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Committee to Elect Piotr Mitros

For excellence in the Cambridge Public School District

Open edX

A bit over a half-decade ago, based on my work on education in Nigeria, I proposed to MIT an initiative based on using technology to bring research-based educational best practices to scale. I built that platform, and it became Open edX.

Despite its image as a MOOC provider in the popular press, edX does tremendous amounts of on-campus work, and has been incredibly effective at accelerating learning across very diverse settings. For example, we were able to work with MIT to quadruple the number of correct answers on final exams in solid state chemistry, with SJSU – a school serving a diverse and disadvantaged population – to bring course completion rates from 59% to 91% (almost entirely closing the achievement gap between SJSU and MIT), with schools around the world, online, and with having students at community colleges master materials from MIT courses.

In this role, I’ve also interfaced with most of the education research communities, including psychometricians, constructivists, connectivists, educational policy researchers, educational dataminers, and many others, and developed a broad understanding of what does and doesn’t work in education, as well as relationships with top researchers in the field.

I would like to bring that experience to bring evidence-based and research-based best practice to your schools.