<p>
[quote]
Harvard University and MIT today 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. </p>
<p>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 who are motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.
<p>This is about a week after the online Stanford free program announced multi-millions in venture capital backing.</p>
<p>If you sign up for or just look at an MIT class (which are boring, outdated videos - at least those I have looked at), they solicit you for money. The free Stanford classes don’t.</p>
<p>Could be, thanks!^^^ Have also just noticed an email from “Coursera”, announcing a free online partnership between Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and Penn - multi-discipline with 40 eventual classes online. Five are being launched now.</p>
<p>It’s good that “certificates of master” will be available. Cause otherwise the difference between online courses and live ones might be that crucial $200,000-plus piece of paper…</p>
<p>^^^If you are quoting from the above citation (#1), it is “certificate of mastery”, not “certificate of master”, and will probably be worth nothing in terms of a valuable credential. </p>
<p>These are more like adult education courses, imo.</p>
<p>^^Nope, already in college. But I do wonder about my nieces, who are currently in elementary school. I think they will hit an awkward transition period in which my sister, who is prepared to send them to private colleges, will have to weigh the cost/benefits of the traditional campus experience and the much cheaper, and by then much more perfected, online option.</p>
<p>It is one thing to offer lectures for college courses online which MIT and other schools have been doing for a while, and quite another to develop courses specifically for online completion and credit. The latter may include interactive questioning, exercises and quizzes, links to multimedia and original sources, the monitoring of progress by profs and TAs, chat or webcam discussion groups and yet to be developed ways of taking advantage of this type of learning.</p>
<p>The element that will be the trickiest to implement is the logistics of exams–there has to be some kind of control of testing, perhaps at designated centers in many locations, sort of in the way standardized testing is carried out now.</p>
<p>mommusic#9 - I pointed that out, because I think the intention of the name is to trick readers into thinking it is worth more than it is. There exists a “real” Master degree, but I have never heard of a Mastery degree.</p>
<p>It’s inevitable. Given that costs of “real college” MUST increase at a rate faster than inflation (assuming our political economy continues its orientation toward ever-increasing productivity), “real college” will become increasingly unaffordable to an increasing percentage of the population until the critical mass of students no longer exists to support an “educational-industrial complex” as it now exists. </p>
<p>Barring massive government support (which ain’t gonna happen), this is a mathematical inevitability. The only question concerns the time horizon, which I suspect is much closer at hand than most people imagine. </p>
<p>Bottom line: If your kids are in kindergarten, they probably won’t be going to what you call “real college.” As for your grandchildren, they won’t even know what the heck you’re taking about.</p>
<p>I don’t know the difference between EdX and coursera.org - but right now Coursera has many more courses and I think 22 colleges participating. I’m taking a class right now on World Music from a UPenn prof. It’s interesting to try this out but I don’t know how the colleges will change this into something that makes fiscal sense for them. Right now it is free.</p>
<p>Now we can look forward to a new type of discussions on CC:</p>
<ul>
<li>Which of edX, Coursera, or Udacity is more prestigious?</li>
<li>When will USNews rank edX, Coursera, or Udacity?</li>
<li>In Asia, edX is definitely more prestigious; agree?</li>
<li>Did edX steal the X from Oxbridge? </li>
<li>Will getting all the Coursera certificates impress the adcom at Penn?</li>
<li>Will the Coursera certificates be the new AP?</li>
<li>When will the IB launch an ibX?</li>
</ul>