Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Harvard Provost Lauds EdX, But Questions Its Financial Sustainability - MEG P. BERNHARD and MARIEL A. KLEIN, Harvard Crimson

Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 reiterated the challenges of sustaining edX’s current financial model in a document released Friday and pointed to potential areas where the non-profit virtual education platform could improve, such as developing mobile platforms and accommodating students from different backgrounds. The 33-page “white paper” summarizes edX’s three-year history after its initial founding by Harvard and MIT and emphasizes the company’s three main goals: to improve on-campus learning, expand college-level course offerings to the world, and conduct research on learner behavior. Garber, though, projected that the current models for funding HarvardX—Harvard's branch of the massive open online course provider—are unsustainable, given the high cost of generating online material and the time investment of professors producing the online courses. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/10/26/garber-edX-financial-sustainability/