21 ms·

MIT and Harvard announce edX

351 points by denzil_correa 15y ago

peteretep 15y ago
Coursera, edX, and Udacity. First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect. The Open University already offers this, so it can be done.
- semantic 15y ago
  Harvard extension school already offers real degree credit for online courses.
- radicalbyte 15y ago
  The quality of the Coursera material is much higher than the quality of The Open University. I've earnt 150/330 points at L1/L2 towards a Bachelor's around Software Engineering with the Open University UK. I pretty much just took took exams and wrote the required essays in order to pass. NOTE: the level 3 courses have programming projects connected to them. Right now I'm following Compilers and Finite Automata with Coursera. I've learnt more in a week than I've learnt so far with The Open University. With Coursera, I actually have to work to pass the class. So yeah, I hope that Coursera have a plan to turn credits into real degrees. They can charge real money for it. The one thing I see standing in the way of Coursera et al is identity verification: the OU require you to physically sit exams and provide proof of IT. I can't see how Coursera can get past that.
  - optymizer 15y ago
    you've earned 0/1 points towards spelling Bachelor's correctly :P
    - radicalbyte 15y ago
      It looks like I was correcting it whilst you were replying. Since I moved to the Netherlands and learning Dutch (fluently), the quality of my English spelling / grammar has plummeted :(
      - optymizer 15y ago
        concurrency issue, huh? :) As a non-native English speaker, I know how you feel.
  - peteretep 15y ago
    If you get bored of The Open University courses, I've been enjoying to Oxford Software Engineering MSc (which doesn't require an undergrad degree)... For the Compiler course on Coursera (which I'm also doing), I found http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/subjects/SEM.html http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/subjects/SEM.html (which you can do just by itself if you like) invaluable
- cliftonmckinney 15y ago
  Possibly. The cache of Harvard/MIT definitely puts it in good shape to be the victor. But, increasingly, and especially in technical fields, degrees are being supplanted by other talent or qualification indicators. Open source work is a great example. There are significant numbers of folks without CS degrees (or even degrees at all) who have found gainful employment as coders based on their open source work alone. Whether it will be accepted by the Fortune 500 crowd remains to be seen though, and certainly the "show me what you can do" idea doesn't really work for non-technical jobs. At least in the short term offering a degree for these online courses might help. I wonder if for the non-technical crowd who can't show what they've learned an online degree will be thought of in the same light as a traditional brick and mortar one. It isn't so far, but that will almost certainly change if that degree comes from some place like MIT or Harvard.
  - ebiester 15y ago
    Just like real world universities, there may be no "victor." but rather many groups catering to individual needs. If it was a mere matter of location, we'd only have one University per city. For that matter, Western Governors University is still quite large. They could pivot much more easily than Harvard and integrate this into their current system, and they have the advantage of accrediation.
    - waterlesscloud 15y ago
      EDx is clearly planning to compete on quality. I expect them to be pretty resistant to watering down their course challenge level. Coursera is likely to head mostly the same way. Udacity, though, looks like they might lean more towards reducing the challenge to increase the audience. That feels a little dangerous as they're then open to considerably more competition from other schools. The floodgates are about to open. What Udacity has in the short run to mitigate that possibility is a start-up agility mindset. But they'll calcify in the long run, everyone does, and then what? What will interest me most is to see how many people can take on the challenge level of EDx. I suspect it will be many more than anyone would have thought. The people in real trouble are those offering mediocre education for high prices. 5-10 years from now those people will be in a new line of work.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  > First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose. Then the whole cycle is complete. You have a place to learn, and means to show what you've learned to get yourself employed. What else do you need? (well, maybe the social part of universities is missing, but that can be fixed with hackatons I guess)
  - evoxed 15y ago
    Even if you can demonstrate your skills to an employer, what are your chances of an admissions committee even being willing to click the link? I have an A.S. in graphic design, a few years into a B.Arch, and am finishing my B.A. in Philosophy, Art History within the next two semesters. Unless there's some sort of scheduling miracle, I won't even be able to get minor credit towards mathematics or engineering– outside of architecture and philosophy, graduate schools wouldn't want to touch me with a ten foot pole. My primary goal over the next semester is to compile all of my notes and certificates from these courses and scrap with hell to get credit for them. Otherwise I'll be 21 with three degrees and still need to go back to school for two years, just to get my engineering degree so I can go to graduate school for CS/eng. --typed quickly from my ipod so apologies if my argument got funky and rushed
  - jessriedel 15y ago
    > With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? I can't speak to the effectiveness of github and stackoverflow as signals of programmer ability, but I know most other disciplines do not have such services, nor will they anytime soon.
  - tzs 15y ago
    > With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose. Github and a degree show different things. Github shows that the person can write code. It doesn't show that he knows how to decide what code to write. Did he consider alternative algorithms? Did he chose based on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms? If you see an O(N^2) algorithm used somewhere instead of an O(N log N) algorithm, is it because he didn't know better, or is it because he determined that for the inputs in this particular project the O(N^2) is actually faster? A degree in the appropriate field from a good school goes a long way toward showing that the person can do that kind of analysis.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  I realize I represent only one of several types of students, but I couldn't care less about degree credit. I've got a BS in CS, and that's enough degree credit for me. But I would happily do all the coursework equivalent to a degree in math for my own education. I just don't care if anyone recognizes it as a degree or not. I'm not willing to pay degree prices for it, but I'd pay some token amount.
  - UK-AL 15y ago
    A lot of people are viewing this as a way to bypass the normal university route. So some other people will care about credit.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- droithomme 15y ago
