Stanford to Work With EdX Open-Source Learning Platform

Stanford University has helped spawn much online learning activity (see our D10 interview with its president), but the school itself is now throwing its weight behind the open-source, not-for-profit EdX platform, which was founded last year by Harvard and MIT.

This is more complicated than you might think it would be. Stanford actually isn’t joining the 12-school EdX consortium, but rather integrating into the EdX platform when it is open-sourced on June 1.

Former Stanford professors are behind Udacity and Coursera, two venture-funded for-profit MOOC (massive open online course) providers that are partnering with professors and universities to teach classes as well, including ones from Stanford.

Stanford is expected to incorporate EdX tools into its online classes this fall, which run on a separate Stanford-built open-source MOOC platform called Class2Go.