By Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Ed
Harvard University jumped on the accelerating online-education train. The creation of edX in partnership with MIT marks the latest development in what’s shaping up to be a fascinating contest between the nation’s leading research universities and its most ambitious private-sector entrepreneurs for domination of virtual higher education. Things began heating up last December. MIT announced the creation of MITx, a new nonprofit organization, branded by the university, which would also offer so-called Massively Open Online Courses, or “MOOC’s,” and would also offer certificates to those who earned them–a new kind of academic currency. In January, some of the Stanford professors broke off from the university and formed a new for-profit company called Udacity, designed to offer the same MOOC’s, sans Stanford. In March, some of the other Stanford professors formed another company, Coursera, which will offer courses from Princeton, Stanford, Michigan, and Penn, also online, also for free.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-x-factor/46395
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