Stanford joins edX - edX to be completely open source by June

edX, the online education initiative to provide MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses), which was founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, is being reinforced by teaming up with Stanford University. Stanford has been developing its own open source Class2Go platform for online education which it released earlier this year.

"Together I think we’ll have chance to produce a much better platform than any of us would have been able to develop individually," said Stanford's vice provost for online learning, John Mitchell. A number of the features of Class2Go will be folded into edX over the coming months; this could, for example, include Class2Go's video analytics, which let educators analyse how long and in what way students watch video content. Stanford will also migrate to edX and work with Class2Go adopters to help them migrate, though it is not joining the "X University" consortium that the non-profit edX organises.

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, calls edX the "Linux of learning" and thanked UC-Berkely who were "instrumental in fostering this collaboration" with Stanford. By 1 June, Agarwal says all the code that drives the edX platform will be open sourced so that any school, or other organisation, can use it to deliver courses. Agarwal says this will be a "true, planet-scale democratisation of education". So far, edX has only delivered its XBlock SDK, a component architecture for building courseware, as open source, though some other utilities are available on the edX GitHub repository.

(djwm)