MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:
organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.
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.
MIT will couple online learning with research on learning
MIT’s online learning initiative is led by MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif, and its development will be coupled with an MIT-wide research initiative on online teaching and learning under his leadership.
“Students worldwide are increasingly supplementing their classroom education with a variety of online tools,” Reif said. “Many members of the MIT faculty have been experimenting with integrating online tools into the campus education. We will facilitate those efforts, many of which will lead to novel learning technologies that offer the best possible online educational experience to non-residential learners. Both parts of this new initiative are extremely important to the future of high-quality, affordable, accessible education.”
Offering interactive MIT courses online to learners around the world builds upon MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free online publication of nearly all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials. Now in its 10th year, OpenCourseWare includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.
MIT President Susan Hockfield said, “MIT has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience that Internet technology enables. OpenCourseWare’s great success signals high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to online teaching.”
OCW will continue to share course materials from across the MIT curriculum, free of charge.
MITx online learning tools to be freely available
MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.
“Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “An open infrastructure will facilitate research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and adapted.” Agarwal is leading the development of the open platform.
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.”
How can you tell I’m behind the scope and sequence?
I was just reminded today of how neat this site is: Imaging the French Revolution. Good stuff comes out of George Mason University from time to time. This site is part of that stuff.
11. Le plus Grand, des Despotes, Renversé par la Liberté (Place Vendôme). [Place Vendôme, The Greatest of Despots Overthrown by Freedom] Source: Museum of the French Revolution 88.170 Medium: Etching and colored wash Dimensions: 17.2 x 24.4 cm Commentary (numbers refer to pages in essays): General analysis – Day-Hickman, 5 Reasonable crowd – Day-Hickman, 2
You’ve got to love C-SPAN. Commercial television networks spend billions purchasing rights to be the sole broadcaster of sporting events, the Superbowl, the World Series, the NBA championships, the NCAA basketball championships, the Olympics.
What’s a money poor, creativity- and content-rich public affairs cable channel to do? Well, gee, there’s the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth coming up in February 2009 . . .:
Note the site, set your video recorders (digital or not — just capture the stuff). C-SPAN plans monthly broadcasts on Lincoln and the times, plus special broadcasts on certain events — November 19, the 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, for example.
Teachers, bookmark that site. Are you out for the summer? U.S. history teachers have a couple of months to mine those resources, watch the broadcasts, and watch and capture the archived videos, to prepare for bell-ringers, warm-ups, and lesson plans.
What will your classes do for the Lincoln Bicentennial? Will that collide with your plans for the Darwin bicentennial?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
In two days the Bathtub got more than 100,000 hits; that’s big blog territory, about where WordPress phones and suggests it’s time to move to a paid format. The first day was chiefly driven by Reddit; the second day by Digg. At this point traffic is coming from about five different flagging services.
I wish other, more serious posts would merit such attention. In the real world, People magazine sells a lot more than Time, and a lot more than Natural History, and those magazines throw away an equivalent of the entire press run of The Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association just because of a crease in one page. Content quality bears no correlation to total circulation. But that’s my judgment; who can say that my judgment is better than the crowd’s? Santayana’s Ghost is a more amicable companion, but Galton’s Ghost haunts us, too.
So, some observations:
1. Archaeologists and anthropologists need to flack their finds better. The animated .gif was created in 2004 as best I can determine. I picked up the story from a tiny note in a monthly archaeology newsletter Kris Hirst’s blog at from Ask.com, which picked the story up from a note on a piece of controversy about the bowl (regarding whether it was the Assyrian Tree of Life depicted or not). The bowl was found, depending on the source, in the 1970s or 1980s (surely someone knows which date would be correct).
In other words, this “news” has been kicking around for a quarter to a third of a century. What other magnificent archaeological finds would people find fascinating, if they only knew about them?
This is a constant problem. News gatekeepers — editors — generally do a good job, but the volume of news means many things people would find intriguing, get overlooked. Some day I’ll write up my experiences as a press secretary, telling how editors would repeatedly reject tips as “not news,” then run the items months later when the item came in through a different source, or a different route. (“She came in through the bathroom window,” the Beatles sang, and every press secretary understands why; the door and the grand staircase were occupied.)
The problem is compounded by the internet and computers. Most people who looked at the post did not start out the day wondering what had happened recently in archaeological digs in Iran. News reader filters for our “interests” may shut out things we really would be interested to see. I called it “animation,” and 100,000 people crowded to see. There’s nothing like an old fashioned newspaper to pique our interest in odd items we were not looking for at all, on pages where we read other stuff we were looking for.
2. We all need to marry the cyber world to the real world. I still know precious little about the artifact in question. Where can I find information on it? I don’t have access to archaeology journals. Without knowing exactly where to look on the internet, we are all at a loss as to where to turn. What museum is this piece in, if any? (If it’s not in a museum, Iran or its owners could auction it off at a pretty good price right now, I’ll bet.) Who were the Italians who found it? Where can we find the papers describing it? What about the 11-minute film mentioned in the press releases — where is that film, how can we see it? Those people who hold this information appear not to be plumbed into the tubes of the internets, or the spigots are turned off. There is an information vacuum here, and good, real information is difficult to find to fill it.
