Personal Review

In the next part of my MITx series, I'm going to give my own personal commentary about the experience of attending the first two weeks of 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics). For the other parts of my review you can see:

• Part 1: Introducing MITx's take on open education, and a look at the course ware platform
• Part 2: Exploring 6.002x Circuit design, examining the content delivery tools
• Part 4: Post midterm, Reporting on the exam and the updates made to the system
• Part 5: Surviving the Final, Closing thoughts, Future of open education

Circuits and Electronics

6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) is a class about how to analyze and build simple circuits. This means being able to estimate the voltage, current, resistances, or behavior of a given circuit; or alternatively being able to build a circuit in order to produce a specific behavior. To put another way, this course is the study of how to read or create circuit blueprints. When you break these concepts down into their simplest form, the foundations of circuits isn't as complicated as you might think.

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Content delivery

MIT has launched a new site for the purpose of providing a free online university education to anyone in the world. For our next look into this system, we will take a look at the corseware section and how they are delivering the bulk of the content for the course. For the other parts of my review you can see:

• Part 1: Introducing MITx's take on open education, and a look at the course ware platform
• Part 3: A Students perspective after the first few weeks of class
• Part 4: Post midterm, Reporting on the exam and the updates made to the system
• Part 5: Surviving the Final, Closing thoughts, Future of open education

The class

As it is their flagship run, MITx is currently only offering one class, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics). The 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) is a required entry level class in their undergraduate program for both Electrical Engineer (EE) or Electrical Engineering Computer Science (EECS) majors. This makes it a fairly high traffic class that a lot of people will want to take. This course is also a good balance of an entry level introductory topic while still having a lot of high concepts and complexities.

A lot of the Circuit course is based on mathematics which makes it easier to create an automatic grading system for homework and exercises; but the course also involves building circuitry as well, giving them the chance to test out a fairly involved lab emulation system as well.

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MITx launches the flagship course of its open education program

MIT has launched its first class as part of its open source MITx initiative. MITx will provide a free online University level education to anyone in the world, using course content from the MIT on campus curriculum. The class 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) is being used as a prototype to test the system, which they expect to launch in earnest this fall with several available classes. Once the system is ready, MITx intends to make its software and web components open source so other institutions can take advantage of this technology as well.

As of their press release, more then 90,000 students have registered to participate in the free course which will be running for 14 weeks starting from March 5th until June; and it is still possible to register. The class is available to absolutely anyone, and for this first experimental class they are waiving the testing fee for the certification of completion. There are already many students from overseas or who have English as a second language singed up for the course. MIT plan on translating the course lectures into other languages in the future.

Despite only hearing about it after the class had launched, I was still able to sign up for the class. You can find a faq about their very first course here. If you are really interested in MITx or the concept of University level open source learning I suggest you to do the same just to see how they are delivering this course ware. Of course if you don't want to go to all of that trouble, I am going to report back on my impressions and review of the course here!

In the first part of my review, I'm going to take a look at the general structure of the sites features. For the other parts of my review you can see:

• Part 2: Exploring 6.002x Circuit design, examining the content delivery tools
• Part 3: A Students perspective after the first few weeks of class
• Part 4: Post midterm, Reporting on the exam and the updates made to the system
• Part 5: Surviving the Final, Closing thoughts, Future of open education

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