I went to MIT from 1992-1997 and graduated with an M. Eng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After taking a hiatus from the engineering world after working for five years, I recently had the pleasure of reading through MIT's opencourseware 6.830/6.814. In addition, I had the certification for web development at www.w3schools.com. I find it to be quite amazing to find all the courses at MIT now offered through Opencourseware. It is an immense gift to the whole world and to enrolled students as well. These days people have access to the internet and would be able to access the information and complement their education but would have no way of accessing the Institute in their lifetime. I would like to suggest www.w3schools.com which is a purely online school for some of MIT's new MITx/edX education. It is thorough, highly informative, and extremely to the point. This also highlights the difference between a residential school such as MIT and a purely online school. The MIT education I had had a lot of laboratory assignments and exercises. This emphasized team work as well as applying what you learned in the classroom which is very important. This would be impossible to emulate with an online only school (unless it is purely software). No money for any students to emulate the millions of dollars worth of equipment to do any experiments. Hence, I do not think that the residential school and research model is going to be threatened or disappear.

Sincerely,
Sofia Gebru