{"id":147,"date":"2012-05-28T10:51:26","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T14:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/acts\/?p=147"},"modified":"2012-06-04T09:09:11","modified_gmt":"2012-06-04T13:09:11","slug":"what-edx-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/2012\/05\/28\/what-edx-isnt\/","title":{"rendered":"What edX isn&#8217;t"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not sure where this has come from, but most of the discussion about edX on the webs is discussing how it&#8217;s going to take over residential education.  How you don&#8217;t need a college education anymore because edX is free.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Perhaps the misconception comes from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/roomfordebate\/2012\/05\/06\/got-a-computer-get-a-degree\">the poorly titled nytimes article<\/a>.  The article gets things right, but the title is misleading.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/search\/%23edx\">#edx on twitter<\/a><\/p>\n<p>edX is advertising itself as the biggest thing since white bread, but what are they actually saying about their service?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/newsoffice\/2012\/edx-faq-050212.html\" title=\"What is edX?\">What is edX?<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nMITx and Harvardx courses will not be offered for credit at either university.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8230;  such certificates would not be issued under the name of Harvard or MIT.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And that&#8217;s really the big deal, that&#8217;s supposedly the big step forward from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/OpenCourseWare\">opencourseware<\/a>.  But it doesn&#8217;t exist.  So I guess the point is to market the edX name so its certificates can someday have perceived value, or maybe that policy will be changed; but for now, based on what they have released, people seem to be ill-informed.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coursera.org\">Coursera<\/a> links the name of the providing university to the cert.  But the cert is available only through Coursera and will be released upon user request similarly to the way a university will release records to an inquiring employer.  Maybe edX will adopt the same methodology, only time will tell as edX is too immature to intelligently speculate over currently.  There&#8217;s some mitx software that was probably not written with open source in mind and 3 guys in a dark room somewhere feverishly trying to produce something that doesn&#8217;t embarrass the Cambridge community before fall.  I&#8217;m confident they&#8217;ll come out with something nice, the problem is Coursera has a head start, a larger staff, possibly less politicking (grass is greener), and they already have a very nice feel to their product.<\/p>\n<p>edX presents a wonderful opportunity to find a solution for the quandary that has been plaguing the educational community for a while.  i.e. how to best leverage the webs for education.  Education online has been clumsy at best, and this is another attempt to capture what works best.  That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m excited about, the research of the successes and failures of these online classes.  And to get that research, maybe it&#8217;s best for people to have an overreaching idea of what edX is so more people are interested..  so on second thought, nevermind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not sure where this has come from, but most of the discussion about edX on the webs is discussing how it&#8217;s going to take over residential education. How you don&#8217;t need a college education anymore because edX is free. Perhaps the misconception comes from the poorly titled nytimes article. The article gets things right, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4571,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63976,63978,63979,63977,63980],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-edx","tag-harvardx","tag-mitx","tag-mooc","tag-opencourseware"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4571"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/acts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}