
MIT and Harvard announce edX  - denzil_correa
http://web.mit.edu/press/2012/mit-harvard-edx-announcement.html
======
sgentle
Can I just say this is super exciting. In Australia, where I live, there was a
very brief period where university education was free. It was before my time,
but I remember the feeling I had as a child when I first heard about it - not
amazement or disbelief, something closer to "oh yeah, that makes sense". I
figured that education would have to be free because otherwise poor people
would stay poor forever. Not the most airtight reasoning, but I think my heart
was in the right place. I hadn't really considered the resources that would
need to go into it, and who would inevitably have to foot the bill.

But this is the best kind of regression. Maybe the childish dream of "hey,
let's just teach everyone" isn't so ridiculous now that we have the right
technology. I find it easy to get frustrated sometimes thinking of how much
power we have at our disposal, and how much of it goes into more efficient cat
sharing and other electronic distractions (some of which, in fairness, I like
quite a bit). This is a pretty cool example of how much what we do can mean to
people: not just entertaining them but radically improving their lives.

The best part, though, is that this isn't even news. This has all already
happened. Between the Khan Academy, OCW, Coursera, Udacity and edX it's
actually a crowded field now. Great! Large universities move slowly, and I'm
sure there are a lot of people who've been pushing for years just to get
things to this point. Now things look like they're starting to snowball. It's
easy to ignore one university or a crazy startup, but when someone says "hey,
uh, half of the Ivy League's on this thing" it gets attention. I'm really
looking forward to whatever comes out of edX, but even more to the inevitable
answers to edX. It's a great time to need an education.

~~~
subbu
_..poor people would stay poor forever.._

This is even more true in corrupt countries. The corrupts have an incentive to
keep people away from knowing their rights. A large part of knowing your
rights comes from education.

~~~
personlurking
I tend to think that, in any given country, what you have is a mixture of
three ideas being constantly employed.

\- Bread & Circuses

\- Plato's Cave

\- Hegelian Dialectic

------
muraiki
I'm currently taking courses with Udacity and Coursera, and I've noticed one
huge difference between the two that I hope edX learns from: whereas the
Coursera class is structured like a traditional class online, Udacity's course
designers seem to better understand and take advantage of the fact that the
course is running in a web browser.

The difference is a bit difficult to explain. Both have videos, forums, and
wikis. Udacity courses are set up as short videos punctuated with many
questions and mini assignments (running in an in-browser Python IDE), along
with larger homework projects. Also, the forums are continually monitored and
new videos are added to clarify concepts that students are struggling with.

In contrast, the Coursera course I'm taking (AI) has longer videos (6-20
minutes) of the instructor mumbling as he draws over and over on ever
increasingly confusing Powerpoint slides. Sometimes a video will have one
multiple choice question, other times the video will not have any questions at
all. The worst part is that only once has the video gone on to explain the
question. So if a student has a problem understanding the question, they will
have to resort to the forums. There's no follow-up, unlike the questions on
Udacity. At the end of each section (about an hours worth of videos) students
can take a five question quiz. Granted, the feedback on the quizzes are a lot
better -- but it's a lot to expect an hour of instruction to be reinforced by
a mere five questions.

Basically, the Coursera course is taught as if I was sitting in a class
watching an instructor draw on a Powerpoint -- the fact that it's running in a
web browser and can provide a different method of teaching seems to be lost on
the instructor.

Granted, this might be a critique of the instructor more than of Coursera
itself -- I'm only taking a single course from them, whereas I'm taking two on
Udacity. But Udacity seems to understand that you can't just take the
experience of sitting in a classroom and put it online: you have to understand
that this is a new medium that allows new methods of teaching.

