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Harvard ready to launch its first free online courses Monday
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By Brock Parker, Town Correspondent October 12, 2012 02:29PM
America’s oldest college will make a leap into cyberspace Monday as Harvard University will begin offering its first free online courses through a joint venture called edX that the schoolestablished with MIT in the spring.
According to the university a total of about 100,000 students have already signed up for the first two Harvard courses, an introduction to computer science and anotheronline course adapted from materials from the Harvard School of Public Health’s courses in epidemiology and biostatics.
Harvard University Provost Alan Garber said Friday that the courses are beingoffered for free in effort to teach the world by making education materials and Harvard courses available online, as well as improving education on its own campus and researching how people learn and howthe university teaches.
“We really think that the first courses we offer will be great, but long term the payoff is going to come from a better understanding about how people learn,” said Garber.Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established edX, a non-profit organization, in the spring, and the University of California, Berkeley joined over the summer.
Anant Agarwal,president of edX, said 155,000 students registered for a circuits and electronics course held in the spring by MIT through edX.
Courses offered through edX are branded MITx, HarvardX and BerkeleyX for theirrespective universities, and Agarwal said interest has been equally high for the courses offered by all three schools.
Students taking the online courses come from around the world, but Agarwal saidthat in the spring most of the students were from the United States, India, the United Kingdom and Columbia.
Agarwal said one of the primary motivations for offering the courses for free online is...