Educating Harvard, MIT — and the world
Every year, bright students around the world dream of a chance to debate ideas in a Harvard classroom or conduct experiments in an MIT laboratory — an opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds in fields from the humanities to engineering to the social sciences. Soon, as leaders of both universities announced today, all an eager student will need is a modem and a mouse. EdX, a new online education platform, will draw on the faculty, research, and institutional backing of both universities to provide Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) courses to users around the world. The partnership will not only build on both universities’ ongoing work in online education, but will provide a treasure trove of data on how students learn and how to teach them most effectively. “We will not only make knowledge more available, we will learn more about learning,” said Harvard President Drew Faust during...