Chris A. Kaiser PhD ’87 will step down as MIT’s provost at the end of October, President L. Rafael Reif announced yesterday in an email to the MIT community. Kaiser will return to teaching and research as an MIT faculty member.

At first glance, an MIT class without p-sets, exams, or essays sounds almost too good to be true. For 3.091 Professor Michael J. Cima, it is his semester-long experiment to test whether students learn better when residence-based instruction is combined with online instruction.

MIT’s endowment grew in fiscal year 2013 to $10.9 billion, the highest ever, in large part due to investment returns of 11.1 percent, MIT announced Friday.

Researchers at MIT facing funding troubles due to the federal budget sequester can rely on the Institute for “bridge funding” in the short term but may have to downsize their labs or adjust their research programs in the long term, exiting provost Chris Kaiser said in an interview.