  > First one to award real degree credit per course wins This is a complex issue. Real degree means ID checks, accreditation costs, and testing in person. That costs money. As Sebastian Thrum pointed out recently, those things would prevent most people in the world from taking these classes, and is why he chose not to go that route. For his first AI class he had 160,000 students which spanned every single country on earth except North Korea. In one quarter, he may have taught AI principles to more students than all previous professors in history combined, certainly more than anyone at his university had. He also gave the exact same tests and assignments to students at Stanford for real credit and they did no better than random people in far away lands who were struggling with issues of finding electricity and an internet connection. Forcing to a credit model locks those people from outside the first world out of the system. What does credit mean? I have taught high school and college classes, and elementary school students. Now I do software and hardware design, and I hire developers. A candidate having a degree has proven to mean absolutely nothing at all as far as technical capabilities go, nor do their grades! About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, and people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform. So I have to check people's body of work, their projects and interests, and we do proactive recruitment as well. This results in finding talented people. Not "resources" but people. Someone who has taken a full set of courses at Coursera and Udacity is going to know just as much as someone with a "legit" credential from the university. So what is that legit credential worth? Nothing! Rather than promote more useless credentials, it would be more useful and productive to promote fewer. We should even consider getting rid of degree credentials all together since they don't prove anyone knows anything at all. Whether someone can perform is not correlated to whether they have a degree.
  - evoxed 15y ago
    > About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform. Yet this statement completely undermines your point. I graduated from community college instead of going to high school, and now wherever I go I get dirty looks for having some random "fake" school next to a top-ranked one. I've been flat out rejected by people who stated that "[they] know what community college portfolios look like", without knowing the whole story. As much as I wish credits and degrees didn't matter, this is not universally true in application. In fact the less they matter on their own, the more accessible they should become! It doesn't force anyone to lower their standards. That is why sooner or later, the credits will matter.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
  Since it's possible to earn a degree online today, I'm not sure this is the case. Top-tier universities are faced with a significant innovator's dilemma problem here: they want to enforce their duopoly on the granting of degrees and they don't want online programs (which can deliver comparable content to students in a more scalable way at a fraction of the cost) to cut into their tuition revenue.
dhawalhs 15y ago
MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration. This makes it bigger than Coursera and Udacity.
chrisaycock 15y ago
Nice to see that Class Central has already been updated to list edX alongside Udacity and Coursera. http://www.class-central.com/ http://www.class-central.com/
- dhawalhs 15y ago
  Thanks for the link! I operate Class Central.
  - muraiki 15y ago
    That's a really nice site. Thanks for making it! I think that a useful feature would be to allow students to comment on / review the courses. This will probably become more important as institutions start to offer similar courses.
molsongolden 15y ago
Sounds like they'll have more classes now but still no information regarding a way to make the classes meaningful to most employers (certificates, credits, etc...).
- dgabriel 15y ago
  Honest question: should these courses be job training or education?
  - kingkilr 15y ago
    Those two don't sound mutually exclusive to me.
    - dgabriel 15y ago
      Not always, and less so in technical fields, but there is a huge difference between a course like "Leveraging Sharepoint for HR Management" (job training) and "Philosophy of the Mind" (pure education). You can only put the former on a resume, but I find the latter to be more meaningful.
  - molsongolden 15y ago
    I also struggle with this but it's difficult to relay the value or amount of your education to most employers without some sort of credential attached to it. If I read a pile of books on international development and the economics of foreign aid, participate in local group discussions, go to lectures, and contribute to online communities, how do I communicate that base level of knowledge to an employer? If I could enroll in an EdX international development program that consists of a series of classes and projects and results in me receiving an EdX International Development Certificate then I have a short one line item that I can stick on a resume if I want to apply to work with a business in that realm.
- dbecker 15y ago
  As more employers look at your github repo, give coding tests, etc, the credits will be less important than the learning. Though certificates look good on a resume, that makes them tomorrow's solution to yesterday's problem.
muraiki 15y ago
I'm currently taking courses with Udacity and Coursera, and I've noticed one huge difference between the two that I hope edX learns from: whereas the Coursera class is structured like a traditional class online, Udacity's course designers seem to better understand and take advantage of the fact that the course is running in a web browser. The difference is a bit difficult to explain. Both have videos, forums, and wikis. Udacity courses are set up as short videos punctuated with many questions and mini assignments (running in an in-browser Python IDE), along with larger homework projects. Also, the forums are continually monitored and new videos are added to clarify concepts that students are struggling with. In contrast, the Coursera course I'm taking (AI) has longer videos (6-20 minutes) of the instructor mumbling as he draws over and over on ever increasingly confusing Powerpoint slides. Sometimes a video will have one multiple choice question, other times the video will not have any questions at all. The worst part is that only once has the video gone on to explain the question. So if a student has a problem understanding the question, they will have to resort to the forums. There's no follow-up, unlike the questions on Udacity. At the end of each section (about an hours worth of videos) students can take a five question quiz. Granted, the feedback on the quizzes are a lot better -- but it's a lot to expect an hour of instruction to be reinforced by a mere five questions. Basically, the Coursera course is taught as if I was sitting in a class watching an instructor draw on a Powerpoint -- the fact that it's running in a web browser and can provide a different method of teaching seems to be lost on the instructor. Granted, this might be a critique of the instructor more than of Coursera itself -- I'm only taking a single course from them, whereas I'm taking two on Udacity. But Udacity seems to understand that you can't just take the experience of sitting in a classroom and put it online: you have to understand that this is a new medium that allows new methods of teaching. To conclude this rambling post (sorry, I didn't know how to explain what I'm feeling as a student more concisely), if these online course ventures that are popping up all over the place are going to succeed, they are going to have to use the medium of the browser to its fullest: and in so doing, I think they will have to compete with traditional universities. That's what worries me when edX says the online classes will supplement the in-college experience: I think that you're going to have to beat the college experience to succeed in this market.
- dantheman 15y ago
  I've been looking at the courses from both and personally I like the Coursera set up much better - the constant interruption by questions makes it a lot less engaging, imho.
makmanalp 15y ago
"EdX will release its learning platform as open-source software so it can be used by other universities and organizations that 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." Is anyone else worried that this'll be a one-sided "we released the damn source in a zip file" style open source? When administration has such a big stake in a project like this, I hope they will allow community style open source. It's harder to justify each design decision you make to a bunch of whining disagreeing third parties on a mailing list, but ultimately I think it's for the best.
- cpnks 15y ago
  Look at who is actually doing the work, not the press releases. The first class is co-taught by Anant Agarwal, the director of CSAIL, Jerry Sussman, who is a founding director of the FSF, and Piotr Mitros, who has been active in the free software community since the nineties.
