MITx: Learning from the First Course; Fall Courses Announced

Get the News Update:

• UC Berkeley joins edX
• Fall courses listed

Eager learners from more than 160 countries signed up for the first MITx course, 6.002x Circuits and Electronics, and they were so enthusiastic about keeping the online community alive that they created the follow-up course—6.003, Signals and Systems—themselves using OpenCourseWare materials.

And that's just one positive lesson that Professor Anant Agarwal and other leaders are sifting out of the experience that put MIT on the world stage with its first offering of free, online courses that can result in MITx certificates for those who pass the "MIT-hard" course.

MIT and Harvard leaders are evaluating the results as they prepare a new batch of courses for this fall through edX, a joint organization that will keep developing the MITx platform and help other universities to participate. Here are highlights:

In the end, almost 155,000 people registered for 6.002x. Of those, roughly 23,000 tried the first problem set, 9,000 passed the midterm, and 7,157 passed the course as a whole.

While the rate of attrition may seem high, Anant Agarwal, the president of edX and a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT, points out, “if you look at the number in absolute terms, it’s as many students as might take the course in 40 years at MIT.”

Agarwal also believes that the rate of completion will increase as more courses are added to the edX catalog. “In some sense, this course popped up out of nowhere,” he says. “It requires a background in physics, a background in calculus, a background in differential equations. Over time, edX will have courses on each of those three prerequisites, and we can point students to those courses if they don’t have the background.

Find out what else the MITx team learned.