Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses.
Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a new non-profit partnership, known as EdX, to offer free online courses from both universities. Harvard University and M.I.T. are not the only one to offer a wide array of massively open online courses or MOCC’s as they are known. Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan also announced their partnership with a new for-profit company to offer a wide array of massively open online courses.
EdX, which is expected to offer its first five courses this fall, will be overseen by a not-for-profit organization in Cambridge, owned and governed equally by the two universities, each of which has committed $ 30 million to the project. The first president of EdX will be Anant Agarwal, director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who has led the development of the MITx platform. At Harvard, Dr. Garber will direct the effort.
M.I.T. and Harvard official emphasized that they would use the new online platform not just to build a global community of online learners, but also to research teaching methods and technologies.
Education experts say that while the new online class offers opportunities for students and researchers, they also pose some threat to low-ranked colleges. Projects like this can impact the lives around the world, for the next billion students China and India said George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer who teaches at Athabasca University, a publicly-supported online Canadian university.
Adapted from the article by Tamar Lewin, in The Muslim Observer Vol 14, issue 19.