jb55 15y ago
I have tried a lot of these new online courses that have been created but I still think they have missed the point, the point that khan academy got right. I don't want to plan my life around weekly assignments. I keep getting emails about about assignment deadlines, causing unneeded anxiety which puts off the whole learning experience.
- muraiki 15y ago
  Some of the courses on Udacity no longer have assignment deadlines. I'm not certain what I think about this yet: on the one hand having hard deadlines means that each "semester" of students stays on the same page and the instructors can respond to the most pressing difficulties they are having. It also allows them to iteratively refine the courses without disrupting current students. On the other hand, it can make things difficult for us in the working world who have to balance education with our work life! I'm taking three courses now, which I found out to be overly ambitious (I should probably spend time with my wife!) so I'll probably drop one.
  - evoxed 15y ago
    I thought their revision the first time around was a good way of doing it. i.e. giving HW deadlines but at the end grading by the exam only if that was a better score. That way it's as if you get credit for staying on pace, but none taken away if you went at your own pace.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  I am a big fan of the weekly assignments. Keeps me on track.
- denzil_correa 15y ago
  Udacity follows a different model. You can submit assignments even after the deadline.
- lupatus 15y ago
  This is why I dropped the MITx course. I'm responsible and motivated, but I also work full-time and have a family that includes a 2-year old. This is the 21st Century for Pete's sake. I should be able to level-up on my own time frame and not Prof. Agarwal's.
sravfeyn 15y ago
It's great MIT and Harvard are combining forces. It completely makes sense. Offering similar courses individually to the same Internet Audience is waste of resources. By the way, all of these courses from Udacity, Coursera, MITx lack one unique thing. These videos can't reproduce the passion of the teacher in a live class-room. In that respect they are little boring. While they are excellent resources, kind of manuals to learn stuff, to actually 'improve the experience' they need to pump passion into video lectures. More than these video lectures I like the actual recorded class room lectures that are kept online for public. Like cs50.net and Tom Mitchel's Machine Learning. Does anyone else feel this 'passion deficiency' in these courses, like me?
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  I feel plenty of passion from Dr. Agarwal in the MITx 6.002 class. He seems like he's having fun, and it makes it fun to watch.
- learc83 15y ago
  I took Sebastian Thrun's AI class last fall, and I'd say he was absolutely bubbling with 'passion'.
  - sravfeyn 15y ago
    Well I had taken db-class as a supplement to actual course at my College. It was just the professor speaking into the camera. While the courses like CS50, were so exciting. I guess it's a personal problem then!
    - bgilroy26 15y ago
      Just to offer an anecdotal counterpoint, I thought Professor Widom was incredible. Had you taken a distance learning class before? If you just stick a random professor in front of a camera, odds are pretty good that they're less interesting to watch and listen to than the "early adopters" that have been a part of this new wave in education thus far.
droithomme 15y ago
Most of the press release is about funding and bureaucracy, as evidenced by the number of name drops and shout outs and culminating in which old school administrator will be granted the honor of being the first president of the new initiative, and going straight for brand name of "MIT+Harvard". Reads like a press release out of the 1890s, the last gasp of a struggling and suddenly irrelevant brick and mortar fabulously costly institute of a bygone era. Conspicuously missing are any specific details about the operation or value other than its brand name and the instantly heavy bureaucracy. It's likely this because they have no specific details yet and the negotiations to date have been about who gets the biggest seats on the board, what compensation packages they can negotiate and who will win the most prestigious titles and positions in behind the scenes political wrangling. As far as the software that runs it, the old canard of making it open source and having other people build it is just tossed out as if that is a magical solution to design. Nothing about this smells agile. It smells very industrial and slow. Compare to Udacity and Coursera who each are happily running dozens of classes to hundreds of thousands of students each, responding quickly to feedback, and demonstrating clearly they are up to the modern speed of doing things.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  The named president of this venture is teaching the first class in it right now, with over 100,000 initial signups and on software developed in house.
- bgilroy26 15y ago
  This is pretty silly criticism, considering the 3 month delays Coursera had this spring. Coursera's delays were because it is much more closely affiliated with Stanford than Udacity is. In the fall they didn't really have the Coursera name settled upon yet and the certificate printouts they sent to people who completed the courses had Stanford's name on them. Discussions involving university reputations are always going to be long and dragged out. Udacity avoided them by having a clear separation between the website and the institutions of its instructors from the outset. Coursera acquired that separation over time. Harvard and MIT's reputations are most of what separate them from FullSail and the University of Phoenix. It is important that they protect them. It is encouraging that more universities are following Stanford into this space. Courses with broadcast lectures and server-based practice/homework/exams will need the (hu)manpower that universities currently command in order to grow quickly.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
peedy 15y ago
I have one simple question, Can I access the material if I have failed to enroll a course in time ( in general for Udacity / Coursera )? Even if I get access to the videos and assignments, it is fair enough.
- varunsaini 15y ago
  Udacity has started mirroring their course content videos. You can check on Udacity web site.
- denzil_correa 15y ago
  Coursera allows you to view videos but not assignments. Go to any course and click on "Preview".
sgentle 15y ago
Can I just say this is super exciting. In Australia, where I live, there was a very brief period where university education was free. It was before my time, but I remember the feeling I had as a child when I first heard about it - not amazement or disbelief, something closer to "oh yeah, that makes sense". I figured that education would have to be free because otherwise poor people would stay poor forever. Not the most airtight reasoning, but I think my heart was in the right place. I hadn't really considered the resources that would need to go into it, and who would inevitably have to foot the bill. But this is the best kind of regression. Maybe the childish dream of "hey, let's just teach everyone" isn't so ridiculous now that we have the right technology. I find it easy to get frustrated sometimes thinking of how much power we have at our disposal, and how much of it goes into more efficient cat sharing and other electronic distractions (some of which, in fairness, I like quite a bit). This is a pretty cool example of how much what we do can mean to people: not just entertaining them but radically improving their lives. The best part, though, is that this isn't even news. This has all already happened. Between the Khan Academy, OCW, Coursera, Udacity and edX it's actually a crowded field now. Great! Large universities move slowly, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who've been pushing for years just to get things to this point. Now things look like they're starting to snowball. It's easy to ignore one university or a crazy startup, but when someone says "hey, uh, half of the Ivy League's on this thing" it gets attention. I'm really looking forward to whatever comes out of edX, but even more to the inevitable answers to edX. It's a great time to need an education.
