Stanford’s venture into online education continues with the school’s latest announcement that it will be using the open-source learning platform edX to host its online courses.
EdX began as a nonprofit project between Harvard and MIT, and grew to include 12 different schools. The learning platform will officially become open-source on June 1, at which point any school will be able to use its platform to provide various online education tools.
Stanford is supporting the move by announcing its intentions to leverage the open-source learning software as soon as it goes live.
Currently, edX hosts free classes from Harvard, MIT and Berkeley. In addition to Stanford, Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas will join in the fall, with hundreds of international schools expressing interest, as well. In addition to free classes, the platform provides certificates of mastery based on evaluation by edX and the participating schools. The open-source model holds a global attraction: More than 150,000 students in 160 countries registered for the first MIT course on the list. Ages of the registrants ranged from 14 to 74.
Stanford already makes use of other major online platforms, such as Coursera and Venture Lab, and the school reported that it will continue with those programs, juggling alternative software options for the time being. However, Stanford’s other open-source platform, Class2Go, will be merged with edX, creating a single open-source project instead of two competing platforms. Stanford also says that 64 different online courses have been taught by 48 different faculty members in its departments, with attendance reaching 2 million students in 2012.
Stanford’s open-source development team has been working with the edX team over the last few months to prepare for the June switch. Eventually, a larger team will be created when Class2Go is merged with edX. Stanford will also continue experimenting with “flipped classrooms” (putting lectures online and using classroom time for discussion), interactive videos, social media conversations and Internet-based assessment.
Stanford has also recently released a series of videos where professors describe their experiences with online education and how it has affected their teaching. Many professors talk about their experiences in online learning as they transitioned from creating simple digital materials to moving content online, and finally to incorporating online learning as an integral, ongoing experience.
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