General Policies

Carefully review the description where you will find the course objectives, who it’s for, and, if applicable, the prerequisites.

The course materials combine the following pedagogical strategies to make it easier to achieve each module’s general and specific objectives.

Instructivism: Teacher-centered learning model. The teacher defines the objectives and presents relevant content.

Examples:
– Tutorials with animations and graphic resources
– Text pages with images, graphs, figures, and diagrams

Constructivism: Practice-centered model. Encourages participants to create, which helps them “develop” their knowledge. It aims to have participants develop something that a real practitioner would make.

Examples:
– Project-based work
– Assessable and non-assessable activities

Anchored instruction: A learning experience is “anchored” in a narrative (e.g., a case study or media content). Participants acquire new knowledge or skills applied to a context. At regular intervals, participants use the knowledge or skills described in the anchor in several parallel contexts, thereby being able to situate the instructional content within the central narrative.

Examples:
– Case studies
– Project-based work

Connectivism: Learning through others. A social learning network in which its members interact feeds the cycle based on sharing and receiving information. It is a way to refine mental models and form interdisciplinary connections. Through peer interactions, participants are encouraged to relate and identify patterns among knowledge nodes. They are also encouraged to seek answers to community questions. Course staff will promote this interaction.

Examples:
– Interventions in discussion forums
– Collaborative project-based work
– Surveys and word clouds with real-time results

MIT xPRO courses are taught by MIT faculty. In addition, there will be sessions in which industry professionals who have made significant contributions to their respective fields will be invited to participate. The course description pages provide detailed information about the faculty and their biographies.

Professionals from around the world with different personal, professional, and academic backgrounds will participate. These professionals include scientists, engineers, technicians, managers, consultants, entrepreneurs, students, and various agents working in industry, government, the military, non-profit organizations, and academia.

MIT xPRO’s commitment to accessibility:

Our platform is compatible with a screen reader; downloadable transcripts are available for all videos.

If you have any special needs to participate in a course, please do not hesitate to contact us as soon as possible so we can find a solution. You should contact us at least two weeks before the course starts. Requests will be considered through an interactive process to meet both the accessibility requirements of participants with special needs and MIT xPRO’s commitment to academic integrity.

MIT xPRO courses are taught in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

MIT xPRO courses are taught in English. However, participating in a course does not require English language proficiency.

Should you wish to take the course, it is up to you to identify whether you are comfortable enough with English to take the course.

Our educational software works best with current Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge versions. For the best possible experience, we recommend switching to an updated version of Chrome. If you do not have Chrome installed, you can get it for free here: http://www.google.com/chrome/browser/.

The course faculty pre-recorded the course’s video content to maximize participants’ time and flexibility. During the course, you can participate in discussion forums and attend live Q&A webinars with the course faculty. The webinars will be recorded and made available on the course website for viewing by those who did not participate in the live session.

The courses are held online.

Check our catalog at https://globalalumni.xpro.mit.edu/ to find information regarding the dates of the courses we offer.

MIT xPRO courses have a board for participants to post messages and encourage them to open discussions to interact with their peers. There will be a team of facilitators who will act as moderators.

The teaching team will schedule at least one live webinar during each course so that participants can submit questions related to the content and have them answered in real-time by the teacher or another course instructor. Attendance at the live session is optional, and participants will have the video available after the live session concludes.

There are no course demonstrations at this time. If you have questions regarding the content of a course, please consult the information on the corresponding website or contact us by email.

The refund period is seven working days after the course start date. If you pay the amount and enroll before that date, you will have access to the content of the first week of the course and can decide if you wish to proceed.

Please note that the refund period is not changeable.

Log in to your MIT xPRO account and start the course on the announced start date. You will receive a welcome email after completing the payment, and you will receive your login credentials one week before the start of the course. If you do not see that you have received it, please check your spam folder and add MIT xPRO as a contact.

