EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise composed of 20+ leading global institutions, the xConsortium. Founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, edX is focused on transforming online and on-campus learning through groundbreaking methodologies, game-like experiences and cutting-edge research on an open source platform. EdX provides inspirational and transformative knowledge to students of all ages, social status, and income who form worldwide communities of learners.

Previously the xConsortium was composed of twelve leading institutions including founding universities MIT and Harvard, as well as the University of California – Berkeley, the University of Texas System, Wellesley College, Georgetown University, McGill University, Australian National University, University of Toronto, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Delft University of Technology and Rice University.

It will be gaining fifteen more schools including six from Asia including The University of Hong Kong, Kyoto University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,Perking University, Seoul National University and Tsinghua University. They will add to course offerings by including courses on subjects in science, engineering, humanities, social sciences, architecture, management, law, medicine, arts and design.

edX is also bringing on five more institutions from the US, three from Europe and another from Australia.

 “As we continue to grow the xConsortium and offer courses from institutions as diverse as our global community of students, we are moving forward with our mission to reimagine education,” said Anant Agarwal, president of edX. “These schools, with their unique faculties and student bodies, will help us conduct collaborative research on best practices which improve education online and on campus.”

edX differs from other massive online courses (MOOCs) providers because they want to go much further then to simply offer quality free online courses. They are networking the world’s top universities on an open source educational platform in order to improve online and on campus education while conducting research on how students learn.

Thus far, edX has over 900,000 individuals on its platform.

 In addition to these new institutions, edX recently launched more than 20 new courses ranging from HarvardX’s Science & Cooking to UTAustinX’s The Ideas of the 20th Century to DelftX’s Solar Energy to GeorgetownX’s Introduction to Bioethics to BerkeleyX’s Introduction to Statistics: Inference to MITx’s Mechanics ReView.  These and other online and blended courses offered by xConsortium institutions are designed to take advantage of the unique features and benefits of online learning environments, including active learning, game-like experiences, instant feedback and cutting-edge virtual laboratories

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Amherst College has rejected overtures to join edX after faculty members expressed reservations about the consortium’s business plan and the impact it might have on student learning. Inside Higher Education reports that the vote to reject edX proposals meant that Amherst will not be using the platform to deliver massive online open courses in the near future.

According to one faculty member who spoke about the decision, reservations ranged from the fact that massive online open courses (MOOCs) seem at odds with the college’s mission, to the perception that the consortium was looking for ways to completely reshape higher education in the U.S. and the world.

The consortium, which currently has 12 partners around the country and was started as a partnership between Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was considered a candidate for teaming with Amherst in the school’s effort to get its toes wet in online course delivery.

Prior to rejecting edX, Amherst considered and discounted working with several for-profit online education providers.

In a statement, edX said it was disappointed its courtship had ended the way it did. “We are disappointed that Amherst College will not be joining edX,” the venture said in a statement released by a spokesman. “Over the past several months we have had many productive meetings and wide-ranging discussions with Amherst’s administration and faculty. Amherst is a wonderful institution and we would have been delighted to have them join. We acknowledge that online educational platforms are not the appropriate solution for all courses or all faculty.”

Saying no to edX, however, doesn’t mean the end of Amherst’s online aspirations. Even among the faculty members who voted against the deal were those who felt that it was long past the time that the school took a step in the direction of online learning. Although the college prides itself on its small-school atmosphere and the professors are known for dedicated a lot of time to their students, some feel that turning their back entirely on digital learning was keeping the school back.

Faculty members commissioned an internal study to enumerate all the pros and cons of a partnership with edX. Although a copy was provided to InsideHigherEd, according to Ry Rivard, the college attached a request that it not be reproduced publicly.

The report talks at length about how faculty members could use edX to experiment with online content and how difficult it might be for Amherst to try to replicate edX’s expertise. The document stresses that Amherst was being invited to pay to join edX for some costs – $2 million (£1.3 million) for five years, perhaps. Amherst officials asked themselves if they could chart their own course with a similar amount of money and found the risk of failure may be greater if Amherst was on its own.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the founders of online education provider edX, is experimenting with delivering one of the core classes for its Mechanical Engineering majors partly online. This year 11 students are participating in a pilot program that allows them to take Mechanics and Materials II – a requirement for first and second-year engineering students – via taped rather than traditionally delivered lectures.

