O Que EdX Harvard?

Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally. Harvard faculty are engaged with teaching and research to push the boundaries of human knowledge. The University has twelve degree-granting Schools in addition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Thanks to the excellent work of many people across Harvard, we were able to enhance teaching and learning through edX and a complementary suite of online learning innovations that continue to accelerate across the University. Now, we have an opportunity to pursue with MIT a new endeavor enabled and emboldened by our success. We look forward to sharing more details about our non-profit in the weeks to come—and to everything that it will do to improve the lives of learners everywhere.

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Learning on edX transforms how you think and what you can do, and translates directly into the real world—immediately apply your new capabilities in the context of your job.

We measure our success by the lives and careers we’ve changed, and transparently share our outcomes for the benefit of all. Here are some of the things we’ve learned and achieved and how we prioritize student success in everything we do.

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So, why seek to start something new? Increasing access and operating at scale certainly brought more people to the table, but those people most in need of opportunities remain underserved, a situation exacerbated and underscored by the pandemic. If we hope to make progress toward addressing longstanding educational inequities, we have to invest our time and resources in those areas where we believe we can have outsized impact. The agreement with 2U ensures the sustainability of the edX mission—including continued access to low-cost and free courses—through capital investments at the level required to reach learners globally with a wide range of courses across multiple disciplines and fields. It extends and improves the freely available open source platform that has become the foundation for innovations in technology-enabled teaching and learning among institutions and individuals, and it promises the advancement of new learning experiences and platforms. The agreement also enables Harvard and MIT to focus in new ways on intractable problems that require concentrated and sustained effort.

Browse free online courses in a variety of subjects. Harvard University courses found below can be audited free or students can choose to receive a verified certificate for a small fee. Select a course to learn more.

Guided by our founding mission to eliminate the back row in higher education, 2U has spent over 15 years advancing the technology and innovation to deliver world-class learning outcomes at scale. In 2021, 2U acquired edX to create a global online learning platform that has delivered life-changing learning experiences to millions of people worldwide.

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Thanks for the comment! It is an interesting thought that edX could be subsidized by governmental agencies since they bring value at a societal level. I personally think it would be difficult to be subsidized by any US governmental agencies since this is a global platform. It is hard to imagine a certain State in the US would pull money to subsidize a global platform. However, it might make sense for developing countries to subsidize edX in order to have their population get easier access to education.

Ge, nice thanks for writing about edX! it a great tool for long distance learning and I used it myself as a way to get a feeling of how these top universities teach their students, and in that sense it leverages the prestige/reputation these schools have into a good cause. However online educational platforms like edX and MOOCs in general are having a privacy concerns with their big data (especially sensitive data for students, related to the FERPA act) and it would be thought-provoking to see where this would play to the MOOC platforms businesses.

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Transforming ambition into impact

In the end, although edX is only the second largest player in the MOOC market [10], as a non-profit business, the value it brings to the broader students globally should be recognized and encouraged.

Great post Ge! No doubt platforms like edX are one of the greatest innovation that brings high quality education closer to the masses. Not only it’s affordable, it’s equally immersive and disciplined in its approach. Another way I see edX can create value in future is by going beyond the course. It can form a community of people/students with shared interests where people can continue to expand their knowledge based by sharing and discussing with each other even after the course ends. It can be an advanced form of discussion forum that they currently have on their portal which is only active until the duration of the course. This way doing a course on edX will just become the beginning of the plethora of knowledge one can gain in the field of interest.

Universities and institutions partner with us to bring high-quality online education to learners across the globe. Together, we offer thousands of courses, professional certificates, boot camps, credit-bearing micro credentials, and undergraduate and graduate degrees.

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Your edX learning experience is grounded in cutting edge cognitive science. With more than two dozen distinct learning features to help you achieve your goals, our approach follows three key principles:

Today, under the leadership of 2U CEO Paul Lalljie and edX Founder and 2U Chief Platform Officer Anant Agarwal, edX connects millions of people with affordable, career-relevant learning opportunities.

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And with edX for Enterprise, hundreds of industry-leading companies are harnessing our platform to create an impact at every level of their organization.

Established in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. The University, which is based in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, has an enrollment of over 20,000 degree candidates, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Harvard has more than 360,000 alumni around the world.

Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard, better known as CS50, is the largest course on the Harvard campus and more than 4,000,000 learners worldwide have registered for the course on edX.

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Through the non-profit, Harvard and MIT will again collaborate to lead an extraordinary effort to put our knowledge and resources to work in the world. When we launched edX in 2012, we were committed to giving more people the opportunity to experience the intellectual resources that abound on our campuses and elsewhere. The results were remarkable—more than 39 million participants in some 3,300 courses offered by more than 160 member universities around the globe. We could not be prouder of the creativity, ingenuity, and effort, especially among members of the Harvard community, that made the past nine years of phenomenal growth possible.

Coursera’s courses used to be significantly more expensive than EdX’s certificates (around $300 per course), which I am sure yields higher course completion rates per participant, but which deterred me from “exploratory” courses (the course that I completed there was an Intro to Finance prior to HBS). I would say that my WTP for these MOOC offerings is higher than what EdX charges (which allows students to audit any courses for free, and where the only expensive offerings are the MicroMasters) but much lower than Coursera’s (which has shifted to a subscription model, with most courses between $40-$80 USD a month). Coursera also has an audit feature, but it provides much more limited functionality than EdX’s.

Earlier today, Harvard and MIT announced the next phase of our joint effort to push the frontiers of online learning. 2U, Inc., a respected leader in educational technology, will acquire edX, and our institutions will use the proceeds of the transaction to fund a non-profit dedicated to transforming education for all. You can read more about the agreement in this interview in the Harvard Gazette.

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Student comments on EdX: The Path to Learn for Career

Demonstrating your knowledge is a critical part of learning. edX courses and programs provide a space to practice with quizzes, open response assessments, virtual environments, and more.

Great post! One component of value creation that you allude to in your final point is the positive externality of education at a societal level. Perhaps that suggests that platforms that benefit society in such a fashion should actually be subsidized by governmental agencies. If that were to happen, these platforms would likely have to work to articulate and quantify the value that they bring to a society.