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"Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX's president compared to a "YouTube for MOOCs." The site is called mooc.org-MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for "massive open online courses." It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses. But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges."

"To date, edX has offered only college-level courses. And, while a smattering of high school-level massive open online courses exist, company officials said edX is the first provider of so-called MOOCs to offer an organized set of free high school curriculums."

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"A complete list of free online courses offered by Stanford, Coursera, MIT and Harvard led edX (MITx + Harvardx + BerkeleyX), and Udacity"

"A complete list of free online courses offered by Stanford, Coursera, MIT and Harvard led edX (MITx + Harvardx + BerkeleyX), and Udacity "

"Reviews for Udacity, Coursera, and edX."

This is nice...thanks!

"a study"

"Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it's now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students."

Amherst's Chair of Neuroscience Stephen A. George led the faculty rejection of edX. It wasn't a rejection of online learning or open resources or the idea of making entire courses available for free online that they rejected, he said. "It was just the massive, synchronous MOOC that didn't seem to fit" with the school's mission and identity.

"this week we did [finally] get a glimpse into what appears to be extensive research going on behind the scenes. The Open Access journal, Research & Practice in Assessment released the paper Studying Learning in the Worldwide Classroom Research into edX's First MOOC."

"early MOOCs failed to incorporate active learning approaches or any of the other innovations in teaching and learning common in other online courses. The three principal MOOC providers-Coursera, Udacity, and edX-wandered into a territory they thought was uninhabited. Yet it was a place that was already well occupied by accomplished practitioners who had thought deeply and productively over the last couple of decades about how students learn online. Like poor, baffled Columbus, MOOC makers believed they had "discovered" a new world. It's telling that in their latest offerings, these vendors have introduced a number of active-learning innovations."

The massive open online course (MOOC) provider edX took a step toward boosting the credibility of its "graduates" on Thursday, announcing a partnership with Pearson's testing centers that would allow students in edX's free, online courses to take proctored exams.

"Out of 841,687 registrants in 17 courses offered in 2012 and 2013 by the universities' joint EdX program, 43,196 saw the classes to conclusion, according to an e-mailed statement from the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based schools. Some of the students signed up for multiple courses, according to the statement."

"To start college, the typical student must meet admission requirements (if any), enroll and pay tuition. But what if anyone anywhere could try out a prominent university's classes for a small fee and wait until the end to decide whether to pay tuition for credit toward a diploma? That is one of the groundbreaking ideas behind an Arizona State University plan, announced Wednesday, to offer a freshman curriculum online through the nonprofit Web site called edX."

"some users will be asked to pay a support fee, "from $9 up to some portion of the certification cost," said Medros. The price of the support fee "will be aligned to the value and experience" that a course gives to a learner, said Medros, suggesting that the best courses will also be the most expensive."

This 12 week course, starting September 10, 2012 will explore openness in education - its roots, its growing influence, and economic and systemic impact. We have adopted an open online format (massive open online courses, sometimes referred to as MOOCs...though we expect this course won't hit that "massive" target achieved by initiatives like Coursera and EDx. For a quick introduction to connectivist courses and how they work, please view the videos below.

"The success of San Jose State University's (SJSU) incorporation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) into their curriculum is indisputable: in side-by-side comparisons of two traditionally-taught sections of an introductory electrical engineering course with an edX-provided MOOC variant, the pass rates went from 55-59 percent to 91 percent.[1] This mirrors results that the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University has been achieving for years. However, interestingly, SJSU incorporated MOOCs as a course supplement in a flipped classroom. If you think about that, it is the beginning of disaggregation of MOOCs into technological (big data), content and pedagogical (peer learning) components."

I remain astounded that anyone with a fully functioning neocortex talking seriously about MOOCs being some model of saving educational costs when the word is each course rings up a tab of $250k (edx) or even more. What does an institution get for dropping a quarter of a million per course? I can tell you what you do not get- an ongoing open sharing of the processes, of what worked, what did not work. Not a Udellian narrating of the process. It's more like another loaf of pre-packaged Wonderbread off the racks.

IN LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR, discussion of the role of online learning in higher education has undergone a qualitative shift. With the launch of for-profit educational start-ups such as Coursera, Udacity, and the MIT and Harvard-founded nonprofit platform edX, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have moved from obscure experiment to major initiative. MOOCs are online classes, generally composed of short lectures, that allow for open, often free enrollments (thousands can easily enroll in a single course), assessing students through periodic quizzes and discussion forums.

"The xMOOC path is pretty much in place with EdX. They have a good module-based system for presenting and assessing instructivist knowledge. Add on top of that they have connected to other systems through single sign-on and they are down with APIs… they have a system that is ready to connect with other systems as well as allow learners to move in and out as need with ease. The cMOOC system that sits alongside that? That is another beast. Technology exists to create a learner-centered system (see A Domain of One's Own)…. but how does this scale to possibly tens of thousands of learners?"

"The University of Toronto is committed to exploring new ways of teaching and sharing knowledge in the 21st Century, and its participation in the two platforms Coursera and EdX are an essential part of this. Instructors from the university have already launched very well received "Massive Open Online Courses" on subjects ranging from programming to aboriginal education, statistics to mental health and psychology. To further our understanding of these new course formats, the Office of Online Learning Strategies (OLS), together with the course instructors, have developed an extensive research program around MOOCs and flipped classrooms"

"I have argued the futility of continuing to call the connectivist-style online courses by the term MOOC. In popular culture MOOC means Udacity, Coursera or EdX, and Andrew Ng's keynote on Wednesday showed the tone-deafness of the dominant paradigm. At #OpenEd13 debate continued among the group of experts (and this conference was full of experts) regarding how we properly define a MOOC, akin to the debate at Educause where Mathieu Plourde argued that every term in the acronym is negotiable. My argument at #OpenEd13 is that such thinking is counter-productive to the political and cultural conversation about distance, online and open education: those of us in that world are still arguing about the definition, but in the mainstream the ship has sailed, and we need to accept that the term MOOC no longer means what it did in 2008."