What sets the course apart isn’t just the control it offers to students over their own scheduling — the technology provides other unique benefits. For example, those who wish to bone up on a particular concept don’t need to listen or fast-forward through the entire lecture to do so. All they have to do is pop the term into the search box, then the algorithm returns a video cued up to the exact moment when the professor begins to cover the topic in question.

The similarity to the ease and convenience provided by the internet search engine giant Google are intentional.

“It’s like Googling your class,” says Ken Kamrin, the Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s a clickable, searchable index of videos … something that might be considered as part of the next generation of textbooks.”

“These are exciting times for online education,” says Pedro Reis, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. “There’s huge momentum at the moment for developing technology, through edX and other MOOC platforms, to deploy to a very large number of students. We’re saying, ‘Let’s take that approach and apply it to benefit our own students.’”

Although those who enroll in the online section of the regular courses are not required to attend lectures, they’re not entirely free from timed obligations. They still have to attend small-group recitations and take the proctored exams.

Kamrin explains that the idea is not to supplant the traditional education environment, but to use technology to offer options. Basically, students who would be in dire straits due to scheduling are being helped out by advances in distance learning.

MIT calls the approach “semionline” perhaps to distinguish it from massive online open courses offered on the edX platform and via OpenCourseWare. It uses technology developed in-house by the school’s office of Educational Innovation and Technology, the Office of Digital Learning and the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

In 2012, Reis and Kamrin videotaped lectures and recitations from 2.002 and tracked the points at which new topics were introduced. The team then organized the videos, creating a tree of clickable topics and subtopics. A student can watch lectures in sequence, or search a topic and watch related videos along a particular topic’s “branch.”

“I like how many resources there are on the website,” says Chan, who often will watch video lectures from the comfort of her room. “It’s presented incredibly well.”

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Stanford University will be working together with the online education platform edX to improve the software which powers its massive online open courses, as well releasing an API to allow other colleges and universities open access to use the software for their own needs.

The move announced this Wednesday is expected to contribute to the growth of MOOCs since it will relieve smaller schools of the need to invest in infrastructure to offer courses of their own.

The improved platform will come with tools that will help schools evaluate the effectiveness of the courses they offer in order to be better able to tailor them to the unique needs of their students. The source code for the platform – which was initially a partnership between Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology — will be released online in June.

“We hope to have a platform that really makes online learning better for everybody in the world,” edX President Anant Agarwal said. His nonprofit organization was founded by MIT and Harvard University last year and now includes 12 universities who have put massive open online courses, or MOOCs, online or will do so by next year.

Agarwal, an MIT professor, likened the Stanford agreement to having formerly rival car manufacturers deciding to work together to design a new car; the result, he said, will be a faster and more efficient vehicle that then can be used for many different types of passengers and trips.

Although a number of schools have joined the edX initiative since its launch, Stanford is not one of them, despite the new commitment it has now made to the platform. It isn’t clear if the university will be financially investing in edX or even offer online courses through it. Currently the school uses its own proprietary platform to offer online classes targeted at the students enrolled in its traditional courses as well as offering limited free access to the public over the internet. The courses do not currently award college credit.

John Mitchell, Stanford’s vice provost for online learning, didn’t rule out using edX for its online offerings in the future, saying merely that all decisions will be made on case-by-case basis.

Whatever the actual portal to online classes, improving the edX open access platform will make all operations more efficient at Stanford and elsewhere, Mitchell said.  For example, the improved platform may be better able to track connections between how well students perform on tests to how often they replay portions of videotaped lectures they they may find confusing; that can help professors improve course material, he said.

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The most highly-regarded names in online education came together earlier this month at MIT Media Lab to talk about what they see as the future of the medium. The summit, titled Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education, was made up of keynote addresses and panel discussions all making predictions about what higher education might look like decades down the road.

