EdX Joins Professional Education Market

EdX will now offer courses geared toward employers and employees in the professional sphere, marking the second move by the platform this fall to target a new audience for its MOOCs.

Anant Agarwal, the platform’s CEO, announced the launch of the new courses on the edX blog Tuesday, writing that the courses “will be offered in a convenient manner, tailored to busy schedules, and will reduce costly travel time and expenses for both.”

Rice University, MIT, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands will begin offering these professional education courses in 2015. The first of the five courses listed on edX’s website is slotted to begin in Jan. 2015.

“We already have MOOC courses at the college level,” Agarwal said in an interview. “Now with professional ed, we are capping it with courses for continuous learners and executives that want to learn about new technologies and features and applications and so on that are coming out and they can apply to their businesses.”

On Wednesday, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Peter K. Bol announced that at this time Harvard will not take part in the professional education program.

In conjunction with the launch of the new courses, edX will will also make available to its partners what it calls a “white label” service, an open platform that an institution can own and brand.

The professional courses are the second initiative edX has launched in the past month aimed at audiences outside of the college course market. Last month, edX announced the creation of its first-ever courses geared toward high school students, which are intended to supplement students’ high school material and prepare them for college classes.

According to Agarwal, unlike most other edX courses, the new professional MOOCs will come with a pricetag. For example, MIT’s “Engaging with Innovation Ecosystems: The Corporate Perspective” costs $1,249 per student, while Rice’s “Basics of Energy Sustainability” costs $495 per student. Revenue from these courses will be shared with edX’s partners.

Additionally employers buying the courses in bulk will be eligible for a discount, Agrawal said.

“We believe that professional education is one blade in our swiss army knife of sustainability,” said Agarwal. “The professional education courses will incur a fee. They will also provide, in many cases, continuing education credit and course licensing models for sustainability.”

Although anyone can sign up for one of edX’s professional education courses, the courses will cater to employers and employees in specific industries.

Kirsten Ostherr, who will be teaching a course at Rice about healthcare in the digital world, said she hopes to engage professionals or aspiring professionals in the medical and healthcare sphere.

“[The course] is really going to be tailored toward people who have a leadership capability in their organization and  who want to use this information and the tools we provide to move their organization into the world of digital health,” Ostherr said.

She added, “There’s a lot of hunger for this content, and there’s not a lot of sources to get it from.”

—Staff writer Michael V. Rothberg contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Meg P. Bernhard can be reached at meg.bernhard@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Meg_Bernhard.