There seems to be a theme of duplicate, potentially competing efforts coming from the same universities in the now emerging online course space. First with Coursera vs Udacity coming out of Stanford. Now with MITx vs RELATE coming out of MIT. Wouldn't it make more sense for those within the same university to collaborate in order to produce a consistent brand and user experience? Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the fact that these types of educational systems are beginning to take off. I'll be enrolling in as many as time permits. But individual course content aside, it seems like each is reinventing each other's wheel.
When movie technology first came out, movie makers used it to film plays. I'm glad they didn't take the approach that they should find the best stage performance of each play, film each one, and turn the collection into the standard movie library, and stop there. Fortunately, they soon discovered that movies didn't have to be limited by the constraints on plays.
So many aspects of college-level courses are bound to the institutional needs of colleges. Courses must be taught to several people simultaneously and in sync, must be delivered in semester/quarter/term-long chunks, must be popular enough to support ongoing employment of local faculty & staff, must be taught in a way that allows for objective grading (so, for example, emphasize grammar rules over pronunciation in foreign language, regardless of actual relative importance, because grammar is easier to score "objectively"),and so on.
Right now, these online courses are still basically movies filming plays. These classroom "plays" are the way they are, because that serves the needs of the institutions producing them.
But the most effective way to learn something personally useful probably isn't going to coincide with maximizing an old institution's needs for prestige, profits, politics, and power. I'd like to see these monolithic "degree credentials" broken down to finer-grained "skill credentials" that are available a la carte from competing sources that optimize their approach differently for each specific skill and for learners with different circumstances, with the learning results validated by independent agencies that only care how much you know, not how you learned it, where you learned it, or how long it took.
The last thing I want is a continuation of the "consistent brand and user experience" of today's universities.
Give them some time to diverge and innovate. They're implementing the obvious ideas now, but a diversity of efforts means more room for experimentation when the obvious ideas are mastered. I doubt there's a lack of talent and infrastructure at these schools, so there's no point in limiting the venues for that talent to express itself.
Also, it isn't obvious now, but when they start adding classes in economics, political science, and history, we'll want more diversity, not less. They're likely to go for breadth first and depth later, so each effort will have a single introductory macroeconomics course, a single course about the cold war, and a single course about medieval Europe, with each instructor chosen by a small cadre of people administering that particular set of online courses. Until the software is open-sourced and polished well enough that these programs start popping up all over the place, we'll be limited to the programs that are independently developing their own technology stack. The more, the better.
No, these new learning environments need time to grow before they standardize and this particular one brands itself as research which goes along with MITx very well which intends to grow into a certification system for MIT. Coursera and Udacity must have their differences and we'll all be better off with them competing as long as this trend continues.
The only overlap so far is Coursera and Udacity both teaching computer science 101. That's assuming either one of them actually ever gets a course off the ground. (Coursera is closing in on one month after their announced launch without any signs of life.)
It also seems that this one in particular it particularly designed to test the online system itself. Others are of course also trying to find a suitable format, but this one is explicitly an experiment in the viability of the software they developed.
