Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced edX, a transformational new partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners.

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 motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.

MIT and Harvard expect that over time other universities will join them in offering courses on the edX platform. 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.

EdX will release its learning platform as open source software so it can be used by other universities and organizations who 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.

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.

“EdX represents a unique opportunity to improve education on our own campuses through online learning, while simultaneously creating a bold new educational path for millions of learners worldwide,” MIT President Susan Hockfield said.

Harvard President Drew Faust said, “edX gives Harvard and MIT an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically extend our collective reach by conducting groundbreaking research into effective education and by extending online access to quality higher education.”

“Harvard and MIT will use these new technologies and the research they will make possible to lead the direction of online learning in a way that benefits our students, our peers, and people across the nation and the globe,” Faust continued.

Jointly Owned Not-for-Profit Structure

The initiative will be overseen by a not-for-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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.

MIT’s Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Anant Agarwal, who has led the development of the MITx platform under the leadership of MIT provost L. Rafael Reif, will serve as the first president of edX.

At Harvard, Provost Alan Garber will direct the Harvardx effort and Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith will play a leading role in working with faculty to develop and deliver courses.

It is anticipated that near-term course offerings from a range of Harvard and MIT schools will be included on the edX platform.

Research to Enhance Residential Model

EdX will enhance the traditional residential model of undergraduate education on both campuses by supporting an unlimited number of experimental online approaches to teaching that can be used by Harvard and MIT faculty and which will benefit students in Cambridge and Boston. It will also have the benefit of providing global access to some of the world-class instruction that already occurs in Cambridge and Boston, but which is only one aspect of the full Harvard College and MIT experience.

“The campus environment offers opportunities and experiences that cannot be replicated online,” said Hockfield. “EdX is designed to improve, not replace, the campus experience.”

EdX will be separate from ongoing distance learning initiatives at both institutions, including MIT OpenCourseWare and courses offered by schools at Harvard such as the Harvard Extension School, the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Medical School.

First Courses by Fall 2012

The universities will work to develop further the online learning platform already begun with MITx and to populate the edX website with courses from the MIT and Harvard faculty. During the early stages, the two universities will work cooperatively to offer as broad an initial set of courses as possible. A first set of courses is scheduled to be announced in early summer and to start in Fall, 2012.

“We are already moving forward quickly,” said Anant Agarwal. “There’s a lot of energy in the air, and the teams at Harvard and MIT can’t wait to collaborate.”

The traditional version of 6.00 on OCW, first published in 2007, quickly became the most visited course on the site, regularly receiving more than 100,000 visits each month. With the additional content and structure of the OCW Scholar format, Professor Guttag expects that 6.00SC will help hundreds of thousands more learn this very marketable skill. But the course doesn’t just teach a programming language—it teaches computational modes of thinking, allowing students to formulate problems that can be solved with computers and implemented in a variety of programming languages.

“The methods taught in this class provide a systematic approach to problem solving that can be applied to thousands of very real challenges,” said Professor Guttag. “By creating this independent learning resource, I hope to put these tools in the hands of people making a real difference in the world.” Prof. Guttag has long collaborated with both local hospitals and the Boston Celtics on real-world applications of the concepts he teaches.

OCW Scholar courses represent a new approach to OCW publication. MIT professors and students work closely with the OCW team to restructure the learning experience for independent learners, who typically have few additional resources available to them. The courses offer more materials than typical OCW courses and include new custom-created content. The OCW Scholar version of Introduction to Computer Science and Programming includes lecture videos, recitation videos and a series of problem sets involving the creation of word games.

The first five of a planned twenty OCW Scholar courses were launched by MIT OpenCourseWare in January 2011, and have collectively received more than 800,000 visits in less than a year. The initial OCW Scholar courses included Classical Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, Solid State Chemistry, Single Variable Calculus, and Multivariable Calculus.

Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Principles of Microeconomics and Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science were published earlier this year, and Introduction to Computer Science and Programming is the fifth of seven OCW Scholar courses that will be published in 2012. Other upcoming OCW Scholar courses include Principles of Microeconomics, Introduction to Psychology and Fundamentals of Biology. OCW Scholar courses are published on the OCW site with the support of the Stanton Foundation.

organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace

feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication

allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx

operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

MIT’s online learning initiative is led by MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif, and its development will be coupled with an MIT-wide research initiative on online teaching and learning under his leadership.

“Students worldwide are increasingly supplementing their classroom education with a variety of online tools,” Reif said. “Many members of the MIT faculty have been experimenting with integrating online tools into the campus education. We will facilitate those efforts, many of which will lead to novel learning technologies that offer the best possible online educational experience to non-residential learners. Both parts of this new initiative are extremely important to the future of high-quality, affordable, accessible education.”