- subbu 15y ago
  ..poor people would stay poor forever.. This is even more true in corrupt countries. The corrupts have an incentive to keep people away from knowing their rights. A large part of knowing your rights comes from education.
  - personlurking 15y ago
    I tend to think that, in any given country, what you have is a mixture of three ideas being constantly employed. - Bread & Circuses - Plato's Cave - Hegelian Dialectic
stephenlee 15y ago
Online education will change the world. Anyway, it's a good thing to the world students. Cheers! I'm hungry to learn.
septerr 15y ago
Does it say anywhere how Harvard+MIT will price their courses? Will they be free? I should read the article myself and find the answer, but the webpage design, the font and the rambling text is uninspiring. Like an academic paper! (sorry)
- molsongolden 15y ago
  I didn't see any mention of price in the press release but MITx courses are free and on the MITx website they mention that Harvard is joining so I'm assuming that the Harvard courses will be free too. http://mitx.mit.edu/ http://mitx.mit.edu/
- J3L2404 15y ago
  From MITNews- "Will there be an admissions process? EdX will be available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, and in general, there will not be an admissions process. For a modest fee — and as determined by the edX board, MIT and Harvard — credentials will be granted only to students who earn them by demonstrating mastery of the material of a subject." Although your credentials won't say Harvard or MIT.
- solarmist 15y ago
  They're free, but will potentially offer a for cost certificate. This is a non-profit institute, so the content will always be free for anyone wanting to use it. The goal with that is simply to make the edX self-supporting not to make a profit.
  - michaelqlarson 15y ago
    This will be the end-game business model for edX, Coursera and Udacity - once they gain critical mass by establishing a large user base and a good reputation beyond their parents' reputations. I see them creating two tracks based on the same open content: 1) a free not-for-credit track for informal continuing education and 2) a credit-based track with more stringent exit requirements (traditional final assessments and assignments). For the latter, they will be able to charge quite a bit, if it's commensurate with a proper degree from an accredited institution. The billion dollar question: how are they going to administer assessment for distance learners? The ability to securely and reliably administer tests by remote is the final piece of the puzzle to enable accreditable distance learning courses.
varunsaini 15y ago
Online education platforms are future, I am not saying that class room education is going away but both can compliment each other. I am taking Udacity classes (one class at a time as it is very easy to get overwhelmed and join 3-4 classes and don't complete any)and I like it.
venturebros 15y ago
I have taken numerous amounts of online courses from h.s on up. The classes I truly enjoyed were hybrid courses when the class would meet every so often. I loathe 100% online courses I like having people around to ask questions,see how they did something,etc. Posting on a messageboard just doesn't give the same vibe.
Kilimanjaro 15y ago
I tried, believe me I tried hard, but video is not my type. Over 20 years I've learnt all I know reading, surfing, browsing the web, not watching videos. I can digest/absorb/ignore a whole page of text in ten seconds instead of being forced to watch boring 10 mins videos that offer only one min of real interesting content. So, the spot is open for an education tool where text is king, like wikipedia, but with a syllabus.
- ernestipark 15y ago
  There are transcripts for all the videos.
- im3w1l 15y ago
  A book?
  - Kilimanjaro 15y ago
    Online? yes. With side notes, explanations, graphs, live tests, a short video if needed to explain a complex topic (only when required) and much more. So, a book is a good start, just make it rich.
- ddandd 15y ago
  That's why I play Coursera's videos at higher rates. It makes the learning much more intensive and interesting.
  - michaelqlarson 15y ago
    At higher rates? You mean 1.5x or 2x speed? What tool do you use for that?
    - FaceKicker 15y ago
      It's built into Coursera's video player - there's a menu/button to change it somewhere on the toolbar under the video. I like to watch at 1.5x (or 2x if it's something I'm really sure I completely know from previous courses or experience) most of the time, and then if something starts to be especially confusing I'll slow down to 1x.
iunk 15y ago
are they using Windows? Apache/2.2.22 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8t PHP/5.2.17 Server at www.edxonline.org Port 80 or just spoofed.
michaelqlarson 15y ago
NY times just posted some analysis: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-...
willwill100 15y ago
- The UK is so far behind in this regard. - This will certainly be at least part of the future of education
kin 15y ago
It's really great how private universities are putting education online. My friends and I have been watching the free Stanford iTunes U videos and have learned so much in iOS development.
snarkinatree 15y ago
I wouldn't take part in this for "credentials". I would do it for the sake of learning. Some of that acquired knowledge might be applied for commercial gain, some might not. Does it matter? The cost is the cost of an internet connection and time invested in learning. Hopefully what they produce will closely mirror the course contents and requirements for their undergraduate courses.
saintfiends 15y ago
Let me just tell you all how awesomely happy I am reading this. So many mixed emotions, all positive I must say. Made my eyes all watery. I don't expect everyone to understand, most of you here have had some sort of formal higher education. Where I live high-schools only offer Business or Science with Biology, Chemistry and Physics. That is it. Being fascinated with computers from an early age it is what I wanted to study. But in order to get any higher formal education one must go abroad, which means a lot of money, more than I or my family could afford. So until very recently I have been getting my education through books, articles, tutorials et al. This was OK, but I always felt I was missing something, felt like it was all a bit fragmented. I have pieces from here and there but never the complete thing. Then came along Mitx, Coursera and Udacity. So I started watching all these lectures and boy did all things fall into place. You have no idea how great it feels to actually know that you know something after a long time of uneasiness. It brought some completeness to my life. Of course I'm nowhere near where I want to be. This feels like end of an era. I can't help but smile to see traditional education systems come to an end and see it all unfold in my lifetime.
ilaksh 15y ago
To what degree do these initiatives incorporate the latest e-learning knowledge/ideas? Also, to what degree do these and other e-learning curriculum or processes align with rapid change in relevant technology knowledge and skills? I think that these types of programs can call into question or clarify the distinction between academic and vocational knowledge/experience. What good is a programmer who isn't able to recognize the difference between an algorithm which takes exponential time or memory versus one that is linear? On the other hand, what good is a programmer who wastes his time optimizing an algorithm because he didn't know how to use the profiler or worse, was just using an outdated library or technology platform?
easp 15y ago
This is great to see. For the last week or so I've had this uneasy feeling that much of the potential of this wave of elearning was going to get strangled by patents, and other IP concerns. This looks to me to be a big chunk of openness and prior art being set free. That won't stop the trolls, but it's a start.