To conclude this rambling post (sorry, I didn't know how to explain what I'm
feeling as a student more concisely), if these online course ventures that are
popping up all over the place are going to succeed, they are going to have to
use the medium of the browser to its fullest: and in so doing, I think they
will have to compete with traditional universities. That's what worries me
when edX says the online classes will supplement the in-college experience: I
think that you're going to have to beat the college experience to succeed in
this market.

~~~
DennisP
I liked Udacity best at first, but after a while found myself spending a lot
more time with Coursera. Mainly for two reasons:

\- Udacity sometimes belabors some really basic points. Coursera never gives
me that "dumbed-down" feeling. It's more like a real, and challenging, college
course.

\- Coursera lets me speed up the lecture, as much as 2x, and every time I go
to a new lecture it remembers that speed. I managed to speed up Udacity
lectures by going to html5 in youtube, but I had to reset it every time I
started a new 2-minute segment.

~~~
hacman
I'm going through the Coursera machine learning class right now and I have to
say that the professor glosses over several details and often makes comments
like "if you're not familiar with calculus..." and "if you're not familiar
with statistics..." which caught me off guard at first. I really doubt that
actual Stanford students enrolled in a machine learning course would be lost
on the incredibly basic operations (e.g., taking the partial derivative of a
polynomial function) he is using.

Also, there has been no acknowledgement of how contrived the exercises are.
For instance: exercise one gives a data set of a the profitability of a
company's existing stores versus the population size of the city in which the
store is located (in units of 10,000 dollars and people, respectively). The
range of the data is 5-23 (population), with most of it concentrated below 10.
We fit a straight line to the data using least squares, then use that line to
predict the profitability of two new locations--in cities of populations 35
and 75. I understand that this is an intro course, but there is not a word
about how ridiculous this is.

I don't mean to be overly negative. I am enjoying the course, but I am
surprised a bit by how basic it is. Let me say that I do like the approach of
the course to ML, which is to formulate a parameterized cost function and then
minimize it by some general method, rather than the typical statistics course
approach which is to solve ordinary least squares directly, which gives an
"exact solution" (given the data) but does not generalize to more general
models.

I know this is foundational material and overall, I am impressed by the
approach of the course, but I would expect more comments on the weakness of
the naïve methods we are employing at this early stage and how they will
eventually be improved. I find it very helpful when professors at least
reference more advanced methods or provide references for further reading by
the interested student. Admittedly, that is more frequently a feature of
graduate courses, but encouraging students to go beyond the material is an
important aspect of good teaching. I have watched the videos for several other
online courses and I do appreciate the fact that Coursera is allowing me to
hand in assignments for grading, which vastly increases by engagement with the
material. This, in fact, is the most valuable resource offered by the program.
The lectures themselves are fine--if a bit dry--but a good book or a set of
well-prepared notes (not slides) would probably suffice just as well if
accompanied by the assignment grader.

All in all, this is great. The more people who know about machine learning
(and have access to higher education in general), the better.

~~~
DennisP
I'm pretty rusty on my math, so I guess it happens to hit the sweet spot for
me at the moment. Once I get back up to speed on calculus I might feel
different about it.

You might be interested in this version at CalTech:
<http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html>

~~~
hacman
I just became aware of the CalTech course. I will likely check it out,
although I will stay with the Stanford course for the time being.

------
droithomme
Most of the press release is about funding and bureaucracy, as evidenced by
the number of name drops and shout outs and culminating in which old school
administrator will be granted the honor of being the first president of the
new initiative, and going straight for brand name of "MIT+Harvard". Reads like
a press release out of the 1890s, the last gasp of a struggling and suddenly
irrelevant brick and mortar fabulously costly institute of a bygone era.

Conspicuously missing are any specific details about the operation or value
other than its brand name and the instantly heavy bureaucracy. It's likely
this because they have no specific details yet and the negotiations to date
have been about who gets the biggest seats on the board, what compensation
packages they can negotiate and who will win the most prestigious titles and
positions in behind the scenes political wrangling.

As far as the software that runs it, the old canard of making it open source
and having other people build it is just tossed out as if that is a magical
solution to design.

