edX (free) (Pricing Varies By Course at edX) does not look like a university. There is no campus, no library, no dormitories, and no tuition. Founded in the spring of 2012 by faculty at MIT and Harvard, edX is very much the wunderkind of academics. Its courses are supplied by some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including UC Berkeley, Boston University, as well as both founding institutions. However, with several million students, edX serves a larger learning community than the entire UC system.
But make no mistake, edX is no university-killer. While participants can audit classes and earn proof of enrollment (Honor Code Certificates) for free, edX does not offer the credentialing, networking, or communal experience of a traditional university. Instead, think of edX as a platform that enables admittedly large and well-heeled universities to reach traditional and non-traditional students alike. Typically, those learners are adults interested in the sciences, but that is expanding, thanks to a high school initiative and professional education program.
Although edX still cannot match Khan Academy’s K-12 offerings or Coursera’s ($0.00 at Coursera) overall catalog, it deserves recognition for two interrelated reasons. As a not-for-profit open source platform, edX encourages developers to contribute to their Open edX initiative, and, thanks to that access, developers have made edX course assessment, while still imperfect, the most versatile currently available.
Background, Foregrounded
EdX offers both self-paced and timed classes, which are free, but there are some flaws. Discussions could be better organized, students have little contact with their professors, TAs, or colleagues, and assessment, while best in class, remains inadequate, particularly in the humanities. Although edX offers various certificates (Honor, Verified, and XSeries), learners will not receive the credentials they would at a traditional institution. EdX employs a freemium model in which learners audit classes for free or make what edX calls a donation ($50 or more) to participate in certificate programs that verify their identities.
I tested edX by enrolling in two courses. Although my perspective is shaped by my background in tech journalism and my experience as a student, teacher, and administrator in a traditional higher education institution, I focused my review on how edX performs as an adult education platform.
On MOOCs
To call edX courses “online courses” is somewhat misleading. EdX courses possess features of online education, including discussion forums (often moderated by faculty and teaching assistants); machine-graded multiple-choice assessments; self and peer assessments; and, of course, video lectures (typically divided into segments of twenty minutes or less). However, unlike an online course at my home institution, edX courses usually do not require prerequisites, and anyone can join at any time before the course ends. This open invitation can be a boon, as it invites all sorts of non-traditional students with different perspectives; however, by the same token, it also means that instructors cannot take for granted certain levels of competency. Moreover, home institutions do not grant credit to their edX courses. For example, I can audit The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours class for free, but if I want course credit, I will have to enroll in a semester-long Harvard Extension course, which costs between $1250 (for noncredit or undergraduate credit) or $2200 (for graduate credit).
Instead, edX and competitors such as Coursera and Udacity can be better understood as MOOCs or “massive open online courses,” that invite unlimited participation via the web. (Read more about MOOCs in Joshua Kim’s excellent Inside Higher Ed piece).
The Catalog
EdX offers a large catalog of courses that tends to favor higher education and the sciences. At last check, there were 420 courses available from sixty-five universities, non-profits, corporations, and other organizations. That catalog shrinks quickly, however, when you narrow your search. One hundred and sixty of those courses were already completed (Archived), 89 were opening in weeks (Coming Soon), and 94 would not begin for at least a month (Upcoming). This left about a hundred courses from which to choose, a respectable, but by no means Coursera-sized buffet (over 900). The sciences have an outsized presence: I could choose from nineteen classes in computer science, compared to just five in arts and culture (and that is a broad designation). Alongside traditional timed classes, which run as long as twelve weeks, edX has also begun to experiment with self-paced courses, of which there are far fewer choices (21 options at last count).
My survey suggests that a handful of universities dominate the edX catalog. For example, faculty at Harvard produced four of the five available Humanities courses. There was a bit more variety in the sciences, where faculty at Harvard, MIT, Rice, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and UT Austin produced classes.
Searching for courses is a delight with edX’s tag-based search engine. Each time you make a selection, edX adds a tag to the top of the page. Either of the tags I used to search for classes in the humanities (Current and Arts and Culture) could be removed at any time. You can also search for a particular course type, including new offerings in professional education or high school, classes compatible with the edX mobile apps, as well as those that join a sequence (XSeries) or offer verified proof of enrollment (Verified Certificates).
edX
Visiting Exoplanets, at My Own Pace
To test edX’s self-paced courses, I enrolled in Brian Schmidt and Paul Francis’s nine-week “Exoplanets,” the second in a sequences of courses (also known as an XSeries) from Australian National University. While I chose to audit the class, Exoplanets automatically generates Honor Code and Verified Certificates on a quarterly basis.
The distinction is that the Verified Certificate confirms your identity through a photo and ID, whereas the Honor Code Certificate simply confirms your completion of the course. Participants receive a link to either certificate (a sample of which you can find in my slideshow). Because edX is a not-for-profit, Verified Certificates, which start at $50, help to fund the creation and improvement of future classes.
Every course has a different set of requirements and expectations, but in the case of Exoplanets, participants must maintain above a fifty percent average on multiple-choice lessons, homework, and exam questions. Unlike many courses in the edX catalog, Exoplanets also includes a prerequisite of “High school maths and physics.” No proof is required, but as someone far removed from high school, I can attest that these prerequisites are more than a suggestion.
