Dear Commons Community,

Inside Education reported yesterday that M.I.T.  will begin offering certificates of achievement for its courses.   The article’s author  commented:

“Forget free content repositories; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wants to deliver “interactive” elite education to the masses, complete with credentials certifying “mastery” of MIT-grade coursework.

In the latest boon for the “open education” movement, the engineering mecca on Monday announced a new online learning initiative, called MITx, that will give anyone the opportunity to work through MIT course material and earn a certificate of achievement.

The university’s announcement (and accompanying FAQ) did not contain much in the way of specifics. It is not known what courses, or how many, will be available when MITx goes live in the spring. Still, for open-education advocates it was an optimistic coda to a year that also saw a promising experiment in “massive open online courses” at Stanford University and a cotillion for the smorgasbord of free tutorials and mastering software at Khan Academy.”