By Chris Gaylord, Christian Sciencde Monitor
As the school year revs up, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Anant Agarwal looks forward to teaching his most popular class. Last semester, Circuits and Electronics welcomed in 154,000 students – 35 times as many as the entire undergraduate enrollment at MIT. The class kicked off MIT’s new push into online learning. It was the inaugural course of edX, a collaboration with Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, to offer top-notch education free of charge to anyone with Internet access. “If you took the online class, the material would be identical” to the on-campus version, says Mr. Agarwal, president of edX and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “It was the same level of difficulty. They took the same exams.” Students even received grades, just not academic credit.
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