UC Berkeley announced Tuesday last week that it is joining the new free
online education platform, edX founded by Harvard and MIT that offers
free but not-for-credit courses to a worldwide audience. The addition of
UC Berkeley will give the “edX” online effort its first expansion into a
prestigious public university and a foothold on the West Coast away
from its Cambridge, Mass. base, officials said.
UC Berkeley will offer two courses, one in software engineering and the other in artificial intelligence,
on the edX site in the fall. Those classes will closely follow the
on-campus versions although without the personal contact with professors
and the in-depth research projects UC students usually do, professors
said. An additional five courses will be offered by Harvard and MIT in
such topics as solid-state chemistry and computer science.
UC
Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau said the nonprofit,
noncommercial edX platform, which has an initial $60 million in funding
from Harvard and MIT plus other donations, matches his school’s “mission
and values.”
Birgeneau said he did not think joining edX would
undercut the UC system’s own early steps into online education since
those concentrate on credit courses for tuition-paying UC students, not
the worldwide audience edX seeks. The UC campus, which has been feeling
the strains of the state budget crisis, is not contributing any money to
edX but instead will allow edX to use some open-source technology that
UC Berkeley professors have developed and already use for parts of their
courses, officials said.
Birgeneau said that UC Berkeley
professors could still link their courses to Coursera, a for-profit
rival to edX that was founded by two Stanford professors. Stanford
University offers courses on Coursera, as do Princeton, the University
of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, among others.
Though
it won’t offer college credits, the edX website is expected to give
certificates to people who complete courses and to charge for some of
those certificates in the future. Birgeneau said that some California
community colleges later may use UC Berkeley’s edX courses as part of
their regular campus classes that would earn students credits to
transfer to a UC.
Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said he was
delighted that UC Berkeley was joining and said he hoped to announce
more partner schools in the near future. “UC Berkeley is an
extraordinary public institution known not only for its academic
excellence but also for its innovativeness. With this collaboration, edX
is now positioned to improve education more rapidly both online and
on-campus worldwide,” Agarwal, an MIT computer science expert, said in a
statement.
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