351 points by denzil_correa 15y ago

Coursera, edX, and Udacity. First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect. The Open University already offers this, so it can be done.

semantic 15y ago
Harvard extension school already offers real degree credit for online courses.
radicalbyte 15y ago
The quality of the Coursera material is much higher than the quality of The Open University. I've earnt 150/330 points at L1/L2 towards a Bachelor's around Software Engineering with the Open University UK. I pretty much just took took exams and wrote the required essays in order to pass. NOTE: the level 3 courses have programming projects connected to them. Right now I'm following Compilers and Finite Automata with Coursera. I've learnt more in a week than I've learnt so far with The Open University. With Coursera, I actually have to work to pass the class. So yeah, I hope that Coursera have a plan to turn credits into real degrees. They can charge real money for it. The one thing I see standing in the way of Coursera et al is identity verification: the OU require you to physically sit exams and provide proof of IT. I can't see how Coursera can get past that.
- optymizer 15y ago
  you've earned 0/1 points towards spelling Bachelor's correctly :P
  - radicalbyte 15y ago
    It looks like I was correcting it whilst you were replying. Since I moved to the Netherlands and learning Dutch (fluently), the quality of my English spelling / grammar has plummeted :(
    - optymizer 15y ago
      concurrency issue, huh? :) As a non-native English speaker, I know how you feel.
- peteretep 15y ago
  If you get bored of The Open University courses, I've been enjoying to Oxford Software Engineering MSc (which doesn't require an undergrad degree)... For the Compiler course on Coursera (which I'm also doing), I found http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/subjects/SEM.html http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/subjects/SEM.html (which you can do just by itself if you like) invaluable
cliftonmckinney 15y ago
Possibly. The cache of Harvard/MIT definitely puts it in good shape to be the victor. But, increasingly, and especially in technical fields, degrees are being supplanted by other talent or qualification indicators. Open source work is a great example. There are significant numbers of folks without CS degrees (or even degrees at all) who have found gainful employment as coders based on their open source work alone. Whether it will be accepted by the Fortune 500 crowd remains to be seen though, and certainly the "show me what you can do" idea doesn't really work for non-technical jobs. At least in the short term offering a degree for these online courses might help. I wonder if for the non-technical crowd who can't show what they've learned an online degree will be thought of in the same light as a traditional brick and mortar one. It isn't so far, but that will almost certainly change if that degree comes from some place like MIT or Harvard.
- ebiester 15y ago
  Just like real world universities, there may be no "victor." but rather many groups catering to individual needs. If it was a mere matter of location, we'd only have one University per city. For that matter, Western Governors University is still quite large. They could pivot much more easily than Harvard and integrate this into their current system, and they have the advantage of accrediation.
  - waterlesscloud 15y ago
    EDx is clearly planning to compete on quality. I expect them to be pretty resistant to watering down their course challenge level. Coursera is likely to head mostly the same way. Udacity, though, looks like they might lean more towards reducing the challenge to increase the audience. That feels a little dangerous as they're then open to considerably more competition from other schools. The floodgates are about to open. What Udacity has in the short run to mitigate that possibility is a start-up agility mindset. But they'll calcify in the long run, everyone does, and then what? What will interest me most is to see how many people can take on the challenge level of EDx. I suspect it will be many more than anyone would have thought. The people in real trouble are those offering mediocre education for high prices. 5-10 years from now those people will be in a new line of work.
vibrunazo 15y ago
> First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose. Then the whole cycle is complete. You have a place to learn, and means to show what you've learned to get yourself employed. What else do you need? (well, maybe the social part of universities is missing, but that can be fixed with hackatons I guess)
- evoxed 15y ago
  Even if you can demonstrate your skills to an employer, what are your chances of an admissions committee even being willing to click the link? I have an A.S. in graphic design, a few years into a B.Arch, and am finishing my B.A. in Philosophy, Art History within the next two semesters. Unless there's some sort of scheduling miracle, I won't even be able to get minor credit towards mathematics or engineering– outside of architecture and philosophy, graduate schools wouldn't want to touch me with a ten foot pole. My primary goal over the next semester is to compile all of my notes and certificates from these courses and scrap with hell to get credit for them. Otherwise I'll be 21 with three degrees and still need to go back to school for two years, just to get my engineering degree so I can go to graduate school for CS/eng. --typed quickly from my ipod so apologies if my argument got funky and rushed
- jessriedel 15y ago
  > With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? I can't speak to the effectiveness of github and stackoverflow as signals of programmer ability, but I know most other disciplines do not have such services, nor will they anytime soon.
- tzs 15y ago
  > With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose. Github and a degree show different things. Github shows that the person can write code. It doesn't show that he knows how to decide what code to write. Did he consider alternative algorithms? Did he chose based on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms? If you see an O(N^2) algorithm used somewhere instead of an O(N log N) algorithm, is it because he didn't know better, or is it because he determined that for the inputs in this particular project the O(N^2) is actually faster? A degree in the appropriate field from a good school goes a long way toward showing that the person can do that kind of analysis.
waterlesscloud 15y ago
I realize I represent only one of several types of students, but I couldn't care less about degree credit. I've got a BS in CS, and that's enough degree credit for me. But I would happily do all the coursework equivalent to a degree in math for my own education. I just don't care if anyone recognizes it as a degree or not. I'm not willing to pay degree prices for it, but I'd pay some token amount.
- UK-AL 15y ago
  A lot of people are viewing this as a way to bypass the normal university route. So some other people will care about credit.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
droithomme 15y ago
> First one to award real degree credit per course wins This is a complex issue. Real degree means ID checks, accreditation costs, and testing in person. That costs money. As Sebastian Thrum pointed out recently, those things would prevent most people in the world from taking these classes, and is why he chose not to go that route. For his first AI class he had 160,000 students which spanned every single country on earth except North Korea. In one quarter, he may have taught AI principles to more students than all previous professors in history combined, certainly more than anyone at his university had. He also gave the exact same tests and assignments to students at Stanford for real credit and they did no better than random people in far away lands who were struggling with issues of finding electricity and an internet connection. Forcing to a credit model locks those people from outside the first world out of the system. What does credit mean? I have taught high school and college classes, and elementary school students. Now I do software and hardware design, and I hire developers. A candidate having a degree has proven to mean absolutely nothing at all as far as technical capabilities go, nor do their grades! About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, and people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform. So I have to check people's body of work, their projects and interests, and we do proactive recruitment as well. This results in finding talented people. Not "resources" but people. Someone who has taken a full set of courses at Coursera and Udacity is going to know just as much as someone with a "legit" credential from the university. So what is that legit credential worth? Nothing! Rather than promote more useless credentials, it would be more useful and productive to promote fewer. We should even consider getting rid of degree credentials all together since they don't prove anyone knows anything at all. Whether someone can perform is not correlated to whether they have a degree.
- evoxed 15y ago
  > About the only thing I know for sure is students from Stanford and MIT are in general more capable than those from a community college, people with degrees from online for-profit colleges like U. Phoenix and CIS degrees from anywhere can be relied on to not know enough to perform. Yet this statement completely undermines your point. I graduated from community college instead of going to high school, and now wherever I go I get dirty looks for having some random "fake" school next to a top-ranked one. I've been flat out rejected by people who stated that "[they] know what community college portfolios look like", without knowing the whole story. As much as I wish credits and degrees didn't matter, this is not universally true in application. In fact the less they matter on their own, the more accessible they should become! It doesn't force anyone to lower their standards. That is why sooner or later, the credits will matter.
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
Since it's possible to earn a degree online today, I'm not sure this is the case. Top-tier universities are faced with a significant innovator's dilemma problem here: they want to enforce their duopoly on the granting of degrees and they don't want online programs (which can deliver comparable content to students in a more scalable way at a fraction of the cost) to cut into their tuition revenue.

