How edX Plans to Earn, and Share, Revenue From Free Online Courses - Technology

Harvard and MIT Put $60-Million Into New Platform for Free Online Courses – Wired Campus - Blogs The group of elite universities offering free online courses just got bigger. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced a partnership that will host online courses from both institutions free of charge. The platform, its creators say, has the potential to improve face-to-face classes on the home campuses while giving students around the world access to a blue-ribbon education. The new venture, called edX, grew out of MIT’s announcement last year that it would offer free online courses on a platform called MITx. Students who complete the courses on the edX platform will not receive university credit, although they could earn certificates. At a news conference, the leaders of edX described it as a tool that colleges can use to experiment with online courses and study how students learn. edX plans to host its first courses this fall, across an array of disciplines. L. “Is there a sustainability model in place for these initiatives?” Return to Top

To MOOC or Not to MOOC - WorldWise MOOCs have become a media obsession. Why? In part because they are the continuation of a story that has been around since at least the 1990s and the first days of magazines like Wired and Fast Company. At that time, information technology was depicted as part of a revolution: Marxist rhetoric had been appropriated by capitalism. Information technology would change everything through a peculiar mix of a corporate charge and evangelism, expanded profit opportunities and enlightenment. I’d like to think that since then we’ve learned something. After all, universities have produced a substantial body of research that argues that information technology is not an epochal economy-changing technology. These sources must induce at least some suspicion about the wider claims concerning MOOCs, or massive open online courses. Why this obsession with MOOCs? Second, because it taps into a vein of middle-class anger over tuition costs. And there is a historical irony about all this, too. Return to Top

Cambridge's MOOC Rock Star, EdX Head Anant Agarwal, Disrupts Higher Ed Business Model | On Campus | The WGBH News Higher Education Blog Anant Agarwal speaks at the TEDx conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in June 2013. (Credit: TEDx under a Creative Commons license.) In the land of higher education, where you might find brilliant professors wearing tweed coats with elbow patches, Anant Agarwal is a bit of a rock star. Agarwal is president of EdX, Harvard and MIT's $60 million online-learning venture. Last year, Agarwal taught the nonprofit's first massive open online course, 6002, a course on circuits and electronics. Like all MOOCs, it was posted online for free. "6002 is all about teaching you how to simplify our lives, make things simple." But what Agarwal and his colleagues didn't figure was the worldwide demand for free, online MIT engineering courses. "We had 10,000 students sign up in the first few hours of making the course open," Agarwal said. So how would a rock star react to this type of panic? "You know, I didn't sleep for three nights leading up to the course," he said. And how much sleep has he gotten since?

MOOCs: The cutting announcement of the wrong revolution | betrokken wetenschap A litany of recent complaints shows that something is wrong with higher education: Cost are rising with 10% every year (US), content has lost track with the explosive development of new knowledge, alumni’s competences do not match with the requirements of the labour market, teachers deliver lectures in the same way as their predecessors did for centuries, revenues for society are unclear. 40% of all students are leaving without a grade. Universities are inside looking, fixed at ratings, complacent and self-confident and consequently do not consider any reason for change. According to Christensen[1], universities are on the eve of disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation is the fast acceptance by the public of affordable new products and services, which were disregarded by established companies and are mostly offered by new entrants. Less than one year ago, the first MOOCs (massive online open course) were launched. However, this is the wrong revolution. Learning processes

Major players in online education market Major players in online education market Comparing Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, & edX missions, offerings September 4, 2012 With most new markets comes competition, as is the case with online education. Today, there are four major platforms that produce content specifically for online instruction: Coursera, Udacity, and edX, which provide university-level content, and Khan Academy, which largely targets K-12 education. While they all offer content designed specifically for web-based instruction, they differ slightly in missions, delivery, and focus. Khan Academy is an educational nonprofit founded in September 2008 by Salman A. Khan conceived the idea after making a website to help tutor his niece in 2004, and two years later he would post the first public video. Most of the videos, which tend to be around 10–15 minutes long, are on YouTube, with the exception of the Computer Science section, which contains integrated coding. Udacity has a unique system of certifications.

