In 2012, MIT professor Anant Agarwal put an undergraduate circuits course online for free; nearly 155,000 people registered to learn from the class

The first course in a new online-learning initiative at a US university was a sophomore-level electrical engineering class on circuits and electronics, a subject that students on campus often find difficult. Unlike a recorded lecture, it offered weekly video lessons, graded homework, online laboratories, exams that counted toward a certificate and a discussion forum and anyone with an internet connection could sign up for free. The course was a prototype, built to test whether much of a campus course could be delivered to learners anywhere and its organizers expected far fewer participants than actually registered. It became both the starting point for a larger platform and a source of data on how people learn in an open online course. The sections below follow the course’s launch, its enrollment and completion numbers, and the research it produced.MITx opens with one course on March 5, 2012MIT unveiled the MITx platform in December 2011 with one course, 6.002x Circuits and Electronics, taught by Anant Agarwal, who later became edX CEO, Class Central recounts. 6.002x launched on March 5, 2012 and ran through June 8, about 14 weeks. Agarwal, in an MIT YouTube video, named his teaching colleagues as Gerry Sussman, Chris Terman, Piotr Mitros and Jacob White. According to Class Central, everyone who registered got free access to an embedded textbook, one of whose authors was Agarwal. In May 2012, Harvard joined the effort and MITx became edX.Planned for 2,000 sign-ups, nearly 155,000 registered from more than 160 countriesMIT’s March 5, 2012 news release said more than 90,000 people had signed up for the prototype course since registration opened in February, far above the original estimate of 2,000 students. Technology Review quoted Agarwal as saying that 10,000 sign-ups would be a fantastic success. Registration kept growing during the run and by the end almost 155,000 people from more than 160 countries had registered, according to the MIT News account that ACM carries. Agarwal compared that figure with the number of students he estimated might have taken the course at MIT over 40 years.From 23,349 first problem set attempts to 7,157 certificatesThe attrition shows what registering meant. Of the 154,763 students who registered, 23,349 tried the first problem set, 10,547 made it to the midterm, 9,318 passed it, 8,240 took the final and 7,157 earned a certificate, according to the 2013 paper discussed below. MIT News also reports that a 15-year-old student in Mongolia was one of 341 students to score full marks on the final exam. Access to the course was free, but the certificate process evolved over time. MIT announced on February 13, 2012, that students who mastered the prototype course would receive a certificate free of charge, while future MITx courses would charge a modest fee. Students needed at least 60 points to earn the honor code certificate.A 2013 paper on edX’s first MOOC, written by six researchersThat paper appeared in Research & Practice in Assessment and is titled Studying Learning in the Worldwide Classroom: Research into edX’s First MOOC. Lori Breslow and five co-authors report that the course consisted of video lectures, problem sets, online labs and forums. The course generated a rich data set on how learners used the platform. The first stage of the research measured the time students spent on each tool and the second stage aimed to build a profile of who the students were and how their background and capability related to achievement and persistence.A paper from the course team: designed to be content-identical to MIT’s sophomore coursePiotr Mitros and colleagues, including Agarwal, wrote Teaching electronic circuits online: Lessons from MITx’s 6.002x on edX, which describes the online course as content-identical to the sophomore-level Circuits and Electronics course taken by residential MIT students. Those who managed to accumulate enough points were issued an honor code certificate by MITx.After its initial spring 2012 run, 6.002x was offered again in fall 2012 and spring 2013, according to the above-mentioned study by Breslow and colleagues. Class Central reported that edX shut down the original platform on March 15, 2017, and moved the roughly 155,000 original registrants to an invitation-only alumni version of the course.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.