IBL News | New York
MITx has become, along with Harvard University and Microsoft, the most prolific course creator on edX.org, with 111 MOOCs shared in the past year, and 26 of them being run for the first time.
“We have about 30 more in the pipeline. At this point we have worked with faculty from 29 of MIT’s departments across all of its 5 schools, as we strive to share the best of MIT’s teaching, and learning, with the world,” said Krishna Rajagopal, Dean for Digital Learning, Open Learning, and Professor of Physics at MIT.
Two of the newest MOOCs from the past Spring have been:
- Healthcare Finance. Professor Andrew Lo, from MIT Sloan School of Management, teaches how to apply financial techniques to biomedical contexts, following its personal mission of bringing more life-saving therapies to patients faster.
- Qualitative Research Methods: Conversational Interviewing. Professor Susan Silbey, a winner of MIT’s Killian Award, teaches learners how to prepare for and conduct a conversational interview for the purpose of gathering data.
Another remarkable initiative where MIT collaborates with eight other top research universities is related to the design of a digital, distributed infrastructure for issuing, storing and displaying verifiable credentials and certificates of academic achievement.
“We aim to utilize strong cryptography to prevent tampering and fraud, and shared ledgers to create a global infrastructure for anchoring academic achievements that build upon earlier research and pioneering efforts — including MIT’s pilot program via which it issued all of its 2018 graduates a digital version of their diplomas that are verified against a blockchain,” explained Professor Krishna Rajagopal.
• MIT: Digital Credentials
