EdX announces partnership with Cengage
Educational services company will provide content to edX students
On Wednesday edX announced a new collaboration with Cengage Learning, a large Connecticut-based provider of educational content and software. The company will both supply content to edX and work with edX to improve pedagogy.
Cengage publishes Principles of Biostatistics, the textbook for one of Harvard’s edX classes, Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical & Public Health Research. Harvard School of Public Health professor Marcello Pagano, a co-instructor of the class, is also one of the co-authors of the text. The book, like the rest of edX’s content, will be free for students.
“EdX students worldwide will benefit from both Professor Pagano’s in-class lectures and his classic Cengage Learning textbook in biostatics [sic],” edX president Anant Agarwal said in a press release.
Over 370,000 people have registered on edX, according Director of Communications Dan O’Connell, Some people enroll in more than one course, bringing course enrollments up to over 500,000. “With the expansion of our course offerings in Spring 2013 to between 20 and 30 courses, enrollments will continue their rapid climb and we expect to hit the million course enrollment mark early in 2013,” O’Connell said in an email to The Tech.
EdX declined to provide a breakdown of enrollments by course.
The eight courses on edX represent just a fraction of the massive open online classes (MOOCs) that have been cropping up in the past couple of years, including 18 from Udacity and 198 from Coursera, two platforms that grew out of projects at Stanford. Both of HarvardX’s classes started on Monday, the same day the University of Texas system announced that it was joining edX. In addition, a new course from the University of California, Berkeley, which joined in July, has appeared on the edX website. The course is called Foundations of Computer Graphics, to begin on Nov. 5, the third class from BerkeleyX, and the sixth class in computer science or electrical engineering.