dhawalhs 15y ago

MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each) in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the collaboration. This makes it bigger than Coursera and Udacity.

chrisaycock 15y ago

Nice to see that Class Central has already been updated to list edX alongside Udacity and Coursera. http://www.class-central.com/ http://www.class-central.com/

dhawalhs 15y ago
Thanks for the link! I operate Class Central.
- muraiki 15y ago
  That's a really nice site. Thanks for making it! I think that a useful feature would be to allow students to comment on / review the courses. This will probably become more important as institutions start to offer similar courses.

molsongolden 15y ago

Sounds like they'll have more classes now but still no information regarding a way to make the classes meaningful to most employers (certificates, credits, etc...).

dgabriel 15y ago
Honest question: should these courses be job training or education?
- kingkilr 15y ago
  Those two don't sound mutually exclusive to me.
  - dgabriel 15y ago
    Not always, and less so in technical fields, but there is a huge difference between a course like "Leveraging Sharepoint for HR Management" (job training) and "Philosophy of the Mind" (pure education). You can only put the former on a resume, but I find the latter to be more meaningful.
- molsongolden 15y ago
  I also struggle with this but it's difficult to relay the value or amount of your education to most employers without some sort of credential attached to it. If I read a pile of books on international development and the economics of foreign aid, participate in local group discussions, go to lectures, and contribute to online communities, how do I communicate that base level of knowledge to an employer? If I could enroll in an EdX international development program that consists of a series of classes and projects and results in me receiving an EdX International Development Certificate then I have a short one line item that I can stick on a resume if I want to apply to work with a business in that realm.
dbecker 15y ago
As more employers look at your github repo, give coding tests, etc, the credits will be less important than the learning. Though certificates look good on a resume, that makes them tomorrow's solution to yesterday's problem.

muraiki 15y ago

I'm currently taking courses with Udacity and Coursera, and I've noticed one huge difference between the two that I hope edX learns from: whereas the Coursera class is structured like a traditional class online, Udacity's course designers seem to better understand and take advantage of the fact that the course is running in a web browser. The difference is a bit difficult to explain. Both have videos, forums, and wikis. Udacity courses are set up as short videos punctuated with many questions and mini assignments (running in an in-browser Python IDE), along with larger homework projects. Also, the forums are continually monitored and new videos are added to clarify concepts that students are struggling with. In contrast, the Coursera course I'm taking (AI) has longer videos (6-20 minutes) of the instructor mumbling as he draws over and over on ever increasingly confusing Powerpoint slides. Sometimes a video will have one multiple choice question, other times the video will not have any questions at all. The worst part is that only once has the video gone on to explain the question. So if a student has a problem understanding the question, they will have to resort to the forums. There's no follow-up, unlike the questions on Udacity. At the end of each section (about an hours worth of videos) students can take a five question quiz. Granted, the feedback on the quizzes are a lot better -- but it's a lot to expect an hour of instruction to be reinforced by a mere five questions. Basically, the Coursera course is taught as if I was sitting in a class watching an instructor draw on a Powerpoint -- the fact that it's running in a web browser and can provide a different method of teaching seems to be lost on the instructor. Granted, this might be a critique of the instructor more than of Coursera itself -- I'm only taking a single course from them, whereas I'm taking two on Udacity. But Udacity seems to understand that you can't just take the experience of sitting in a classroom and put it online: you have to understand that this is a new medium that allows new methods of teaching. To conclude this rambling post (sorry, I didn't know how to explain what I'm feeling as a student more concisely), if these online course ventures that are popping up all over the place are going to succeed, they are going to have to use the medium of the browser to its fullest: and in so doing, I think they will have to compete with traditional universities. That's what worries me when edX says the online classes will supplement the in-college experience: I think that you're going to have to beat the college experience to succeed in this market.

dantheman 15y ago
I've been looking at the courses from both and personally I like the Coursera set up much better - the constant interruption by questions makes it a lot less engaging, imho.

makmanalp 15y ago

"EdX will release its learning platform as open-source software so it can be used by other universities and organizations that 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." Is anyone else worried that this'll be a one-sided "we released the damn source in a zip file" style open source? When administration has such a big stake in a project like this, I hope they will allow community style open source. It's harder to justify each design decision you make to a bunch of whining disagreeing third parties on a mailing list, but ultimately I think it's for the best.

cpnks 15y ago
Look at who is actually doing the work, not the press releases. The first class is co-taught by Anant Agarwal, the director of CSAIL, Jerry Sussman, who is a founding director of the FSF, and Piotr Mitros, who has been active in the free software community since the nineties.

jb55 15y ago

I have tried a lot of these new online courses that have been created but I still think they have missed the point, the point that khan academy got right. I don't want to plan my life around weekly assignments. I keep getting emails about about assignment deadlines, causing unneeded anxiety which puts off the whole learning experience.

