Thursday, May 30, 2013

EdX offering interesting new tech courses


EdX is a nonprofit project founded by MIT and Harvard universities that was created with the purpose of offering a free university-level online educational platform. Most of the new courses will start this upcoming fall of 2013 as the project is expanding into more interesting courses than the seven initial ones offered in the fall of 2012. That's why enrollment has continued to increase and is expected to stay that way based on the quality and relevance of the materials and courses being developed. 

After taking a glance at the new courses, and for someone having a special interest in tech education, it is clear that the new subjects are appealing to a somewhat more tech oriented audience. For instance, they are starting to offer courses like Software as a Service, Solar Energy, Innovation and Commercialization, Fundamentals of Neuroscience, among others.  In addition, they also have less techie oriented themes like Fundamentals of Clinical Trials, Health and Society, A Global History of Architecture or Copyright.

According to EdX president Anant Agarwal, their mission is to dramatically increase access to education for students around the world, and to offer them top level educational materials in the form of structured massive open online courses, or MOOC's. Even if no credit is being offered towards an MIT degree at the moment, Mr. Agarwal argues that students can get other forms of credit, like using the certificates they receive after completion to help them get admission to MIT or other universities since these courses are being licensed to higher-ed institutions. 

In a may 1st 2013 interview with the online learning publication Degree of Freedom, he stated:

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