Have you always wished that you could have gone to top tier universities such as Harvard or MIT? Well thanks to Harvard and MIT’s newly announcement partnership, you will now be able to get a taste of the sort of classes and courses that students at Harvard and MIT have been experiencing. The initiative dubbed edX will be run by a non-profit organization controlled by both schools, with each school ponying up $30 million each in this $60 million endeavor.
The courses will be free and will officially be announced this summer and is set to begin in the fall. Students who sign up for these courses won’t receive university credit, and neither will there be an admissions process. However there are exams and assessments and students will even be able to receive a certificate of their mastery over the course, for a small fee of course.
This project will be faced with some pretty stiff competition by other top ranking universities. This includes Princeton, Stanford, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania who announced last month that they would offer free web-based courses, along with Udacity founded by a former Stanford professor and Khan Academy that offers about 3,100 free educational videos that cover a variety of different subjects. More information on this initiative can be found at Harvard and MIT’s websites.