UC BERKELEY JOINS
HARVARD AND MIT NOT-FOR-PROFIT ONLINE LEARNING COLLABORATIVE; EDX BROADENS FREE
COURSE OFFERINGS INTO PUBLIC HEALTH, COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOLID-STATE
CHEMISTRY; OPENS REGISTRATION (excerpts)
EdX, the online learning initiative founded by Harvard
University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and launched in
May, announced today the addition of the University of California, Berkeley to
its platform. UC Berkeley, ranked
No. 1 among public universities in the United States in 2012 by US News &
World Report, will collaborate with edX to expand the group of participating
"X Universities" – universities offering their courses on the edX
platform. Through edX, the "X
Universities" will provide interactive education wherever there is access
to the Internet and will enhance teaching and learning through research about
how students learn, and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both
on-campus and online. EdX plans to add other "X Universities" from
around the world to the edX platform in the coming months.
UC Berkeley will offer
two courses on edX this Fall, and the university will also serve as the
inaugural chair of the to-be-formed "X University" Consortium. Robert J. Birgeneau,
the Chancellor of UC Berkeley, announced: "We are committed to excellence
in online education with the dual goals of distributing higher education more
broadly and enriching the quality of campus-based education. We share the
vision of MIT and Harvard leadership and believe that collaborating with the
not-for-profit model of edX is the best way to do this. Fiat Lux."
Meanwhile, edX announced two new courses each from HarvardX
and MITx to be launched on edX this fall, along with MITx's 6.002x Circuits
& Electronics. All of the courses will be hosted from edX's website, www.edx.org.
MIT launched its MITx online learning initiative in December
2011, with 6.002x as its prototype course, and more than 150,000 students
worldwide enrolled. EdX was announced by Harvard and MIT in May, with each
university committing to contribute $30 million toward the online partnership.
"We are very excited that UC Berkeley is joining us in
this effort," said Anant Agarwal, President of edX.
"EdX is about
revolutionizing learning, and we have received a tremendous outpouring of
excitement and interest from universities around the world. 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."
"From the outset, we have imagined edX as a platform to
be shared with other educational institutions," said MIT President L.
Rafael Reif. "Berkeley's decision to join the effort is great news: MIT is
already seeing the benefits of its collaboration with Harvard, and we look
forward to working with our remarkable colleagues at Berkeley as we explore the
future of online education. Together, we are sure to learn much about how to
enrich residential education even as we reach new learners far from our
campuses."
In addition to the funding commitments by Harvard and MIT,
edX has already garnered outside financial support, including two individual
leadership gifts. MIT alumnus Philippe Laffont, founder and chief investment
officer of Coatue Management, LLC, has made a gift to support MITx in honor of
MIT Professor Stephen A. Ward, Laffont's thesis advisor at MIT. Harvard Alumnus
Jonathan Grayer, former chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc. and cofounder of Weld
North LLC, has made a gift in support of HarvardX.
Foundation support has also begun to flow in. Earlier in the
summer, MIT received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Grant funds will go towards developing an introduction to computer science
course on the edX platform and partnering with a postsecondary institution that
targets low-income young adults to offer this introductory course in a
"flipped classroom" setting, where students watch course videos at
home and work together in the classroom.
"Interest from other institutions in collaborating with
edX has been enormous from the outset and we are delighted that the partnership
announced today by Berkeley has come together so quickly," said Harvard
President Drew Faust. "Since the beginning, our goal has been to broaden
edX offerings by partnering with other universities who are equally committed
to both expanding access to education and improving research about teaching and
learning. Today's announcement is in an important step in that direction."
UC Berkeley will bring significant, new, open source
technology to the edX platform. Developers from UC Berkeley are working
directly with the edX team to integrate the technology. EdX will release its
learning platform as open source software so that anyone around the world can
adopt and improve this shared tool. Timing of the release has not yet been
determined. The (UC-Berkeley) classes to be offered on edX this fall are:
BerkeleyX – "Artificial Intelligence" is a course
in the basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer
systems, with a specific emphasis on the statistical and decision-theoretic
modeling paradigm. By the end of this course, students will have built
autonomous agents that reason in uncertain environments and will have developed
machine learning algorithms that will classify handwritten digits and
photographs. The on-campus version of the course is one of the most popular computer
science courses at Berkeley. It will be taught by UC Berkeley Assistant
Professor Pieter Abbeel and Associate Professor Dan Klein, a recent recipient
of the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley's highest teaching honor.
BerkeleyX – "Software as a Service" teaches the
fundamentals for engineering long-lived software using highly-productive agile
techniques to develop Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails. The
topics include test-driven development, behavior-driven/user-centric design, design
patterns, legacy code, refactoring and deployment. It will be taught by UC
Berkeley Adjunct Associate Professor Armando Fox, who has received teaching and
mentoring awards from Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers and
Tau Beta Pi Honor Society, and Professor David A. Patterson, winner of the ACM
Karl Karlstrom Teaching Award and the IEEE Mulligan Medal in Education.
For this introductory set of courses, certificates of
mastery will be available at no charge for each of the courses to those
learners motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course
material.
ABOUT EDX
EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features
learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web. Based on a
long history of collaboration and their shared educational missions the
founders are creating a new online-learning experience. Anant Agarwal, former
Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
serves as the first president of edX. Along with offering online courses, the
institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can
transform learning—both on-campus and worldwide. EdX is based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard.
Full release at https://www.edx.org/press/uc-berkeley-joins-edx
The Inside
Higher Ed article is at
There are advantages to being online:
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