Willcox Research Group
Funded by MIT Alumni Class Funds 2010, MIT Alumni Class Funds 2015, MIT Office of Digital Learning, The Lord Foundation
In collaboration with In collaboration with Luwen Huang, Chad Lieberman, Haynes Miller, Dipa Shah
Project Site Crosslinks / Crosslinks-js Github repo
Relevant publications
Crosslinks was conceived in 2011 to address the need for MIT students to easily access specific learning resources. One goal is for students to refresh prerequisite material needed in engineering classes. Another goal is for students to appreciate the downstream relevance of fundamental math and science topics. Crosslinks was thus created as an MIT-wide, student-driven community site where students can share materials deemed to be helpful.
On the Crosslinks site, students navigate through topics taught in the GIRs and further downstream classes. Topics contain five facets of comprehension: Prepare — prerequisite topics, Advance — follow-on topics, Relate — related topics, Learn — links of learning resources that teach the topic, and Apply — links of resources that apply the topic. These resources span the spectrum of video, PDF files, and interactive mathlets; they primarily link to MIT OCW, MIT class websites, and Khan Academy.
Crosslinks is a community-driven site — any MIT student, faculty or staff is free to contribute new topics and edit existing content. Since 2015, Crosslinks houses about 300 topics and over 1500 linked resources. In the first month of the 2015–2016 academic year, 8% of the undergraduate student population visited Crosslinks.