Nothing about this smells agile. It smells very industrial and slow. Compare
to Udacity and Coursera who each are happily running dozens of classes to
hundreds of thousands of students each, responding quickly to feedback, and
demonstrating clearly they are up to the modern speed of doing things.

~~~
bgilroy26
This is pretty silly criticism, considering the 3 month delays Coursera had
this spring.

Coursera's delays were because it is much more closely affiliated with
Stanford than Udacity is. In the fall they didn't really have the Coursera
name settled upon yet and the certificate printouts they sent to people who
completed the courses had Stanford's name on them.

Discussions involving university reputations are always going to be long and
dragged out. Udacity avoided them by having a clear separation between the
website and the institutions of its instructors from the outset. Coursera
acquired that separation over time.

Harvard and MIT's reputations are most of what separate them from FullSail and
the University of Phoenix. It is important that they protect them. It is
encouraging that more universities are following Stanford into this space.

Courses with broadcast lectures and server-based practice/homework/exams will
need the (hu)manpower that universities currently command in order to grow
quickly.

~~~
droithomme
> In the fall the certificate printouts they sent had Stanford's name on them.

The certificates they sent had a paragraph disclaimer at the end pointing out
that the certificate had nothing at all to do with Stanford. This was the only
mention of Stanford. This clause was only added because Stanford legal
requested it since the classes were taught by the Stanford professors who set
up the system, of their own initiative and definitely not something initiated
from the bureaucratic side of the institution. Your post suggests that the
certificates indicated they were granted or approved or validated in some way
by Stanford. This is not the case at all, it is the opposite. I recommend you
track down one of these certificates and examine it to your satisfaction.

As far as Coursera, it didn't exist in Fall. It was created in response to
Stanford lawyers and bureaucrats going apeshit and shutting the venture down
once they saw what a threat it was since the classes were as good as what they
were charging for. This caused several of their best professors to resign and
leave Stanford.

Stanford is about their reputation, which comes from their top notch
professors. With professors leaving, the reputation is worth less than before.

Stanford intentionally isolated themselves from this venture and tried to
punish those who pursued it. This shows how committed their administration and
legal staff are to the future of education. Not at all, in direct conflict to
their most progressive and talented professors.

The future clearly belongs the rogues who are leaving the inefficient and
ineffective old system behind to join the ground level grass roots work of
modernizing education. This is something that institutions are showing
themselves incapable of doing, and it scares them. They won't go down easily.
They will fight this, attack the new paradigms, and try their damnedest to
retain an economy based on buggy whips that supports their institutional
power, wealth and obsolete practices. Many on the forefront such as Salman
Khan do not have any teaching credentials or background, and that is how it
must be for the old practices do not work.

~~~
bgilroy26
>This caused several of their best professors to resign and leave Stanford.

Just to clarify, this was one professor, Sebastian Thrun. The Coursera
professors still teach at Stanford. In fact, the Coursera effort has been to
integrate on-campus and off-campus efforts from the beginning.

The off-campus students of the DB, ML, and AI classes were given access to
interactive lectures, exercises, and exams which was revolutionary. For their
part, the on-campus students were freed from the lecture problem all other
college students face. When you attend most college lectures, you might as
well be watching a video (to most professors chagrin).

Despite professors' pleading, in 2012 the best way to get lectures to students
AND have an interactive experience is to separate the lectures out entirely
and then simply have interactive "lab-ish" sessions when on-campus students
are in class. This is what they did in the DB, ML, and AI classes, the
Stanford students for their money enjoyed more intimate professor access, and
these extra learning modules. On top of that, it must have been a big relief
to be a part of a class run that way. At other schools, if a professor has
videos from previous years or even slides posted online, many kids just don't
go, there isn't much point.

>Your post suggests that the certificates indicated they were granted or
approved or validated in some way by Stanford.

My point was that the relationship with the Stanford name was strained and it
created legalistic issues. It seems like we're in agreement about that.

------
jb55
I have tried a lot of these new online courses that have been created but I
still think they have missed the point, the point that khan academy got right.
I don't want to plan my life around weekly assignments. I keep getting emails
about about assignment deadlines, causing unneeded anxiety which puts off the
whole learning experience.

~~~
muraiki
Some of the courses on Udacity no longer have assignment deadlines. I'm not
certain what I think about this yet: on the one hand having hard deadlines
means that each "semester" of students stays on the same page and the
instructors can respond to the most pressing difficulties they are having. It
also allows them to iteratively refine the courses without disrupting current
students.