3. Most of us know precious little about the world; the internet is often limited in the help it can offer to cure our ignorance. Several commenters seemed to have some knowledge about Iran’s archaeological heritage. Most of us had never heard of the Burnt City, most of us still couldn’t find it on a map, and most of us don’t know where to go to get the next chunk of fascinating information. The internet is a great institution, but in these matters, it’s still hit or miss for people who really want to know. We’re missing the boat on using computers and the internet as education tools.
Readers: What else have we learned from this experience?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I’d love to have every kid in the class with a computer to take this thing, or pieces of it, to drill on it, and I’d love the ability to add new stuff to it.
How’d you do? What do you think — are there classroom possibilities here? (I’ve tried to make the widget work, below . . .)
The blog appears to be rather an afterthought, an add-on. But consider: What if your class were able to follow this guy to Antarctica, and keep up regular communication with him through the blog?
Not necessarily. The page designers chose Pierce, our 14th President, as the most obscure and trivial of the presidents. They claim Pierce as even more trivial and obscure than Millard Fillmore!
How close did we come to having “the Millard Fillmore Pages?” You’ll shudder to find out.
The wonders of the intertubes: We can afford to have a set of pages dedicated to our 14th President, Franklin Pierce! Let’s see you do that on broadcast or cable television, or on radio.
The site offers a lot. E-mail updates on issues, cheap DVDs of the movie ($10.00 each for the first 10, $9.00 each for the next 10 . . . you may want to get a copy for each social studies classroom), background stories to the movie, story of Annie Leonard, background sheets, lists of organizations working on the issues and reading lists and more. I found no lesson plans, but you can surely cobble one together for an hour class, with 20 minutes taken up by the film. Plus you can download the movie, for free.
Go noodle around the site: There are lots of possibilities for student projects, student discussions, in-class exercises, homework, and fun.
This movie details, quickly and with good humor, the economics of recycling, the economics of waste disposal, and the economics of production. This provides a great gateway to talk about civics and government, and how to make things happen like garbage collection and recycling; a gateway to talk about economics, especially the various flows of money and goods; a gateway to talk about geography and how we have used our land and rivers to bury and carry waste; and how we use natural resources generally.
This would also be a good video for Boy Scout merit badge classes for the Citizenship in the Community and Citizenship in the Nation badges.
Contrasted with most of the industrial grade video I’ve seen for economics classes, this is fantastic. It’s better than any of the sometimes ambitious, but ultimately dull productions from the Federal Reserve Banks (are you listening, Richard Fisher? Hire Will Brehm’s group). (No offense, Osgood — yours is the best of that lot.)
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., probably has political objections to the movie, claiming it leans left, which indicates it’s in the mainstream. If you’re using any other supplemental material in your classes, this just balances it out.
Screen capture from the film, “Story of Stuff”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Our friends and benefactors at the Bill of Rights Institute put up a great branch of their site, Founders Online. A grant from the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation made the project possible.
This page should be a first stop for your students doing biographies on any of these people, and it should be a test review feature for your classes that they can do on the internet at home, or in class if you’re lucky enough to have access in your classroom.
Good on-line sources are still too rare. This is stuff you can trust to be accurate and appropriate for your students. Send a note of thanks to the Bill of Rights Institute, and send your students to the site.
Other articles from 1922 to 1987 will be available for a reduced fee, or free.
Access opens to much of the archived material at midnight tonight, September 18, 2007 (probably Eastern Time).
History, economics and science teachers especially now can get news stories of key events that were previously difficult to find and often expensive. Now-free periods of history include the periods covering the Spanish-American War, the entire administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, World War I, the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and the current administration, the end of the Cold War, nullification and destruction of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, breakup of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War, and much more.
Still behind a proprietary shield will be World War II, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the rise of the Cold War, the Korean War, the development of atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, the discovery of the structure of DNA, the trial of John Scopes, the trial of the Rosenbergs, the McCarthy era, and the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
The Times said the policy change makes sense because of links from other internet sources that drive people to the Times’ site. The newspaper can make more money from advertising to those referral clicks than from charging an access fee.
This makes a great deal of high quality information about events in history available to teachers and students. One danger for the light-hearted: It may confuse students about the meaning of “free press.”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Text publishers for Texas generally provide websites to accompany their texts. In several cases the on-line version’s chief virtue is offering the full text on-line, in case students leave their books in their locker. Most of the texts offer a few brilliant on-line sources.
In most cases, features of an on-line text are limited so those school districts that purchase the publisher’s books. Access is restricted by sign-in codes and passwords. In many cases the on-line books are a bit clunky.
Textbook Revolution is a site that claims to be “taking the bite out of textbooks.” I hope they don’t mean the intellectual bite.
The site points to textbooks available on-line with no serious restrictions. There are five history texts, four for U.S. history and one with a focus on world history. Economics is a hotter field, with 14 listings, including one from the Ludwig von Mises Institute which promises links to “dozens” of texts. Geography doesn’t have its own category, but a search of the site for “geography” turns up seven texts. The search for “government” is much less successful, turning up a hodge podge that includes chemistry and a rant, “Nudity and Smartfilter.”
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
Error: Please make sure the Twitter account is public.
Dead Link?
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
