EdX: Expanding Education Beyond the American University

By Kristina D. Lorch and Conor J. Reilley. In May 2012, faculty from Harvard University and MIT teamed up to create a massive open online course (MOOC) platform for students and institutions of higher education alike. But unlike its for-profit MOOC peers Coursera and Udacity, edX—the new venture—was guided by more academic, pedagogical goals. By making its source code accessible to the public and licensing the distribution rights to its software, edX now allows participating institutions to adopt its platform for their own use and improve the existing code—for free. More...