To improve education on campus and around the world:
- On campus, edX research will enhance our understanding of how students learn and how technologies can best be used as part of our larger efforts to improve teaching and learning.
- Beyond our campuses, edX will expand access to education, allow for certificates of mastery to be earned by able learners, and make the open source platform available to other institutions.
Personally, I've started using Coursera (Stanford/Princeton/Penn) in my spare time and I love it. I used to be very skeptical about online education, but now I see I was wrong. Using this free resource, I have expanded my knowledge/skillbase in some pretty esoteric areas significantly than I could have done using books or the internet alone. Had my undergraduate university possessed a platform like EdX or Coursera, I can assure you I would have gotten a better education by being able to review lectures at my own speed and review them at will (as opposed to missing them altogether).
That said, I can't yet imagine a world where I would skip an opportunity to attend Harvard, MIT, et cetera simply because I could take some of the courses for free online.
That's why they do it. Nobody is going to turn down a place at MIT/Stanford/Caltech to do the course online and even if they did there are 20 other candidates.
But they might turn down a place at UVa to do the courses at @MIT - get a cert and spend the $50K they saved on a startup.
This free market increases MIT/Stanford's reputation, it hits 2nd tier state-U and totally destroys the online market for Phoenix University type places.
Why are MIT and Harvard doing this?
To improve education on campus and around the world: - On campus, edX research will enhance our understanding of how students learn and how technologies can best be used as part of our larger efforts to improve teaching and learning. - Beyond our campuses, edX will expand access to education, allow for certificates of mastery to be earned by able learners, and make the open source platform available to other institutions.
Personally, I've started using Coursera (Stanford/Princeton/Penn) in my spare time and I love it. I used to be very skeptical about online education, but now I see I was wrong. Using this free resource, I have expanded my knowledge/skillbase in some pretty esoteric areas significantly than I could have done using books or the internet alone. Had my undergraduate university possessed a platform like EdX or Coursera, I can assure you I would have gotten a better education by being able to review lectures at my own speed and review them at will (as opposed to missing them altogether).
That said, I can't yet imagine a world where I would skip an opportunity to attend Harvard, MIT, et cetera simply because I could take some of the courses for free online.