The panels looked at different ways that technology might transform education as we know it now. One panel was made up of a debate over how efficient traditional lectures are as a knowledge delivery mechanism. The panel – called Blended Models of Learning: Bringing Online to On-Campus” — included such luminaries as Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard University, who talked about a recent study of student engagement performed by MIT professor of media arts and sciences Rosalind Picard:

… subjects were fitted with wristbands that measured skin conductance as an index of the “arousal associated with emotion, cognition and attention.” Mazur presented a figure from the Picard group’s paper showing wrist-sensor readings for a single MIT student over the course of week. The sensor recorded regular, strong spikes during periods of study, lab work and homework, but the readout flatlined during two activities: attending class and watching TV.

When Salman Khan, the founder of The Khan Academy, an online learning platform targeted at K-12 students, spoke at the second panel “Online Learning: Today and Tomorrow,” he agreed with Mazur that student engagement flatlined when they received purely visual information such as watching a video. Khan said he realized that even as someone for whom video creation is considered a hallmark, yet early on there was an understanding that making the videos was only part of the process. Integrating them effectively into the classroom was the necessary second step.

As several speakers pointed out, however, the advantages of interactive learning over lectures have been well-documented for decades, if not centuries. Indeed, Mazur referred to Samuel Johnson on the inefficiency of lectures.

Johnson wrote, well over 200 years ago, “I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chemistry by lectures: You might teach the making of shoes by lectures!” One audience member, a classicist, went back even further, citing Plato’s mistrust of books and his attempts to impress upon his readers the importance of dialectical engagement as the pathway to true knowledge.

Clayton Christensen from Harvard’s Business School, who gave the third keynote address during the conference, attempted to answer how this wave of technology was going to make a real difference. He said that the new approaches pioneered by Coursera, Khan Academy and edX represented a disruptive technology that was bound to turn education on its head, much like revolutionary innovations turned around manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century.

The internet has lowered the cost barrier for entry that has previously kept out those who wanted to compete with Harvard or MIT in the level playing field, which is driving disruption and innovation.

The suite of technologies that edX and others have introduced — video lectures, online discussion boards, automated grading algorithms, communal text-annotation programs, virtual labs and the like — constitute education’s extendable core. These technologies are now in their infancy, but like the steel produced in “mini mills” that displaced integrated steel mills, they will only improve in quality.

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Harvard has announced the makeup of its HarvardX leadership team and faculty committees charged with overseeing the university’s online education efforts. HarvardX is the school’s operating entity to manage its relationship and contribution to edX, the online initiative launched with MIT which is committed to fulfilling the promise of higher education delivered over the internet.

edX was officially launched nine months ago in 2012, and has already undergone rapid expansion, signing up a substantial number of both domestic and international partners. The effort will be guided by three bodies – HarvardX Leadership Group, HarvardX Faculty Committee and HarvardX Support Team.

The Leadership Group will be tasked with making decisions and setting the agenda for the entire effort. The Faculty Committee will weigh on on course design, set curriculum policies and deal with issues concerning the grant of course credit for classes offered through edX. The Support Team will be charged with putting into effect the decisions made by the HarvardX leadership.

Still to come are a research committee, which will oversee and support the analyses and evaluations of online initiatives—at least in part to apply what is learned to in-class, on-campus instruction and learning; and the membership of the edX board of directors, and of its partnership subcommittee, which oversees identification and admission of new member institutions (a recent expansion has brought the number of affiliates to a dozen).

The analysis of who has been named on the various bodies makes it possible to hazard guesses at the direction the HarvardX initiative will go. The high position some of the appointed members hold in the university also demonstrated the the school is taking its commitment both the edX and online education very seriously. The Leadership group will include the university provost, an executive vice president, two vice presidents and two deans.

Beyond whatever applications of online-teaching and -learning techniques may be made in their Cambridge and Boston classrooms, most of the professional schools and DCE conduct large, often global, and frequently very profitable continuing- and executive-education operations—an important educational and financial opportunity for HarvardX and edX.

The appointments to the Faculty Committee also demonstrate commitment to bringing online learning to a broad range of disciplines. The members include representatives from the Harvard Medical School, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, among others.

