Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have partnered to launch edX, an initiative to offer free online courses worldwide and develop an open source platform to deliver them.
The platform developed for MITx, an initiative launched early this year to offer free MIT courses online, will serve as the joint venture’s foundation. MITx courses feature “video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories, and student-paced learning,” according to information released by the universities.
The MITx platform is open source and scalable so that other higher education institutions and K-12 schools can use and adapt it to their own needs, and the same will be true of the technology used by the new joint initiative.
In a similar vein, “MIT and Harvard expect that over time other universities will join them in offering courses on the edX platform.” The institutions will also use the platform to research online learning and teaching.