On the other hand, it can make things difficult for us in the working world
who have to balance education with our work life! I'm taking three courses
now, which I found out to be overly ambitious (I should probably spend time
with my wife!) so I'll probably drop one.

~~~
evoxed
I thought their revision the first time around was a good way of doing it.
i.e. giving HW deadlines but at the end grading by the exam only if that was a
better score. That way it's as if you get credit for staying on pace, but none
taken away if you went at your own pace.

------
peteretep
Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect. The Open
University already offers this, so it can be done.

~~~
vibrunazo
> First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect

With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a
degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers
will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow
accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and
put online for this purpose.

Then the whole cycle is complete. You have a place to learn, and means to show
what you've learned to get yourself employed. What else do you need?

(well, maybe the social part of universities is missing, but that can be fixed
with hackatons I guess)

~~~
tzs
> With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a
> degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so
> employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and
> stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build
> awesome stuff and put online for this purpose.

Github and a degree show different things.

Github shows that the person can write code. It doesn't show that he knows how
to decide what code to write. Did he consider alternative algorithms? Did he
chose based on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms?
If you see an O(N^2) algorithm used somewhere instead of an O(N log N)
algorithm, is it because he didn't know better, or is it because he determined
that for the inputs in this particular project the O(N^2) is actually faster?

A degree in the appropriate field from a good school goes a long way toward
showing that the person can do that kind of analysis.

~~~
learc83
I'd say for most developers a degree shows that you can stick with something,
and that you were at least smart enough to get through a CS program.

However, most of the people I know have forgotten just about everything but
the very basics from their algorithms class within a few years.

When I was teaching myself to program, I knew 3 guys who were seniors in CS at
Georgia Tech. With only about 3 years experience myself, I could code circles
around all of them.

At the time they may have had more theoretical knowledge than I did
(definitely not true now though since I've caught up on the theoretical side),
but I would have been a _much_ better hire for 95% of programming jobs.

Not because I was some kind of rockstar, but because I'd had more practical
experience actually writing real programs. Sure if I was working at Facebook,
or trying to scale something truly massive (or working with resource limited
embedded systems), they would have had an edge on me, but the vast majority of
programming that happens each day doesn't require that level of computer
science chops.

There are definitely jobs that require a "Computer Scientist", and if you want
to work on interesting problems a CS degree is extremely beneficial. However,
a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for most programming jobs.

(That being said, I'm currently in the process of finishing a math degree.)

------
Kilimanjaro
I tried, believe me I tried hard, but video is not my type. Over 20 years I've
learnt all I know reading, surfing, browsing the web, not watching videos. I
can digest/absorb/ignore a whole page of text in ten seconds instead of being
forced to watch boring 10 mins videos that offer only one min of real
interesting content.

So, the spot is open for an education tool where text is king, like wikipedia,
but with a syllabus.

~~~
ddandd
That's why I play Coursera's videos at higher rates. It makes the learning
much more intensive and interesting.

~~~
michaelqlarson
At higher rates? You mean 1.5x or 2x speed? What tool do you use for that?

~~~
FaceKicker
It's built into Coursera's video player - there's a menu/button to change it
somewhere on the toolbar under the video.

I like to watch at 1.5x (or 2x if it's something I'm _really_ sure I
completely know from previous courses or experience) most of the time, and
then if something starts to be especially confusing I'll slow down to 1x.

------
dhawalhs
_MIT and Harvard have committed to a combined $60 million ($30 million each)
in institutional support, grants and philanthropy to launch the
collaboration._

This makes it bigger than Coursera and Udacity.

------
chrisaycock
Nice to see that Class Central has already been updated to list edX alongside
Udacity and Coursera.

<http://www.class-central.com/>

