Following on the heels of the MITx online learning project
launched last December, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has teamed
with its Cambridge, MA, neighbor, Harvard University, to launch a new nonprofit
partnership offering free online courses from both schools.
The project, know as edX, is the latest venture into the
world of massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Stanford, Princeton, the
University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan announced in April
their partnership with Coursera, a for-profit company that started with Stanford’s
experiments in offering free online courses.
“Through this partnership, we will not only make
knowledge more available, but we will learn more about learning," Harvard President
Drew Faust said at a news conference on edX. “Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in
the world can have access."
MIT and Harvard have each committed $30 million to the
project, which will offer its first five courses in the fall. The courses will
be free and certificates will be available on completion with no college
credits. EdX classes will not only focus on engineering, math, and the sciences,
but also include humanities subjects that require grading by peers or essay-grading
software.
According to the edX web site, the platform is based on MITx, which offered video
lessons, embedded testing, real-time feedback, student-ranked questions and
answers, and student-paced learning.
“If I were president of a midtier university, I would be
looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading
university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether
other universities need to develop a circuits course,” said George Siemens in a
New York Times article.
Siemens is a MOOC
innovator teaching at Athabasca University, a Canadian school that offers
distance online education.
