Three's Company

By Ry Rivard. Stanford University, the epicenter of the modern massive open online course movement, said this week that it will develop online learning software with the only one of the three MOOC providers not founded by a Stanford faculty member. Instead, Stanford is teaming up with edX, the Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Stanford and edX plan to work together to develop edX’s software platform, which will soon be freely available to developers across the world. (A key part of its software is already freely available.) In joining with edX’s development effort, Stanford has implicitly distanced itself from Coursera and Udacity, the two for-profit Silicon Valley companies started by Stanford faculty. Read more...