~~~
dhawalhs
Thanks for the link! I operate Class Central.

~~~
muraiki
That's a really nice site. Thanks for making it!

I think that a useful feature would be to allow students to comment on /
review the courses. This will probably become more important as institutions
start to offer similar courses.

------
sravfeyn
It's great MIT and Harvard are combining forces. It completely makes sense.
Offering similar courses individually to the same Internet Audience is waste
of resources.

By the way, all of these courses from Udacity, Coursera, MITx lack one unique
thing. These videos can't reproduce the passion of the teacher in a live
class-room. In that respect they are little boring. While they are excellent
resources, kind of manuals to learn stuff, to actually 'improve the
experience' they need to pump passion into video lectures. More than these
video lectures I like the actual recorded class room lectures that are kept
online for public. Like cs50.net and Tom Mitchel's Machine Learning.

Does anyone else feel this 'passion deficiency' in these courses, like me?

~~~
learc83
I took Sebastian Thrun's AI class last fall, and I'd say he was absolutely
bubbling with 'passion'.

~~~
sravfeyn
Well I had taken db-class as a supplement to actual course at my College. It
was just the professor speaking into the camera. While the courses like CS50,
were so exciting.

I guess it's a personal problem then!

~~~
bgilroy26
Just to offer an anecdotal counterpoint, I thought Professor Widom was
incredible.

Had you taken a distance learning class before? If you just stick a random
professor in front of a camera, odds are pretty good that they're less
interesting to watch and listen to than the "early adopters" that have been a
part of this new wave in education thus far.

~~~
sravfeyn
Yes, Professor Widom was incredible in terms of teaching concepts clearly. But
it's very difficult for anyone to produce such an enthusiasm to a passive
camera as one would in a live classroom full of students. What I am
complaining is not about the quality of the knowledge they impart, but about
the passion and enthusiasm that they just can't impart to a student viewing
these videos.

But again, there are professors in these courses (In this particular course
the Prof. teaches as if someone is listening to him
[http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs262/CourseRev/apr20...](http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs262/CourseRev/apr2012))
who put a lot of effort, to produce an awe of surprise for instance when they
arrive at something imp, like in a class-room. But this is an exception and
can't be applied to every professor.

So I think there should be an improvement someway in this regard.

------
saintfiends
Let me just tell you all how awesomely happy I am reading this. So many mixed
emotions, all positive I must say. Made my eyes all watery.

I don't expect everyone to understand, most of you here have had some sort of
formal higher education. Where I live high-schools only offer Business or
Science with Biology, Chemistry and Physics. That is it. Being fascinated with
computers from an early age it is what I wanted to study. But in order to get
any higher formal education one must go abroad, which means a lot of money,
more than I or my family could afford. So until very recently I have been
getting my education through books, articles, tutorials et al. This was OK,
but I always felt I was missing something, felt like it was all a bit
fragmented. I have pieces from here and there but never the complete thing.
Then came along Mitx, Coursera and Udacity. So I started watching all these
lectures and boy did all things fall into place. You have no idea how great it
feels to actually know that you know something after a long time of
uneasiness. It brought some completeness to my life.

Of course I'm nowhere near where I want to be. This feels like end of an era.
I can't help but smile to see traditional education systems come to an end and
see it all unfold in my lifetime.

------
michaelqlarson
NY times just posted some analysis:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-
mit-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-
to-offer-free-online-courses.html?hp)

------
makmanalp
"EdX will release its learning platform as open-source software so it can be
used by other universities and organizations that wish to host the platform
themselves. Because the learning technology will be available as open-source
software, other universities and individuals will be able to help edX improve
and add features to the technology."

Is anyone else worried that this'll be a one-sided "we released the damn
source in a zip file" style open source? When administration has such a big
stake in a project like this, I hope they will allow community style open
source. It's harder to justify each design decision you make to a bunch of
whining disagreeing third parties on a mailing list, but ultimately I think
it's for the best.

~~~
cpnks
Look at who is actually doing the work, not the press releases. The first
class is co-taught by Anant Agarwal, the director of CSAIL, Jerry Sussman, who
is a founding director of the FSF, and Piotr Mitros, who has been active in
the free software community since the nineties.

------
stephenlee
Online education will change the world. Anyway, it's a good thing to the world
students. Cheers! I'm hungry to learn.

