Harvard University and MIT recently announced their new non-profit joint venture, edX online learning initiative. edX aims to enhance on-campus teaching and make courses from both schools available to people around the world for free. If you’re looking for specific courses, although they may not be free, you could have a look into what the University of Southern California has to offer.
The new platform developed for edX provides more than mere videos of lectures. Class handouts, quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning round out the multi-media, interactive learning platform.
MIT courses are planned for fall, although rumors say Harvard might start offering courses as soon as this summer. Visitors to www.edxonline.org can sign up to receive class announcments and edX news.
And if MIT and Harvard aren’t enough for you, a new online education start-up, Coursera, offers free online courses from Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Pennsylvania.