Reviewing Christensen’s Disruptive Technologies (Harvard Business Review, 1995) in MOOC Terms One of the common citations in xMOOC artifacts and discussion is the idea of xMOOC as a disruptive technology. The concept, developed by Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen, is tossed into discussion as if it’s vital reading I should already know…none of the authors do more than give a cursory definition to the concept in abstract fashion rather than concrete, and in all of the articles I have read, I don’t see consensus on the definition. This makes me think several possibilities: 1) this is a concept so integral to this field that I should know all about it and am an idiot for not having a foundational knowledge, or 2) this is a concept not fully understood but thrown out there in a way that sounds erudite but lacks foundation. I realize my first introduction to this topic was in a Leadership course during my doctoral work. FINAL NOTE: I haven’t gone back through my readings, but I wonder if cMOOC folk use the “disruptive technology” monicker when discussing their model.

INFOGRAPHIC: How Major Players in the MOOC-iverse Get Their Game On It’s not just students and higher ed institutions flocking to the MOOC extravaganza. Venture capitalists, foundations, companies, and non-profit orgs are also getting in on the action. The Chronicle produced this spectacular infographic that helps illustrate the huddle around the experiment. [The Chronicle] Disruptive Innovation Some examples of disruptive innovation include: As companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ needs evolve, most organizations eventually end up producing products or services that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive, and too complicated for many customers in their market. Companies pursue these “sustaining innovations” at the higher tiers of their markets because this is what has historically helped them succeed: by charging the highest prices to their most demanding and sophisticated customers at the top of the market, companies will achieve the greatest profitability. However, by doing so, companies unwittingly open the door to “disruptive innovations” at the bottom of the market. An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of a market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.

edX Drops Plans to Connect MOOC Students With Employers – Wired Campus - Blogs Can taking a MOOC help a student land a better job? Proponents of the massive open online courses hope so. Each of the major MOOC providers—Coursera, edX, and Udacity—has expressed interest in helping connect employers to well-qualified job applicants who succeed in their online courses. But now, after a failed experiment, edX says it is giving up on job-placement services. That was among several developments described last month to members of edX’s consortium in a private meeting during which a possible expansion of the group and of the edX business model were also discussed. In a pilot job-placement program, edX recruited 868 high-performing students from two computer-science MOOCs at the University of California at Berkeley. But it didn’t pan out. The MOOC provider has a number of theories about why the experiment went so poorly. “Existing HR departments want to go for traditional degree programs and filter out nontraditional candidates,” reads one slide from the presentation.

No Significant Difference - Presented by WCET Margaret Weigel: 5 Ideas for EdX, Harvard and MIT's New Online Initiative On May 2nd, the education world welcomed EdX, Harvard and MIT's $60 million online partnership that promises to upend higher education as we know it. At the launch event, MIT President Susan Hockfield, Harvard President Drew Faust and a handful of project administrators outlined a collaboration intended to enhance learning for both residential and online students via shared content on an open-source platform. Projects like EdX suggest that information not only wants to be free, lots of intrepid learners want it to be free as well. Helping that smart but poor kid in Cambodia/Cameroon/Canada (with a robust internet connection) gain access to great teaching materials is a noble cause. But $60 million is not that much money to establish a non-profit organization that will provide no-cost, quality education to all, and MIT Provost Raphael Reif noted that EdX needs to become financially self-supporting. The underlying software will be open source and not for sale.

The Trouble with College, Online or Off There is an editorial in the New York Times entitled "The Trouble with Online College" this morning about online education. It argues that online education has high attrition rates and that students who are unprepared for college will not do very well. The "therefore" is that we should think twice before seeking to attempt the MOOC model (Massive Open Online Courses). To begin with, I generally agree with this article but disagree with the take-away. There is a large body of research in online learning that shows that there is no significant difference between face-to-face and online learning that has been going on for decades and is routinely ignored by many educators and columnists. Student OrientationWe designed a free, fully online student orientation that used all the tools that the school's learning management system used.

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