Residential MITx Terms of Service

Intent

This service is intended for use by:

MIT students enrolled at the Institute
MIT faculty, instructors, teaching assistants and staff
Non-MIT affiliates enrolled and/or participating in an academic course

Residential MITx is a service offered by MIT's Office of Digital Learning (ODL) Requesting and/or using a Residential MITx site indicates assent to these Terms of Service. Residential MITx is offered on an "as is" basis and is intended for Institute-related business and interactions only.

Support

The Residential MITx support team will respond to questions or difficulties during normal Institute business hours and will work to resolve issues as promptly as is practical within this time window. Support requests, bug reports and feedback should be sent to mitx-support@mit.edu.

If you encounter any issues with Residential MITx, please contact us at mitx-support@mit.edu. In the case of prolonged system outage (planned or unplanned), we will contact course instructors at their MIT e-mail address. If there is a significant unplanned outage, we may recommend substituting non-digital teaching methods independent of MITx Residential.

Acceptable Use

This service is to be used for legal purposes only, and in conformance with the Policies and Procedures of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For example, you may not use it to post, distribute or disseminate any defamatory, obscene, or other unlawful material, including another's proprietary information, including trademarks or copyrighted information without express authorization from the rights holder. See the Acceptable Use Policy (http://web.mit.edu/policies/) and MIT STOP IT (http://ist.mit.edu/stopit)

User Access

Be default, everyone with a valid MIT certificate can access Residential MITx & as such can for and participate in any course on the system. Instructors have the ability & responsibility to override this default, limiting access to officially registered students, if they so desire. Instructors can manually add people with MIT Collaboration accounts to their courses, and unlike valid MIT certificate holders, users with MIT Collaboration accounts only have access to the courses they have specifically been added to. Instructors are responsible for the managing of student access to and students requests for any and all course materials posted on current and past course sites.

Instructor Access

Course administrators have access, upon request, to course sites, present and past for a minimum of five years. This is subject to change based on archive and storage limitations. Domain administrators will receive notification prior to any permanent archival of course sites.

Archiving process

At term's end, courses are archived and removed from view, but will remain visible, or be reinstated at the course instructor's request.

Copyright

ODL, in accordance with Institute policy, is committed to complying with all copyright laws to the fullest extent possible. Information for MIT faculty mounting course material on the Web is available at MIT Libraries Copyright Information. For an extensive list of guides and references to copyright policies and practices at MIT, see Copyright at MIT.

Intellectual Property

Unauthorized use of third-party copyrighted work is illegal, unethical, raises significant financial liability, and damages the reputation of MIT. All Residential MITx users must exercise scrupulous care to identify the source of every third-party owned element posted in the Residential MITx System.

Authentication

Residential MITx uses MIT Touchstone as their login authentication process. Non-members of the MIT community will authenticate to the service by means of MIT Collaboration Accounts (https://ist.mit.edu/touchstone).

Data storage & retention

Data is stored and backed-up nightly. Data restoration can be requested by e-mailing mitx-support@mit.edu. Course data is retained per Archiving Process section above. Student data is retained for a minimum of five years. This is subject to change based on archive and storage limitations. Domain administrators will receive notification prior to any permanent archival of course sites.