What do Harvard and MIT students think of edX?

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Kenny Lei

I will offer my experience with edX and online learning in general. Note that many class recordings are available for Harvard students only and not put on edX. It's very tempting for Harvard students to not attend lecture and instead just watch a livestream or recording later. My motivations for this are either the class was too early and I needed to catch up on sleep, or the weather was terrible that day (I'm from the west coast, sorry). I've done it countless times before, but I can tell you it's just not the same as being at lecture in person. Watching from a computer screen is not a live, interactive experience and I really don't devote the similar attention or desire to learn as I would in an actual lecture. With these recordings, I sacrifice the experience for convenience.

For one of my classes this semester, they experimented by incorporating the edX platform into the class, by having us watch videos and answers questions prior to class. They thought it would give them more time in lecture to do other things like lab demonstrations without really teaching what was going on. However, from the students perspective, it was a mess, since many did not watch videos/answer questions prior and the instructors felt like they didn't need teach material during lecture. The videos were also not a comprehensive learning guide so it was really hard to find the information to do problem sets or study for exams. So what I got from this class was that edX is very capable of missing something on parts of the actual class experience.

So overall, I think edX is a great way to open up information to the public, but it really doesn't equate to a formal education someone can attain at Harvard or other universities. So if you do take a class on edX, don't come with the expectation that the edX class is the same experience as the actual class at that university.

To offer an outside perspective, I got a chance to talk to Zach Sims from Codecademy, and he condemned MOOC's like edX for not really changing the way we learn, especially noting its literally just a video camera in traditional lectures. He has a valid point and I feel like edX really needs to go beyond video recordings to use the internet to change the way we learn. What Zach Sims did with Codecademy is a good model for the direction MOOC's like edX should follow.

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Sam Edson

I got to be a part of the filming for 7.00x in Spring 2013 with Eric Lander. My friend and I sat in the front row every class so you can see us in the videos.

I think that Edx has a ton of potential to be really awesome, and that the people behind the scenes are truly committed to doing so. I think this can be illustrated by how this class was conducted.

For starters, the people running 7.00x decided to release the course to the public half way through the semester. I could tell it was stressful. They told us that they go through every single comment on the course forums, which is pretty crazy if you consider how many people were taking it. They used us MIT students as guinea pigs for the online questions, and constantly asked us for feedback.

Also, not only was the engineering team hard at work improving the site, they also came up with creative ways to visualize information. Anyone who has taken 7.00x knows that the protein and DNA viewers are especially good at showing you what is actually going on. The protein viewer allows you to move around a protein in 3D. The DNA viewer allows for some tricky problems finding sequences and such in really long (sometimes too long) slices of a genome.

In addition, the whole world can now take Biology from one of the best speakers in the world. Eric Lander chose lectures that would give the audience a perfectly relevant introduction to Biology, touching on topics in his research in the Human Genome Project. He knows so much about Biology and it is really apparent in how he answered questions that my class had.

Lastly, I believe that the MIT faculty as a whole is starting to realize the advantage of an online system, and having so many professors on board is integral to creating an Edx that is suited for the people using it: professors and students.

On a side note, my Film Experience professor has filmed all of his lectures and put them on MIT Open CourseWare. He, like many other professors, is worried that putting everything online will make going to class obsolete. He also recognizes that if we do watch the lectures outside of class, we have a really amazing opportunity to have a closer relationship with the profess because he could discuss the information in the lecture with us during class time, instead of just lecturing.

So Edx is built on top of some experiments like MIT OCW. It has a great engineering team and a ton of faculty support. I personally like using the website for the study questions many of my professors post before class.

Here is a picture of my friend and I being enlightened by Lander:

He fell asleep almost every class in that position. It's not his fault he needs to wake up at 5:00 every morning.


EDIT: I am goint to adress something that I cannot believe I left out.

Many people in the past have worried that putting MIT and Harvard material online will decrease the value of the respective universitiy's education. This is completely false.

When I took this 7.00x at MIT to be filmed, we were expected to know material well beyone the scope of the online course. If I had decided to rely solely on the material taught in the lectures and on EDX, I would have failed the class. We were also given extra lectures near the end of the semester to cover material that was out of the scope of Edx, but were needed to fulfil the Biology General Institute Requirement at MIT.

There are other reasons why Edx won't hurt these colleges' value, but I think this is the biggest.

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