Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard held a press conference May 2nd to announce edX. edX is "a joint partnership 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" according to their website.
Between MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW), and Harvard's Open Learning Initiative, both universities have a wealth of data and experience to draw upon for such an endeavor. edX may be starting as a partnership between these two universities, but their leadership envisions more. Other universities will be encouraged to partner with edX to offer their own "branded" open courses on the edX platform, according to Anant Agarwal, President of edX and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT (CSAIL). Agarwal also indicated the edX platform itself is Free (gratis and libre), and the source code will be released open source in the near future.
Stanford University seemed well positioned to be one of the edX early partners, after a wildly successful first year of open courses. Intro to Databases and Intro to Artificial Intelligence saw course registrations in the hundreds of thousands.
Though the courses were open to anyone with an internet connection and email address, only Stanford Students were able to receive credit. Everyone else who completed the course received a certificate of completion, ranking them against fellow classmates.
Since offering the course, the part-time instructors of Intro to AI have gone on to found a startup called Know Labs, which claims to offer high-quality college courses to thousands of people through their portal Udacity.com. This entity is a for-profit educational organization, unlike edX which is a not-for-profit partnership. Co-founder and CEO of Know Labs David Stavens believes the key to their business model is enrollment scale.
In a recent interview with InsideHigherEd.com Stavens predicted "a course of 160,000 students could cover its overhead by charging $1 per student... With costs that well-distributed, Udacity need not worry about whether its students qualify for federal financial aid -- the lifeblood of most degree-granting for-profits."
The most telling portion of that interview for our #why_college readers is this gem based on informal surveys of the participants in the artificial intelligence pilot.
“One of the things we asked was, 'Which is more important to you -- the reputation of the instructor, or the reputation of the institution?'
They said the instructor is the main thing that’s important to them... That gives us a lot of running room.”