muraiki 15y ago
Some of the courses on Udacity no longer have assignment deadlines. I'm not certain what I think about this yet: on the one hand having hard deadlines means that each "semester" of students stays on the same page and the instructors can respond to the most pressing difficulties they are having. It also allows them to iteratively refine the courses without disrupting current students. On the other hand, it can make things difficult for us in the working world who have to balance education with our work life! I'm taking three courses now, which I found out to be overly ambitious (I should probably spend time with my wife!) so I'll probably drop one.
- evoxed 15y ago
  I thought their revision the first time around was a good way of doing it. i.e. giving HW deadlines but at the end grading by the exam only if that was a better score. That way it's as if you get credit for staying on pace, but none taken away if you went at your own pace.
waterlesscloud 15y ago
I am a big fan of the weekly assignments. Keeps me on track.
denzil_correa 15y ago
Udacity follows a different model. You can submit assignments even after the deadline.
lupatus 15y ago
This is why I dropped the MITx course. I'm responsible and motivated, but I also work full-time and have a family that includes a 2-year old. This is the 21st Century for Pete's sake. I should be able to level-up on my own time frame and not Prof. Agarwal's.

sravfeyn 15y ago

It's great MIT and Harvard are combining forces. It completely makes sense. Offering similar courses individually to the same Internet Audience is waste of resources. By the way, all of these courses from Udacity, Coursera, MITx lack one unique thing. These videos can't reproduce the passion of the teacher in a live class-room. In that respect they are little boring. While they are excellent resources, kind of manuals to learn stuff, to actually 'improve the experience' they need to pump passion into video lectures. More than these video lectures I like the actual recorded class room lectures that are kept online for public. Like cs50.net and Tom Mitchel's Machine Learning. Does anyone else feel this 'passion deficiency' in these courses, like me?

waterlesscloud 15y ago
I feel plenty of passion from Dr. Agarwal in the MITx 6.002 class. He seems like he's having fun, and it makes it fun to watch.
learc83 15y ago
I took Sebastian Thrun's AI class last fall, and I'd say he was absolutely bubbling with 'passion'.
- sravfeyn 15y ago
  Well I had taken db-class as a supplement to actual course at my College. It was just the professor speaking into the camera. While the courses like CS50, were so exciting. I guess it's a personal problem then!
  - bgilroy26 15y ago
    Just to offer an anecdotal counterpoint, I thought Professor Widom was incredible. Had you taken a distance learning class before? If you just stick a random professor in front of a camera, odds are pretty good that they're less interesting to watch and listen to than the "early adopters" that have been a part of this new wave in education thus far.

droithomme 15y ago

Most of the press release is about funding and bureaucracy, as evidenced by the number of name drops and shout outs and culminating in which old school administrator will be granted the honor of being the first president of the new initiative, and going straight for brand name of "MIT+Harvard". Reads like a press release out of the 1890s, the last gasp of a struggling and suddenly irrelevant brick and mortar fabulously costly institute of a bygone era. Conspicuously missing are any specific details about the operation or value other than its brand name and the instantly heavy bureaucracy. It's likely this because they have no specific details yet and the negotiations to date have been about who gets the biggest seats on the board, what compensation packages they can negotiate and who will win the most prestigious titles and positions in behind the scenes political wrangling. As far as the software that runs it, the old canard of making it open source and having other people build it is just tossed out as if that is a magical solution to design. Nothing about this smells agile. It smells very industrial and slow. Compare to Udacity and Coursera who each are happily running dozens of classes to hundreds of thousands of students each, responding quickly to feedback, and demonstrating clearly they are up to the modern speed of doing things.

waterlesscloud 15y ago
The named president of this venture is teaching the first class in it right now, with over 100,000 initial signups and on software developed in house.
bgilroy26 15y ago
This is pretty silly criticism, considering the 3 month delays Coursera had this spring. Coursera's delays were because it is much more closely affiliated with Stanford than Udacity is. In the fall they didn't really have the Coursera name settled upon yet and the certificate printouts they sent to people who completed the courses had Stanford's name on them. Discussions involving university reputations are always going to be long and dragged out. Udacity avoided them by having a clear separation between the website and the institutions of its instructors from the outset. Coursera acquired that separation over time. Harvard and MIT's reputations are most of what separate them from FullSail and the University of Phoenix. It is important that they protect them. It is encouraging that more universities are following Stanford into this space. Courses with broadcast lectures and server-based practice/homework/exams will need the (hu)manpower that universities currently command in order to grow quickly.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

peedy 15y ago

I have one simple question, Can I access the material if I have failed to enroll a course in time ( in general for Udacity / Coursera )? Even if I get access to the videos and assignments, it is fair enough.

varunsaini 15y ago
Udacity has started mirroring their course content videos. You can check on Udacity web site.
denzil_correa 15y ago
Coursera allows you to view videos but not assignments. Go to any course and click on "Preview".

sgentle 15y ago

Can I just say this is super exciting. In Australia, where I live, there was a very brief period where university education was free. It was before my time, but I remember the feeling I had as a child when I first heard about it - not amazement or disbelief, something closer to "oh yeah, that makes sense". I figured that education would have to be free because otherwise poor people would stay poor forever. Not the most airtight reasoning, but I think my heart was in the right place. I hadn't really considered the resources that would need to go into it, and who would inevitably have to foot the bill. But this is the best kind of regression. Maybe the childish dream of "hey, let's just teach everyone" isn't so ridiculous now that we have the right technology. I find it easy to get frustrated sometimes thinking of how much power we have at our disposal, and how much of it goes into more efficient cat sharing and other electronic distractions (some of which, in fairness, I like quite a bit). This is a pretty cool example of how much what we do can mean to people: not just entertaining them but radically improving their lives. The best part, though, is that this isn't even news. This has all already happened. Between the Khan Academy, OCW, Coursera, Udacity and edX it's actually a crowded field now. Great! Large universities move slowly, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who've been pushing for years just to get things to this point. Now things look like they're starting to snowball. It's easy to ignore one university or a crazy startup, but when someone says "hey, uh, half of the Ivy League's on this thing" it gets attention. I'm really looking forward to whatever comes out of edX, but even more to the inevitable answers to edX. It's a great time to need an education.

