Harvard & MIT Announce EdX, a Disruptive Joint Venture That Will Offer Free Online Courses

By the time the first MITx course launched, 90,000 people had already registered, merely proving the popularity of online education. Today, however, with the help of Harvard University, MIT’s upped the ante. Together, the two have announced EdX, a new tool designed to build on both schools’ experience in online learning.

MITx will serve as the foundation for the new system, providing video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning. Certificates of mastery will also be available, as the universities strive to encourage other institutions to hop on board the open-source platform.

“EdX represents a unique opportunity to improve education on our own campuses through online learning, while simultaneously creating a bold new educational path for millions of learners worldwide,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield in a press release...