110 countries.