Lessons learned from MITx’s prototype course

Lessons learned from MITx’s prototype course - MIT News Office

Last December, MIT announced the creation of MITx, an ambitious project to recreate the MIT classroom experience online; in March, the MITx prototype course — “Circuits and Electronics,” or 6.002x in MIT’s course-numbering system — debuted. In May, MIT and Harvard University jointly announced the creation of edX, an organization that will further develop the MITx platform and enable other universities to use it as well. As MIT and Harvard gear up to offer new edX courses in the fall, the edX team is taking stock of its experience with 6.002x and beginning to incorporate what it learned into the system’s design.

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Students preferred the hand-drawn diagrams by a substantial margin. “It lets you pace yourself,” Agarwal says. “The PowerPoint is going to flash a picture on the screen, and you don’t develop the idea in the same way that you develop the idea by drawing a picture on the chalkboard.”

Similarly, Agarwal says, several weeks into the course, after canvassing student responses to the course, the MITx team begin posting videos in which the course teachers worked problems out onscreen, rather than just presenting students with completed solutions — a feature that is certain to become a staple of future edX courses. “We learned a lot about how to do a course like this,” Agarwal says. “Clearly, that is influencing us a lot in where we go from here.”