MITx The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has gotten a lot of attention for their free eLearning initiatives over the last decade. Their pioneering OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, which has made thousands of courses worth of material freely available online, has been emulated by many, and has served as a the crown jewel in a movement that now counts many different universities as participants. While the original intention of OCW seems more to have been to provide materials that might be used in a classroom setting, or to some extent in online courses, one of the things the project's leaders noticed was that it was also incredibly popular with individuals who are simply interested in learning from them, even without gaining any sort of credential to validate that learning.

As a response, MIT developed MITx, a separate project from OCW but one that uses its materials as the basis for actual online courses that individuals can complete. But beyond this, students who finish courses can earn actual an actual certificate of completion. It's not academic credit, but it is a piece of paper from MIT, and that's something of interest to a lot of people.

Now the leaders of the MITx project have been interviewed by the Chronicle, and their explanations about the project are worth a look. And while MIT is rightly praised for the way they are willing to conduct educational experiments that other top schools usually don't consider, some of their statements show that they aren't any further along than the rest of us when it comes to wrestling with some of the thornier questions of eLearning. For example, asked about how the project will answer the age old question of how to know whether the person saying they're taking the course is the one actually doing the work, Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, replies:

I could give a speech on this question.... In the very short term students will have to pledge an honor code that says that they’ll do the work honestly and things like that. In the medium term our plan is to work with testing companies that offer testing sites around the world, where they can do an identity check and they can also proctor tests and exams for us. For the longer term we have quite a few ideas, and I would say these are in the so-called R&D phase, in terms of how we can electronically check to see if the student is who they say they are, and this would use some combination of face recognition and other forms of technique, and also it could involve various forms of activity recognition.

An honor code may not sound very comprehensive, but the reality is that not only is this the way most universities approach distance learning, it's also the way most of them approach learning in the classroom. Many universities have lecture hall courses where hundreds of students are taking an exam at once. How many of them make sure to match the exam turned in with the ID of the person taking it? Proctoring is a more well accepted solution, although they would have to think carefully about how to approach it to avoid shutting out students who don't live near a testing center. And electronic means to monitor students taking exams is a good idea, but not a new one — a number of providers already offer the sort of technological proctoring they describe, although if anyone can come up with better solutions in this area one would expect it to be MIT.

Another interesting remark comes from L. Rafael Reif, MIT's provost. He addresses the idea that while interesting, MITx is not a degree program and completing its courses will not lead to university credit. But intriguingly, he seems not only to be aware of the debate raging about whether everyone really should get a college degree in order to be prepared for a job, he seems perfectly comfortable with the idea that non-degree programs such as MITx might in the long run displace the college degree from its privileged position as the ticket to a professional position:

The real question is, What do employers want? I think that for a while MITx or activities like MITx—and there is quite a bit of buzz going on around things like that—will augment the education students get in college today. It's not intended to replace it. But of course one can think of, "What if in a few years, I only take two MITx-like courses for free and that's enough to get me a job?" Well, let's see how well all this is received and how well or how badly the traditional college model gets threatened.

In other words, he may say now that MITx isn't intended to replace a degree program, but he doesn't sound particularly upset at the prospect if it happens to do just that. And could that happen in the long run? Could so called "educational badges" that demonstrate skill in a particular area challenge the college degree? Truly we live in interesting educational times!