Presentation on edX: MOOCs, OERs, and Higher Education

edX is a massive open online course platform founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. The edX learning platform will be developed as open-source software and made available to other institutions of higher learning that want to make similar offerings.

edX currently offers 24 courses from 12 partner universities. The Delfts University (Netherlands) is the first of edX partners to offer their 3 edX courses with open licenses.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the significant potential to offer very high-quality higher education courses to a previously untapped ‘massive’ number of students especially from developing countries. There are currently 3 existing providers: edX, Coursera, and Udacity (all based in the US). There have been recent announcements by UK and European MOOCs.

UNESCO is pleased to note that the edX MOOC initiative is committed to open-licenses – the learning platform is based on open-source software, and edX is encouraging their partner universities to offer openly-licensed OER courses.

Following on from a keynote presentation by Anant Agarwal, President of edX, at the World OER Congress, and discussions with Howard Lurie, edX Vice-President, at the Hewlett Grantees Meeting, UNESCO Communication and Information Sector (CI) organize a lecture presentation of edX to CI Staff.