subbu 15y ago
..poor people would stay poor forever.. This is even more true in corrupt countries. The corrupts have an incentive to keep people away from knowing their rights. A large part of knowing your rights comes from education.
- personlurking 15y ago
  I tend to think that, in any given country, what you have is a mixture of three ideas being constantly employed. - Bread & Circuses - Plato's Cave - Hegelian Dialectic

stephenlee 15y ago

Online education will change the world. Anyway, it's a good thing to the world students. Cheers! I'm hungry to learn.

septerr 15y ago

Does it say anywhere how Harvard+MIT will price their courses? Will they be free? I should read the article myself and find the answer, but the webpage design, the font and the rambling text is uninspiring. Like an academic paper! (sorry)

molsongolden 15y ago
I didn't see any mention of price in the press release but MITx courses are free and on the MITx website they mention that Harvard is joining so I'm assuming that the Harvard courses will be free too. http://mitx.mit.edu/ http://mitx.mit.edu/
J3L2404 15y ago
From MITNews- "Will there be an admissions process? EdX will be available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, and in general, there will not be an admissions process. For a modest fee — and as determined by the edX board, MIT and Harvard — credentials will be granted only to students who earn them by demonstrating mastery of the material of a subject." Although your credentials won't say Harvard or MIT.
solarmist 15y ago
They're free, but will potentially offer a for cost certificate. This is a non-profit institute, so the content will always be free for anyone wanting to use it. The goal with that is simply to make the edX self-supporting not to make a profit.
- michaelqlarson 15y ago
  This will be the end-game business model for edX, Coursera and Udacity - once they gain critical mass by establishing a large user base and a good reputation beyond their parents' reputations. I see them creating two tracks based on the same open content: 1) a free not-for-credit track for informal continuing education and 2) a credit-based track with more stringent exit requirements (traditional final assessments and assignments). For the latter, they will be able to charge quite a bit, if it's commensurate with a proper degree from an accredited institution. The billion dollar question: how are they going to administer assessment for distance learners? The ability to securely and reliably administer tests by remote is the final piece of the puzzle to enable accreditable distance learning courses.

varunsaini 15y ago

Online education platforms are future, I am not saying that class room education is going away but both can compliment each other. I am taking Udacity classes (one class at a time as it is very easy to get overwhelmed and join 3-4 classes and don't complete any)and I like it.

venturebros 15y ago

I have taken numerous amounts of online courses from h.s on up. The classes I truly enjoyed were hybrid courses when the class would meet every so often. I loathe 100% online courses I like having people around to ask questions,see how they did something,etc. Posting on a messageboard just doesn't give the same vibe.

Kilimanjaro 15y ago

I tried, believe me I tried hard, but video is not my type. Over 20 years I've learnt all I know reading, surfing, browsing the web, not watching videos. I can digest/absorb/ignore a whole page of text in ten seconds instead of being forced to watch boring 10 mins videos that offer only one min of real interesting content. So, the spot is open for an education tool where text is king, like wikipedia, but with a syllabus.

ernestipark 15y ago
There are transcripts for all the videos.
im3w1l 15y ago
A book?
- Kilimanjaro 15y ago
  Online? yes. With side notes, explanations, graphs, live tests, a short video if needed to explain a complex topic (only when required) and much more. So, a book is a good start, just make it rich.
ddandd 15y ago
That's why I play Coursera's videos at higher rates. It makes the learning much more intensive and interesting.
- michaelqlarson 15y ago
  At higher rates? You mean 1.5x or 2x speed? What tool do you use for that?
  - FaceKicker 15y ago
    It's built into Coursera's video player - there's a menu/button to change it somewhere on the toolbar under the video. I like to watch at 1.5x (or 2x if it's something I'm really sure I completely know from previous courses or experience) most of the time, and then if something starts to be especially confusing I'll slow down to 1x.

iunk 15y ago

are they using Windows? Apache/2.2.22 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8t PHP/5.2.17 Server at www.edxonline.org Port 80 or just spoofed.

michaelqlarson 15y ago

NY times just posted some analysis: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html?hp http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-...

willwill100 15y ago

- The UK is so far behind in this regard. - This will certainly be at least part of the future of education

kin 15y ago

It's really great how private universities are putting education online. My friends and I have been watching the free Stanford iTunes U videos and have learned so much in iOS development.

snarkinatree 15y ago

I wouldn't take part in this for "credentials". I would do it for the sake of learning. Some of that acquired knowledge might be applied for commercial gain, some might not. Does it matter? The cost is the cost of an internet connection and time invested in learning. Hopefully what they produce will closely mirror the course contents and requirements for their undergraduate courses.

saintfiends 15y ago

Let me just tell you all how awesomely happy I am reading this. So many mixed emotions, all positive I must say. Made my eyes all watery. I don't expect everyone to understand, most of you here have had some sort of formal higher education. Where I live high-schools only offer Business or Science with Biology, Chemistry and Physics. That is it. Being fascinated with computers from an early age it is what I wanted to study. But in order to get any higher formal education one must go abroad, which means a lot of money, more than I or my family could afford. So until very recently I have been getting my education through books, articles, tutorials et al. This was OK, but I always felt I was missing something, felt like it was all a bit fragmented. I have pieces from here and there but never the complete thing. Then came along Mitx, Coursera and Udacity. So I started watching all these lectures and boy did all things fall into place. You have no idea how great it feels to actually know that you know something after a long time of uneasiness. It brought some completeness to my life. Of course I'm nowhere near where I want to be. This feels like end of an era. I can't help but smile to see traditional education systems come to an end and see it all unfold in my lifetime.

ilaksh 15y ago

To what degree do these initiatives incorporate the latest e-learning knowledge/ideas? Also, to what degree do these and other e-learning curriculum or processes align with rapid change in relevant technology knowledge and skills? I think that these types of programs can call into question or clarify the distinction between academic and vocational knowledge/experience. What good is a programmer who isn't able to recognize the difference between an algorithm which takes exponential time or memory versus one that is linear? On the other hand, what good is a programmer who wastes his time optimizing an algorithm because he didn't know how to use the profiler or worse, was just using an outdated library or technology platform?

easp 15y ago

This is great to see. For the last week or so I've had this uneasy feeling that much of the potential of this wave of elearning was going to get strangled by patents, and other IP concerns. This looks to me to be a big chunk of openness and prior art being set free. That won't stop the trolls, but it's a start.