A study examining courses offered through edX, the nonprofit learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT, found that teachers are enrolling in MOOCS in large numbers, reports Casey Fabris for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Of the 200,000 participants who responded to a survey about teaching, “39 percent of them said they were current or former teachers.”
Senior Lecturer Otto Scharmer writes about the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ‘U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self’ that connects students in 350 hubs across the world: “[I]n the U.Lab, we didn't try to replace the classroom. Instead, we decentralized it, then took the learning out of the classroom altogether.”
Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, speaks with Jeremy Hobson of WBUR’s Here and Now about edX and the future of massive open online courses and digital learning. “Our aim is to increase access to learning to people all over the world,” says Agarwal.
Curt Nickisch of WBUR reports that MIT, Harvard, MGH and The Boston Globe are joining forces for HUBweek, a weeklong festival focused on innovation to be held in the fall of 2015. “MIT plans to host a huge gathering called SOLVE to tackle with some of the world’s most perplexing problems,” reports Nickisch.
Matt Murphy writes for WBUR about Solve, an event MIT will host next fall as part of the HUBweek innovation festival. The event will focus on “research and problem-solving exercises” aimed at four areas: education, health care, manufacturing, and environmental sustainability and energy.
Yiqing Shao of Boston Magazine reports on HUBweek, a new innovation festival that will be co-hosted by MIT, The Boston Globe, Harvard and MGH. “By uniting so many of the region’s leading institutions, HUBweek itself embodies the open, collaborative spirit that has helped make Greater Boston and Cambridge a hotbed of innovation and new ideas,” said MIT President L. Rafael Reif.
Boston Globe reporter Michael Levenson writes about HUBweek, an “innovation-themed festival” that aims to showcase Boston. As part of HUBweek, MIT will host “‘Solve’ to brainstorm solutions to problems in education, energy, the environment, manufacturing, and infrastructure.”
“If the festival helps experts in Greater Boston make new connections across disciplines and across institutions — and find common interests and opportunities for collaboration with people around the world — the region as a whole can only benefit,” writes The Boston Globe Editorial Board of HUBweek, which will be co-hosted by MIT.
Carl Straumsheim of Inside Higher Ed writes about the future of higher education at MIT and research universities across the country. Straumsheim writes that MIT plans to “modularize” education, “breaking courses down into smaller modules that can be taken on their own or shuffled and rearranged into a more personalized experience.”
Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson writes that edX, the online learning platform from MIT and Harvard, is now offering free online AP courses. Anderson writes that edX offering AP courses is a “potentially significant milestone for a movement that aims to bring college-level courses to high school students.”
USA Today reporter Greg Toppo writes that edX has kicked off a series of free online courses on educational technology and game design. “The new courses aim to help students both inside and outside of MIT produce saleable products,” writes Toppo.
The Economist reports on an MIT study on the effectiveness of massive open online courses or MOOCs. Researchers found that MOOC participants “learned slightly more than they typically would in lectures.”
Barney Thompson writes for the Financial Times about how massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by edX, are changing higher education. “We offer 220 subjects in everything from law to medicine, humanities, arts, music, computer science and engineering,” says edX CEO and MIT Professor Anant Agarwal.
Raghu Dhara of The Harvard Crimson writes that a new study by researchers from MIT, Harvard and Tsinghua University found that online courses are just as effective as traditional university courses. The study found that “the ‘learning gain’ of a group of MOOC students was comparable to that achieved by students enrolled in the same course at MIT,” explains Dhara.
Issie Lapowsky writes for Wired about an MIT study that demonstrated that students who completed a physics class online learned as effectively as those who took it in person. “What’s more, the results were the same, regardless of how well the online students scored on a pre-test before taking the class,” Lapowsky writes.