Harvard x M.I.T: edX – Free Online Courses Aiming to Educate a Billion People

Everyone know about the prestigious universities M.I.T. and Harvard. The two are some of the top schools in the country, known for churning out graduates who help change the world. Instead of competing for the top students, as they often do, Harvard and M.I.T. are now collaborating on free online courseware technology.

Starting next fall, both schools will offer free courses using a platform based on MIT’s MITx technology.  MITx enables the creation of online classes that knit together video segments, embedded quizzes, interactive feedback, online labs and student-ranked Q&A.

While students taking online classes won’t get the same credit as those taking traditional coursework, they can get “Certificates of Mastery.”  This could of course give students considering a for-profit college second thought. A certificate from Harvard or MIT might be seen as more valuable than a degree from a for-profit institution like the University of Phoenix. And, given the skyrocketing cost of education, free options like this may become even more enticing. Harvard and MIT officials said the online coursework will not be “Harvard light or MIT light” but be same material offered to in-class students.

According to a joint statement from the schools, their new edX partnership:

… 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.

The underlying technology will be open-sourced and made available to any educational facility wanting to use it. Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a driving force behind edX said the technology could educate up to 1 billion people. ”Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access [to edX],” said Harvard President Drew Faust.