Caltech to Offer Online Courses through edX

To expand its involvement in online learning, the California Institute of Technology will offer courses through the online education platform edX beginning this October.

The edX course platform is an online learning initiative launched in 2012 by founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Caltech's rigorous online course offerings will join those of 28 other prestigious colleges and universities in the edX platform's "xConsortium."

This new partnership with edX comes one year after Caltech offered three courses through the online learning platform Coursera in fall 2012. The Institute will now offer courses through both platforms.

"Coursera and edX have some foundational differences which are of interest to the faculty," says Cassandra Horii, director of teaching and learning programs at Caltech. Both organizations offer their courses at no cost to participating students; edX, however, operates as a nonprofit and plans to partner with only a small number of institutions, whereas Coursera—a for-profit, self-described "social entrepreneurship company"—partners with many institutions and state university systems.

The two platforms also emphasize different learning strategies, says Horii. "Coursera has a strong organizational principle built around lectures, so a lot of the interactivity is tied right into the video," she says. Though edX still enables the use of video lectures, a student can customize when he or she would like to take quizzes and use learning resources. In addition, edX allows faculty to embed a variety of learning materials—like textbook chapters, discussions, diagrams, and tables—directly into the platform's layout.

In the future, data collected from both platforms could provide valuable information about how students best learn certain material, especially in the sciences. "Caltech occupies this advanced, really rigorous scientific education space, and in general our interest in these online courses is to maintain that rigor and quality," Horii says. "So, with these learning data, we have some potential contributions to make to the general understanding of learning in this niche that we occupy."

Even before joining edX and Coursera, Caltech had already become an example in the growing trend of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Yaser Abu-Mostafa, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, developed his own MOOC on machine learning, called "Learning from Data," and offered it on YouTube and iTunes U beginning in April 2012.

Since its debut, Abu-Mostafa's MOOC has reached more than 200,000 participants, and it received mention in the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition—the latest edition of an annual report highlighting important trends in higher education. The course will be offered again in fall 2013 on iTunes U, and is now also open for enrollment in edX.

Although Caltech is now actively exploring several outlets for online learning, the Institute's commitment to educational outreach is not a recent phenomenon. In the early 1960s, Caltech physicist Richard Feynman reorganized the Institute's introductory physics course, incorporating contemporary research topics and making the course more engaging for students. His lectures were recorded and eventually incorporated into a widely popular physics book, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which has sold millions of copies in a dozen languages.

Continuing in the tradition set by Feynman, the MOOCs at Caltech seek to provide a high-quality learning environment that is rigorous but accessible. "No dumbing down of courses for popular consumption . . . no talking over people's heads either; at Caltech, we explain things well because we understand them well," adds Abu-Mostafa.

More information on Caltech's online learning opportunities is available on the Online Education website.