------
molsongolden
Sounds like they'll have more classes now but still no information regarding a
way to make the classes meaningful to most employers (certificates, credits,
etc...).

~~~
dgabriel
Honest question: should these courses be job training or education?

~~~
kingkilr
Those two don't sound mutually exclusive to me.

~~~
dgabriel
Not always, and less so in technical fields, but there is a huge difference
between a course like "Leveraging Sharepoint for HR Management" (job training)
and "Philosophy of the Mind" (pure education). You can only put the former on
a resume, but I find the latter to be more meaningful.

------
ilaksh
To what degree do these initiatives incorporate the latest e-learning
knowledge/ideas?

Also, to what degree do these and other e-learning curriculum or processes
align with rapid change in relevant technology knowledge and skills?

I think that these types of programs can call into question or clarify the
distinction between academic and vocational knowledge/experience.

What good is a programmer who isn't able to recognize the difference between
an algorithm which takes exponential time or memory versus one that is linear?
On the other hand, what good is a programmer who wastes his time optimizing an
algorithm because he didn't know how to use the profiler or worse, was just
using an outdated library or technology platform?

------
septerr
Does it say anywhere how Harvard+MIT will price their courses? Will they be
free? I should read the article myself and find the answer, but the webpage
design, the font and the rambling text is uninspiring. Like an academic paper!
(sorry)

~~~
solarmist
They're free, but will potentially offer a for cost certificate. This is a
non-profit institute, so the content will always be free for anyone wanting to
use it.

The goal with that is simply to make the edX self-supporting not to make a
profit.

~~~
michaelqlarson
This will be the end-game business model for edX, Coursera and Udacity - once
they gain critical mass by establishing a large user base and a good
reputation beyond their parents' reputations.

I see them creating two tracks based on the same open content: 1) a free not-
for-credit track for informal continuing education and 2) a credit-based track
with more stringent exit requirements (traditional final assessments and
assignments).

For the latter, they will be able to charge quite a bit, if it's commensurate
with a proper degree from an accredited institution.

The billion dollar question: how are they going to administer assessment for
distance learners? The ability to securely and reliably administer tests by
remote is the final piece of the puzzle to enable accreditable distance
learning courses.

------
snarkinatree
I wouldn't take part in this for "credentials". I would do it for the sake of
learning. Some of that acquired knowledge might be applied for commercial
gain, some might not. Does it matter? The cost is the cost of an internet
connection and time invested in learning. Hopefully what they produce will
closely mirror the course contents and requirements for their undergraduate
courses.

------
venturebros
I have taken numerous amounts of online courses from h.s on up. The classes I
truly enjoyed were hybrid courses when the class would meet every so often. I
loathe 100% online courses I like having people around to ask questions,see
how they did something,etc. Posting on a messageboard just doesn't give the
same vibe.

------
easp
This is great to see. For the last week or so I've had this uneasy feeling
that much of the potential of this wave of elearning was going to get
strangled by patents, and other IP concerns. This looks to me to be a big
chunk of openness and prior art being set free. That won't stop the trolls,
but it's a start.

------
varunsaini
Online education platforms are future, I am not saying that class room
education is going away but both can compliment each other. I am taking
Udacity classes (one class at a time as it is very easy to get overwhelmed and
join 3-4 classes and don't complete any)and I like it.

------
peedy
I have one simple question, Can I access the material if I have failed to
enroll a course in time ( in general for Udacity / Coursera )?

Even if I get access to the videos and assignments, it is fair enough.

~~~
denzil_correa
Coursera allows you to view videos but not assignments. Go to any course and
click on "Preview".

------
kin
It's really great how private universities are putting education online. My
friends and I have been watching the free Stanford iTunes U videos and have
learned so much in iOS development.

------
willwill100
\- The UK is so far behind in this regard.

\- This will certainly be at least _part_ of the future of education

------
iunk
are they using Windows? Apache/2.2.22 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8t
PHP/5.2.17 Server at www.edxonline.org Port 80 or just spoofed.

