Harvard joins MIT in platform to offer massive online courses | Inside Higher Ed

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“After a whirlwind nine months that has witnessed a rapid rebirth of online education at elite U.S. universities in the form of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, Harvard University threw its hat into the ring Wednesday -- along with the largest investment yet in technology aimed at bringing interactive online education to hundreds of thousands of students at a time, free. Harvard will be piggybacking on MITx, the platform the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed for its own MOOCs, the universities jointly announced. The combined venture will be a nonprofit called edX. Harvard and MIT together have committed $60 million to the project, which is likely more than the combined venture funds raised by Coursera, Udacity and Khan Academy. Like the open courses being developed by MIT, Harvard’s open, online courses will be taught by the same professors who preside over the classroom versions. The courses will have to go through an approval process at each campus to make sure they measure up to standards of rigor and usability. ‘Certificates of mastery will be available for those motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material,’ the universities said in a release... There is no word on what Harvard and MIT courses are next in line for MOOC adaptation, but university officials indicated that the edX offerings will include courses in humanities, social science and natural science. The EdX platform will be open source, ‘so it can be used by other universities and organizations who wish to host the platform themselves,’ according to the release. While EdX will initially play host to adapted versions of courses from MIT and Harvard, the institutions expect it to become a clearinghouse for open courses offered by various institutions. “MIT and Harvard expect that over time other universities will join them in offering courses on the edX platform,” the universities said. ‘The gathering of many universities’ educational content together on one site will enable learners worldwide to access the course content of any participating university from a single website, and to use a set of online educational tools shared by all participating universities.’ Harvard is hardly the first top university of late to announce a foray into large-scale open teaching. Stanford and MIT made their online moves last year; and Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of California at Berkeley are preparing to open their first MOOCs with help from Coursera, a venture-backed company started by two Stanford engineering professors. The string of announcements represents an online education renaissance among top-tier U.S. universities... Harvard and MIT say one of their main goals with edX is to generate learning data that the universities  can share freely with education researchers. The MITx platform, which will serve as the technology platform for edX, ‘already has a lot of mechanisms for understanding how students are learning,’ said Anant Agarwal, a computer science and engineering professor at MIT and the first president of edX. ‘These data will be available to researchers at MIT and Harvard and other universities around the world,’ he said. The combination of the data-rich online medium and the scale edX hopes to achieve will "enable [education researchers] to ask very different questions than we’ve been able to ask before," said Alan Garber, the provost at Harvard. By crunching granular data on the activity of students in the edX environment, educators will be able to get a sense not only of how well they perform on high-stakes tests but also ‘how well they acquire and apply the information months after a class has ended,’ Garber said. In a subtle swipe at the proprietary companies (like Coursera and Udacity) that have also built platforms through which top-tier universities can run MOOCs, L. Rafael Reif, the MIT provost, suggested that the ethic of transparency and public-mindedness Harvard and MIT bring to the table will make edX a more generous and responsible curator of the learning data that MOOC platforms will accumulate. Harvard and MIT say one of their main goals with edX is to generate learning data that the universities  can share freely with education researchers. The MITx platform, which will serve as the technology platform for edX, ‘already has a lot of mechanisms for understanding how students are learning,’ said Anant Agarwal, a computer science and engineering professor at MIT and the first president of edX. ‘These data will be available to researchers at MIT and Harvard and other universities around the world,’ he said. The combination of the data-rich online medium and the scale edX hopes to achieve will ‘enable [education researchers] to ask very different questions than we’ve been able to ask before,’ said Alan Garber, the provost at Harvard. By crunching granular data on the activity of students in the edX environment, educators will be able to get a sense not only of how well they perform on high-stakes tests but

Link:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/03/harvard-joins-mit-platform-offer-massive-online-courses

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.comment oa.oer oa.sustainability oa.education oa.mit oa.floss oa.studies oa.harvard.u oa.khan_academy oa.mitx oa.coursera oa.udacity oa.edx oa.announcements oa.moocs oa.courseware oa.economics_of

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 17:52

Date published:

05/04/2012, 23:19