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Article in the NYTimes about expansion of MIT ocw

New York Times article Open Access

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans - one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world - Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

"Science is very inefficient," says Ijad Madisch, founder of a Web site called ResearchGate. "You try an experiment, fail, try again, fail, try again, it works. And what works is what you publish. All the data about failure is wasted."

"Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. And schools like M.I.T. and Stanford have been offering lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is over $40,000 a year.) Coursera is starting with 40 courses online - from computing to the humanities - offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. "