Offering interactive MIT courses online to learners around the world builds upon MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a free online publication of nearly all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials. Now in its 10th year, OpenCourseWare includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.

MIT President Susan Hockfield said, “MIT has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience that Internet technology enables. OpenCourseWare’s great success signals high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to online teaching.”

OCW will continue to share course materials from across the MIT curriculum, free of charge.

MIT will make the MITx open learning software available free of cost, so that others — whether other universities or different educational institutions, such as K-12 school systems — can leverage the same software for their online education offerings.

“Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “An open infrastructure will facilitate research on learning technologies and also enable learning content to be easily portable to other educational platforms that will develop. In this way the infrastructure will improve continuously as it is used and adapted.” Agarwal is leading the development of the open platform.

President Hockfield called this “a transformative initiative for MIT and for online learning worldwide. On our residential campus, the heart of MIT, students and faculty are already integrating on-campus and online learning, but the MITx initiative will greatly accelerate that effort. It will also bring new energy to our longstanding effort to educate millions of able learners across the United States and around the world. And in offering an open-source technological platform to other educational institutions everywhere, we hope that teachers and students the world over will together create learning opportunities that break barriers to education everywhere.”

Here you can read frequently asked questions about MITx

American Literature I: From beginnings to the Civil War
by Professor Cyrus Patell
New York City: A Social History by Professor Daniel Walkowitz
Introduction to Sociology by Professor Harvey Molotch
Genomes & Diversity by Dr. Mark L. Siegal
Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences by Elizabeth Bauer

The University plans to add more courses over the coming months. NYU’s iTunes U section currently offers approximately 220 podcasts and vodcasts covering such topics as arts, humanities, business, sciences, health and medicine, social sciences, University speakers, and University life. Within NYU’s YouTube presence, there are currently approximately 200 video uploads, featuring speakers, class events, topic discussions, and faculty interviews.
A full list of available course offerings is maintained at:
http://www.nyu.edu/academics/open-education/courses.html.

TEDxCaltech is an independently organized TED event. TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. On 14. January 2011 TEDxCaltech assembled a group of inventive thinkers and creative artists on the campus of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. The theme of the conference was: “Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years”. All of the talks have been posted on TEDxCaltech. This is an intellectual feast for all admirer of the ingenieous Richard Feynman. Have fun!

Pamela Björkman: Visualizing and Engineering New Anti-HIV Agents
Angela Belcher: Engineering Biology to Make Materials for Energy Devices
Scott Aaronson: Physics in the 21st Century: Toiling in Feynman’s Shadow
Curtis Wong: World Wide Telescope: The interactive sky on your desktop
Lenny Susskind: Richard Feynman
John Preskill and Kip Thorne: Finding Things Out
J. Craig Venter: Future Biology
Jeff Marlow: The Forces of Exploraton
Michelle Feynman and Christopher Sykes: Fun to Imagine
Dennis Callahan: Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Artist
Alexander Szalay: Cosmology: Science in an Exponential World
Shuki Bruck: Teaching the Past; Dreaming the Future
Jordan Theriot: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Don Eigler: Moving Atoms, one-by-one
Charlie Marcus: Nanoelectronics and Quantum Computation
David Awschalom: Spintronics: Abandoning Perfection for the Quantum Age
George Djorgovski: Evolving Science and Technology in Cyberspace
Drew Berry: Visualization: Biology and Complex Circuits
Rick Heller: Freak Waves: a Visual Pathway to Discovery
Simon Fölling: Quantum Simulations
Zvi Bern: Feynman Diagrams: Past, Present, Future
Sean Carroll: Cosmology and the arrow of time
Nadine Dabby: Programming Molecular Robots
Pete Trautman: Robotic Navigation in Human Crowds
Mark Davis: Nanomedicines: Nanobiotech v. Cancer
Steve Quake: The Integrated Circuit of Biology
Michael Roukes: Embracing Biocomplexity: Plenty of Room in the Middle
Adam Cochran: The Electronic “Feynman Lectures on Physics”
Tony Hey: Feynman and Computation
Kongar-Ol Ondar: Tuva or Bust!
Danny Hillis: Reminiscing about Richard Feynman
Rives: TEDxCaltech Deconstruction
Lyle Mays: Musical Performance

Portrait of a Lady with a Rabbit, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, ca. 1515

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale’s vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. You can read more about this wonderful project on the site of the Yale Office Of PublicAffairs & Communications. The main site for searching the documents is here: Discover Yale Digital Commons

In Charles M. Vest’s expansive vision, scientists and engineers around the world are creating a “meta university” as they increasingly share ideas and build on common knowledge. Technology enables this integration of minds, leading us toward “an era better called brain circulation,” he says.

Charles M. Vest stepped down as MIT’s 15th president in December, 2004. He began his six-year term at the National Academy of Engineering in 2007. You can find this lecture on MIT World, a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT.