EdX announces course offerings for fall launch
With the launch of launches of the first for-profit providers Coursera and Udacity, MOOCs, or massive open online courses, have been generating a lot of buzz over the past year. Both providers offer courses from top ranked universities at no cost to the student.
Coursera, who recently announced it has reached more than 1 million registered users, currently offers more than 100 courses from 16 learning institutions including its original partners Stanford, Princeton, University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania, plus the recently added Georgia Tech, Duke University, University of Washington, Caltech, Rice University, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, EPFL – Lausanne (Switzerland), Johns Hopkins University (School of Public Health), UCSF, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Virginia.
Udacity, founded by Google alum and Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun has focused most of its courses in the computer sciences, and recently revealed that it has more than 700,000 registered users.
Adding significantly to the buzz was the entry of edX, a $60 million, powerhouse joint venture between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into the not-for-profit MOOC space.
To date, more than 120 universities worldwide have expressed interest in collaborating with edX, who has announced it will launch courses from 3 providers in the fall; a chemistry course courtesy of MIT, an entry level computer science course from Harvard, a course in SaaS (short for software as a service) from UC Berkeley, and others.
“EdX will actively explore the addition of other institutions from around the world to the edX platform, and we look forward to adding more ‘X Universities’ as capacity increases,” according to the edX FAQ page.
