MITx and edX update from Prof. Sanjay Sarma

Prof Sanjay Sarma, Director of Digital Learning at MIT, gave a talk on Massive Open Online Courses(MOOCs), at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) on July 4, 2013.

Here are some of the talk's key points.

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.”

Computer Programming for Children

New and more sophisticated tools are changing the way that the next generation learns to program computers. Children can now create elaborate scenes and games without the cryptic commands that were once the only way to tell computers what to do. The most talented children can also use some of the sophisticated tools normally used by professional programmers, because the tools are now often easy enough for someone to pick up with only a few months of study.

Source: NYTimes.com

First citywide energy audit

An energy audit – an assessment of how well a home holds in its heat or cooling – typically takes hours for just one house. But MIT Professor Sanjay Sarma’s new method can conduct an energy audit of a building in only seconds. His team uses special heat-sensitive cameras mounted on a car.

(Image Credit: Long Phan)

Source: EarthSky

Improving recommendation systems

Devavrat Shah, the Jamieson Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT’s Laboratory of Information and Decisions Systems, thinks that the most common approach to recommendation systems is fundamentally flawed. Shah believes that, instead of asking users to rate products on, say, a five-star scale, as Netflix and Amazon do, recommendation systems should ask users to compare products in pairs. Stitching the pairwise rankings into a master list, Shah argues, will offer a more accurate representation of consumers’ preferences.

Source: MIT News Office via ACM Tech News

Baby brain

New study shows that babies can perform sophisticated analyses of how the physical world should behave.

Source: MIT News

This post is dedicated to Artur Mota :)

Which technologies get better faster?

Some forms of technology — think, for example, of computer chips — are on a fast track to constant improvements, while others evolve much more slowly. Now, a new study by researchers at MIT and other institutions shows that it may be possible to predict which technologies are likeliest to advance rapidly, and therefore may be worth more investment in research and resources.

Source: MIT News via ACM Tech News

Hold the Call, Watch the Road

An in-car warning system being developed by Microsoft researchers could help prevent accidents by automatically putting calls on hold when the road demands more attention. The researchers found that the system could significantly reduce the risk of an accident while driving.

Source: MIT Technology Review via ACM Tech News

Faster transistors

MIT physicists discover a new physical phenomenon that could eventually lead to the first increases in computers’ clock speed since 2002.

Source: MIT via ACM Tech News

AI needs a reboot, experts say

Some of the founders and leading lights in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science gave a harsh assessment last night of the lack of progress in AI over the last few decades.

Read the Unthinking Machines story

Final Idea Factory quote

If anyone taught me how to be a good person it was by example!

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT



This was a (long) series of quotes from this book. This series is dedicated to my kid brother, João. By the way, happy 18th birthday brother! ;-)

Idea Factory quote

Some kid is reading my thesis. In the Eiffel Tower of technology, I am a rivet.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Idea Factory quote

"Design" often means "figure out where to put things"

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Idea Factory quote

Oral exam. They present you with a problem; you have 20 minutes to look at it and try to solve it or at least think up something to say about it, and then you present your solution and/or answer their questions for 20 minutes. To discourage cheating, the 40-minute periods are consecutive, with no time allowed to go from one room to the other. Thus you run from examination room to examination room, to have as much of the 20 minutes of preparation time as possible.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Idea Factory quote

Sometimes I feel like MIT is a dragon I have to slay.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Idea Factory quote

The first definition of thesis is a proposition advanced and maintained by argument. If there is no proposition there is no thesis. If there is no thesis there is no degree.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Day Without Yesterday quote

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the exponentially expanding space that I discovered was hardly new – it was in fact one of the earliest known solutions to the equations of general relativity. I had rediscovered the equations of de Sitter’s cosmology of 1917, written in a form that was introduced by Georges Lemaître in 1925 as part of his Ph.D. thesis at MIT.

Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology

Idea Factory quote

All the graphs looked the same, sitting side by side.
There has to be a pattern...

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Idea Factory quote

Debugging: It will become apparent to you many times during a program's evolution that the program is not entirely right. Instead of blaming the program for these faults, strange creatures called bugs are blamed. In this way the programmer remains free of guilt. Debugging, like programming, is an acquired skill and an art.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Idea Factory quote

Top-down programming is wishful thinking: wouldn't it be nice if I had a thing that did such and such a thing...
You make procrastination a productive part of the problem by not losing yourself in the fine details until later.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT