Harvard And MIT Back Open Education With $60 Million Online Learning Project
from the another-tipping-point? dept
News that Harvard University is the latest to join the growing revolt against the exorbitant pricing of academic journals caused something of a stir recently -- although it has been pointed out that its case would be stronger if it followed its own advice and made the Harvard Business Review open access, or at least cheaper.
But here's an area where Harvard, together with MIT, is being more pro-active in helping to make knowledge more widely available online:
EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.
MIT's MITx platform already offers some MIT courses online, and is open source:
EdX will build on both universities’ experience in offering online instructional content. The technological platform recently established by MITx, which will serve as the foundation for the new learning system, was designed to offer online versions of MIT courses featuring video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning. Certificates of mastery will be available for those who are motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.EdX will release its learning platform as open-source software so it can be used by other universities and organizations that wish to host the platform themselves. Because the learning technology will be available as open-source software, other universities and individuals will be able to help edX improve and add features to the technology.
The hope is that other universities will join with Harvard and MIT to make EdX one of the primary platforms for online learning. Interestingly, it will also be used to research how people learn using digital technology -- and how it can be deployed more effectively:
MIT and Harvard will use the jointly operated edX platform to research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. The edX platform will enable the study of which teaching methods and tools are most successful. The findings of this research will be used to inform how faculty use technology in their teaching, which will enhance the experience for students on campus and for the millions expected to take advantage of these new online offerings.
This looks like an important move for online learning, not least because of the scale of the financial support:
The initiative will be overseen by a not-for-profit organization based in Cambridge, Mass., to be owned and governed equally by the two universities. MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration.
Those funds and the projects they will catalyze could boost efforts to make university courses more widely available, complementing the growing success of open access in opening up published materials.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: education, edx, harvard, mit, open access
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Harvard Extension has been going for a while now. I wonder how this might affect enrollment there. Then again, it's possible to actually get one's degree through the extension school right now, iirc, while Edx only appears to offer "certificates of mastery", whatever those are.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Great idea
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Great idea
great article
Abel
[ link to this | view in thread ]