Georgetown To Join EdX

Georgetown University is the latest institution to join edX—an online education venture started by Harvard and MIT—Georgetown President John J. Degioia announced yesterday.

Georgetown’s participation in edX is part of the university’s broader $8 million investment in “technology-enhanced learning,” according to information from the school’s website.

Georgetown officials and faculty members plan to utilize the edX platform both to provide online courses and better understand how technology can enhance learning, according to the university’s press release. They also hope to craft new approaches toward teaching on campus in Washington, D. C. and at Georgetown’s international campus in Doha, Qatar.

First announced last May, the edX initiative aims to make knowledge more accessible to the public by providing online versions of courses from participating universities. The not-for-profit endeavor, first launched with $30 million investments from both Harvard and MIT, currently allows anyone with access to a computer to enroll in an edX course—of which nine have been offered so far—at no charge. The educational enterprise has already attracted hundreds of thousands of students from around the world.

GeorgetownX, the subsection of online courses offered by Georgetown, will be launched in the fall of 2013. The school is now part of a cadre of educational institutions that, in addition to Harvard and MIT, includes the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas school system, and, most recently, Wellesley College.

—Staff writer Nikita Kansra can be reached at nkansra01@college.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following clarification:

CLARIFICATION: Dec. 10

An earlier version of this article stated that Bunker Hill Community College and MassBay Community College are part of the online education venture edX. To clarify, while Bunker Hill and MassBay have partnered with edX to use its educational materials, they are not members of the edX consortium.