By Steve Kolowich
MOOC companies are hardly universities unto themselves, but now a provider wants to move beyond offering one-off courses.
MITx, a division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that offers courses on the nonprofit edX’s platform, announced on Tuesday that it would soon offer special certificates to students who completed a prescribed sequence of massive open online courses from MIT. The sequences will be called XSeries.
MIT plans to offer its first XSeries sequence, Foundations of Computer Science, beginning this fall. The computer-science series will consist of seven courses that together “will cover content equivalent to two to four traditional residential courses and take between six months and two years to complete,” according to a news release.
EdX is working with SoftwareSecure, a major player in the online-proctoring industry, to make sure that students who pass each course in an XSeries are who they say they are and aren’t cheating. The fee for a proctored final examination is roughly $100 per course, meaning students who aim to earn XSeries certificates can expect to pay about $700 each, said Anant Agarwal, president of edX.
[ Full article available at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mit-will-offer-mooc-curricula-not-just-single-courses-on-edx/46715/ ]
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