Ivy walls lower with free online classes from Coursera and edX
More top-notch courses open up to anyone online. Coursera and edX promise virtual equivalents of the real Ivy-league classes.
As the school year revs up, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Anant Agarwal looks forward to teaching his most popular class. Last semester, Circuits and Electronics welcomed in 154,000 students – 35 times as many as the entire undergraduate enrollment at MIT.
The class kicked off MIT's new push into online learning. It was the inaugural course of edX, a collaboration with Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, to offer top-notch education free of charge to anyone with Internet access.
"If you took the online class, the material would be identical" to the on-campus version, says Mr. Agarwal, president of edX and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "It was the same level of difficulty. They took the same exams." Students even received grades, just not academic credit.
This fall, edX will offer seven courses ranging from computer science to public health. Agarwal hopes his circuits class will once again attract students ages 16 to 98 and from more than 150 countries – people who may never get the chance to attend or be able to afford a world-class engineering course.
While edX prepares for its first full semester of science-oriented classes, Coursera offers the same model of free education with a longer list of subjects and schools. Coursera founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng have pulled in classes on the humanities, design, and science from Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and several other institutions.