All videos have been transcribed, and if you enable closed captioning, you can see the captions at the bottom of the video. Synchronized transcripts allow students to follow the videos and go to a specific part of the video by clicking on the transcript. In addition, all transcripts are available for download. Participants can use the transcripts of the media materials for study and review.

All MIT xPRO courses follow the pass/fail model, i.e., they are not evaluated with grades.

Participants must complete evaluable activities in each course to obtain points. Remember the due dates. You can check your progress throughout the course by clicking “Progress” at the top of the navigation bar. Check that you meet the necessary criteria to pass the course and the minimum number of points required to obtain a certificate. All MIT xPRO courses follow the pass/fail model.

Participants who successfully complete a course will receive a Certificate of Completion online.

There are no specific admission criteria for the course. It is not required to have a degree or a certain level of education. All participants should dedicate four to six hours per week to the course and have the necessary technical resources to access the online course. We also recommend that participants review the course prerequisites.

Visit the xPRO home page, click on the name of the course you are interested in, and then click “REGISTER.” You will first need to fill in the registration form with your details. Complete this process and then follow the payment process. After registering, you will receive an email with confirmation/instructions.

Groups of ten or more participants are eligible for an additional discount—email globalalumni@xpro.mit.edu with the number of people you would like to enroll.

Participants must pay invoices before the course start date and on the same day they are issued. Pay before the course begins to avoid expulsion from the course. No extensions will be granted, and no exceptions will be made.

The registration period ends one week after the course begins. Please note that if you register after the course’s start date, you may not be able to meet the deadline for some evaluated activities. Please consult the course calendar for details and deadlines for evaluated activities. A calendar is available on the course website.

Sanctions activated by the United States prevent this course from being offered to participants currently residing in the Crimean region of Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria.

Please visit the course pages to check the calendar. We will post information there as we confirm new dates. Please get in touch with us if you do not see a listing of upcoming dates.

At this time, we are unable to accept any requests for substitution.

We take academic honesty very seriously and monitor participants’ work. If we become aware of any attempt to engage in dishonest practice (e.g. plagiarism, sharing of answers, or inappropriate collaboration on assessable activities), we reserve the right to take action: suspend the offender, not award the course certificate, revoke the MIT xPRO certificate, and/or prohibit access to future MIT xPRO courses.

Only those participating in an MIT undergraduate or graduate course are considered former MIT students.

Participants who complete an online course are considered former MIT xPRO students.

When creating courses, we consider flexibility vital for professional students. If you miss a due date, the grade you will get for that evaluable activity will be 0. However, many courses offer the possibility of not counting the lowest grade when calculating the final grade. The facilitator teams will send reminders of upcoming dates by email.

MIT xPRO courses aren’t designed for high school students but target professionals with industry experience. On the MIT website, there is a list of several courses for high school students.

This course is designed primarily for professionals with graduate training, but undergraduates are welcome if they have the appropriate background. Please note that courses will only earn continuing professional education (CEU) credits, not credits that can be applied toward a bachelor’s degree.

All MIT xPRO courses follow the pass/fail model. If you do not pass this course, you may reapply for a place in a future course. The admission and tuition fee payment in one cohort will not be valid for future cohorts.

Each course has a defined start and end date; access before or after these dates is not permitted. Nor is it possible after the course has ended. However, once you start the course, participants can follow their own pace instead of going through the exercises week by week at the pace we suggest. Please note that while participants can study the course content according to their schedule, there are specific evaluable activities with a due date because they require coordination between participants’ deliveries.

In the case of both stand-alone and multi-course courses, participants who pay a fee will have access to the materials for three months after the end of the course. You may be able to access support services, facilitators and teachers, and discussion forums up to 30 days after the course’s end date, but you will not be able to do so after this period.

You will continue to have access to the course materials, as they pertain to the course you enrolled in, but you will not receive updates to those materials. You cannot download the materials for most courses, but you are welcome to take notes. Some xPRO courses have downloadable materials (usually in PDF format).