Google teams up with Harvard and MIT to help boost free online courses

By Casey Newton. Google said today that it will develop software for edX, a nonprofit created by Harvard and MIT that solicits and distributes online courses for free. Open edX, as the effort is called, is a platform for creating courses that can be taken by anyone with internet access. The move builds on Google's release last year of Course Builder, its own open-source education tool. "This platform is helping to deliver on our goal of making education more accessible through technology, and enabling educators to easily teach at scale on top of cloud platform services," said Dan Clancy, Google's director of research in the announcement. More...