Members of the support group include not only the expected leaders in academic computing and information technology, but also communications and development experts—suggestive of a major effort consistent with the University’s announced intention of committing up to $30 million to fund its participation in edX.

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The two titans of massive online open courses continue to run neck-in-neck in the race up sign up partners. Both edX and Coursera have recently announced the signing of additional partners, with one mainly expanding its reach locally and the other looking beyond the borders of the United States to form relationships with schools in Canada, Europe and beyond.

GigaOM reports that edX, the online education partnership founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, already boast a substantial international presence, with as many as 70% of its students coming from outside the United States. Now, the consortium is announcing the addition of 6 schools that will become the first non-American partners to join the X University Consortium.

The new partners include: Australian National University (ANU), Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, McGill University and the University of Toronto in Canada, and Rice University in Texas. With the new additions, edX now counts 12 academic institutions as partners.

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said that signing up international partners helps the consortium to continue its mission to put the best courses from the most highly esteemed professors online and make them available for free to the largest number of students possible. He also pointed out that although edX has the backing of two of the countries best universities behind it, it continues to think of itself as a startup, although one that puts principles ahead of profits.

Meanwhile, according to The Wall Street Journal, Coursera has announced a few signings of its own. Earlier this week, the company finalized the addition of 29 more schools both in the United States and around the world. The most recent signing brings the number of universities offering courses through the company’s platform to 62.

With the impact that Coursera has had on online education it’s hard to believe that it launched less than a year ago – drawing funding from a number of big-name venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley – and already counts more than 2.8 million unique registered users.

Colleges have eagerly put forward faculty to teach the free courses, but few award credit to students who complete those classes. The American Council on Education recently recommended that schools consider granting credit for certain Coursera classes, and is weighing a similar decision for a handful of classes taught by rival Udacity. Separately, edX has made agreements to introduce classes into some Boston-area community colleges.

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Wellesley College, which first opened its doors to students in 1875,  is set to announce that it has become the first liberal arts college in the country to join the edX alliance.

Founded as a joint effort between Harvard and MIT, edX is an online learning platform that counts among its partners some of the most prestigious higher ed institutions in America, and the addition of Wellesley to the roster will allow edX to test out for the first time how well humanities classes can translate into the massive online open course (MOOC) format.

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said that adding more humanities courses will create an opportunity to test whether it’s possible to translate the small-group setting common at liberal arts colleges like Wellesley to the MOOC environment without too many compromises.

“We want to create the aura of a small-group setting, so that students can discuss among themselves,” he said. Teachers will be able to break the class into small discussion groups that would be akin to seminars, he said.

With students coming ­together from all over the world, exchanges would hold great promise, he said.

In an article published earlier this week in the Huffington Post, H. Kim Bottomly, the President of Wellesley, said that school leaders initially expressed concern about online education because it was believed that the approach is more suitable to rote memorization and “training” rather than learning. Bottomly believes that her school’s mission isn’t simply to provide very expensive vocational training, but to provide its students with the tools to allow them to continue learning long after they leave the Wellesley campus behind.

Yet, even with the reservations, Bottomly felt that entrance into online sphere was inevitable, because as a school that prides itself on its willingness to experiment with any and all educational approaches, for Wellesley, not wading into digital learning would have been both an oversight and a disservice to the school’s current and future students.

I view this as an opportunity for a faculty known for innovation in the classroom to continue to experiment with the use of new technologies that have the potential to bring even more excitement to learning, and to enhance and enliven the classroom experience. Using a powerful platform such as edX, Wellesley faculty can fully explore the concept of blended learning — a process that combines the best of classroom and non-classroom experience. We have also joined edX because we believe that the transformative experience of a liberal arts education, which has been so successful at Wellesley for generations, can contribute important value to the online learning space. Through edX and its partners, we will strive to develop the highest quality online education possible.

Those who are interested in taking advantage of Wellesley’s edX offerings will get their first opportunity next fall, although the specifics of what the first four courses will cover haven’t yet been determined.

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MIT President Rafael Reif has announced that Professor Sanjay Sarma will be the first to fill the post of Director of Digital Learning, Bostinno.com reports. Sarma brings to his new job more than 15 years of experience designing innovative ways to teach subjects related to mechanical engineering.

