Open edX is the platform of choice for residential learning at MIT. This institution finds it convenient for flipping the classroom and providing assessments and exams.
Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the Board of Directors at the edX Consortium [in the picture], talks about it on an interview at edSurge.
“Ninety-nine percent of our students will have seen the edX platform on campus regardless of whether they ever take it on edX because we have a private instance of edX on campus for our students. And what do professors do with it? They flip the classroom. They give instant feedback on exams. A lot of exams are going online.”
Mr. Sarma also talks about the need to smartly with data trove by doing intentional experiments.
“So for example, I could be in a video and change my background to blue, and see if people like it more. That’s an intentional experiment. But if I just take all the logs of this video, it’s very hard for me to figure out whether people want blue.”
“When we started using edX, there was enthusiasm that somehow magic would fall out of the data. We did learn a lot. We learned, for example, the demographics. We learned about our users. We learned about their career choices. But it started plateauing some time ago. We stopped getting a lot of insights out of the data.”
• Edsurge: What College Professors Should Know About Learning Science
