The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) wants to reach the world with online courses

The MIT is already offering some free online courses to students worldwide: OpenCourseware.
http://ocw.mit.edu/help/get-started-with-ocw/

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

-organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
-feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
-allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
-operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html

According to Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the new tools will be available to whoever needs it.

"Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining … An open infrastructure will facilitate research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and adapted."

Online learning obtained respectability with such for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix. It has now a growing importance to traditional colleges and universities seeking ways to reach beyond their traditional constituencies.

Louis Rhéaume
Infocom Intelligence
louis@infocomintelligence.com
Twitter: @InfocomAnalysis