Sarma’s main role will be to figure out what role online learning will play in the university’s future. Among projects to be overseen by Sarma will be MIT’s OpenCourseWare, a revolutionary online education initiative launched by the university in 2002.

When edX was announced earlier this year, former MIT President Susan Hockfield claimed the platform represented “a unique opportunity to improve education on [Harvard and MIT’s] campuses through online learning.” That focus on what online education can do offline has resounded with faculty, as they continue to discover how to most effectively incorporate blended learning into their classrooms. edX has been collecting data on how students learn both in-person and online—data MIT News writes will “profoundly shape Sarma’s work as director of digital education.”

In an email announcing Sarma’s appointment, Reif referred to his job as “experimenter-in-chief,” and that he will be responsible for determining which online education approach will work best in the university’s current academic environment. The fact that MIT is looking to allow massive online open courses to play more of a role in education on its campus is a promising sign for the future of the paradigm. The move is also in stark contrast to those being taken at other schools around the country, which in the past several months seem to be taking a small, corrective step back from MOOCs.

It’s hard to explain why exactly the popular opinion on MOOCs and online learning in general has swung to the negative in the past several months, but at least one person hypothesizes that many who are enmeshed in the higher education system fear its destructive influence and aren’t quite ready for dealing with the potential of online learning to upend the status quo.

As Hockfield said during the edX press conference in May:

Today, in higher education, generally, you can choose to view this era as one of threatening change and unsettling volatility, or you can see it as a moment charged with the most exciting possibilities presented to educators in our lifetimes. [...] Online education is not an enemy of residential education, but rather a profoundly liberating and inspiring ally.

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The number of students who have gone through Peter Struck’s University of Pennsylvania course on Greek and Roman mythology in his 15 years of offering it on campus pales in comparison to the number currently enrolled to the massive online open course he is offering this fall. More than 50,000 people are following along with Struck as he guides them through the intricacies of Homer and Sophocles using the platform provided by the MOOC pioneer Coursera.

Struck said that he finds himself amazed by the sheer reach made possible by online education. Among those taking his course this year include students from as far away as Thailand and Brazil. But when asked to definitively say that the quality of instruction offered by a MOOC is similar to what he provides to his tuition-paying students who actually attend his lectures at U Penn, he demurs.

“Where you have a back-and-forth, interrogating each other ideas, finding shades of gray in each other’s ideas, I don’t know how much of that you can do in a MOOC,” he said. “I can measure some things students are getting out of this course, but it’s nowhere near what I can do even when I teach 300 here at Penn.”

It’s hard to believe that even a year ago few had heard of massive online open courses – now known typically by their acronym “MOOC.” Thanks to Coursera, and the edX consortium, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, it would be equally as difficult to find anyone, at least in academia, who is not familiar with the concept. ABC News compares MOOCs to a meteorite that has shaken up a field that is typically extremely change-averse.

Yet those who want to see online education go further are stymied in two ways: as of now, universities seem downright reluctant to offer college credit for MOOC work, and for those schools that offer online courses, they appear to be no cheaper than traditional ones.

Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education, refers to the “iron triangle” of higher education: cost, access and quality. The assumption has always been it’s a zero-sum game — you can improve any one of those only at the expense of the others. There’s also the famous analogy of Princeton economists William Baumol and William Bowen from the 1960s, that college teaching is akin to a string quartet. No matter how technology improves, a string quartet simply can’t be performed (well) by fewer people than in Beethoven’s day. So the relative cost of college (and musical performance) will always rise, relative to other things where efficiency does improve.

There is yet another hurdle standing in the way of MOOC acceptance as a legitimate way to deliver instruction: cheating. At the moment, edX is exploring a partnership with a company that would allow it offer access to regional centers where the knowledge gained via MOOCs could be assessed by proctored exams. Another possibility would be for students who have no access to a regional testing center to have their exams proctored remotely via webcam. In other words, everyone involved with online learning believes that a solution can be found — even if they are not yet sure what form that solution will take.

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