As with other edX classes, Exoplanets is divided into five components that can be accessed via the navigation bar. Course Info resembles a landing page, with the latest updates. (In the case of Exoplanets, however, Course Info had not been updated since last November). Discussion allows quick access to student discussions. Although edX has integrated useful features such as searching, up-voting, following, and flagging responses, it needs work. One faculty member I spoke with compared it to a late-nineties bulletin board; I second that. Even so, I was impressed with their collegiality, especially in the context of a self-paced class. The Wiki provides the course knowledgebase, though in the case of Exoplanets, that knowledgebase included only a few helpful links. Progress allows participants to visualize—you guessed it—their progress in the course.
Participants will spend most of their time in Courseware, which begins with a left-aligned overview. Lessons are divided into sections, sections into learning sequences, and learning sequences into units. Participants navigate through units using arrows at the top of the screen. I found this process somewhat inorganic at first, and I would have preferred something like Coursera’s auto-progression; however, once I adjusted to it, I actually preferred the edX structure because it allowed you to anticipate forthcoming content via the object icons.
Exoplanets alternated between short (five- to ten-minute) video clips and machine-graded multiple-choice questions. The video clips include hyperlinked transcripts, which scrolled alongside videos. This is a standard feature—one that edX provides to partners—and a boon for English Language Learners (ELL).
Although Exoplanets’s lectures were challenging for this astronomy amateur, I found the talks informative (if green screen-heavy) and the tablet-based formula work legible. I liked how Professors Schmidt and Francis interspersed videos with questions, which forced active viewing during esoteric lectures. With the ability to check answers and reveal correct responses, practice questions were low-stakes. While Professors Schmidt and Francis relied upon multiple-choice assessments in early sections, later, they integrated tick boxes and fill-in-the-blanks, but even these reflect a fraction of edX’s assessment capabilities. (I will return to assessment shortly).
Exoplanets falls somewhere between a tutorial and a course. You would not pass a course if you completed fifty percent of its work, especially if you were allowed to retake questions and reveal answers. But, unlike a Coursera on-demand course I finished in an afternoon, after several weeks of testing, I still have not finished Exoplanets. Admittedly, the topic is outside my wheelhouse, but it is also a larger and more sophisticated course.
Reading Frankenstein, On a Schedule
I tested an edX timed course using Maggie Sokolik’s “Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus” at UC Berkeley. Framed as a “book club,” this course is a bit unconventional, but unconventional or not, I was ready to return to my solar system, and there were not many choices in the humanities. At four weeks duration, Frankenstein is shorter than most edX timed courses (which run as long as twelve weeks), but it adheres to their basic format: It began on a set date, includes several hours of weekly readings and assignments, and requires that all assignments be submitted by the end of week four.
Structurally, Frankenstein looks much the same as Exoplanets, but given that it is a book club, Professor Sokolik does less with video and more with discussion. Those discussions were generally thoughtful, though, without a faculty moderator, I noticed that students tended to speak past one another. For example, in response to a reading question about the novel’s subtitle (“The Modern Prometheus”), there were thirty-three responses, but only two that directly addressed one another. This was surprising given how often responses repeated at least portions of one another. In a traditional book club (or seminar), it would be strange if, after one person finished speaking, the next person made the same point. Now imagine if that happened a couple dozen times. To her credit, Professor Sokolik has integrated social media into her class, but it can be a challenge to get students to address one another in relation to discussion questions.
edX
While Frankenstein includes multiple-choice machine-graded quizzes, written homework is the spine of the class. For the first week, participants were asked to write a couple of paragraphs considering the enduring appeal of Frankenstein’s monster. Simple, right? Here’s the rub: After submitting your paragraphs, you must peer review five other responses, an average of which determines homework grades. Reading and responding to peers took me longer than writing my paragraphs. However, in my experience, other participants did not take the review process so seriously. While everyone is required to assign a grade (Good, Fair, or Poor) and mandatory comment, those comments can be, and often are, monosyllabic. What does “Very good!” (one peer’s assessment) tell me that her multiple-choice selection (“Good”) did not? Yes, technically there is no “very good” selection, but what about my response was effective? This is the kind of assessment that students receive regularly in seminar classes, and while I accept that there is no practical means through which to recreate that space online (yet), I wish there was a way for me to initiate a correspondence with my readers, and vice versa.
Frankly, such contact could aid performance. Looking at the Progress tab, the Frankenstein homework average was a mere seventeen percent, a far cry from the required fifty percent. If reviewers cannot grant one another “Good” or “Fair” marks, those reviewers ought to be challenged to justify (or reevaluate) “Poor” assessments. From my testing, I do not know of an edX tool that would enable that conversation, though edX does offer a self-assessment module, whose example could help writers evaluate their writing, and others.
To be fair, peer assessment is not the only place where students learn. In my correspondence with Professor Sokolik, she stressed the value of discussion forums, which can function as productive meeting places for the diverse student body. I would tend to agree, especially looking at threads created by participants. Students introduce themselves, recommend resources to one another (such as the New York Public Library’s Frankenstein Biblion), and even establish guidelines for online conduct.
Open edX and Assessment
While I have my concerns about the peer review process, other MOOCs have struggled to create scalable assessment in the humanities, and in the context of that space, edX offers the most versatile toolkit. In addition to multiple-choice, tick boxes, and fill-in-the-blanks, edX supports specialized tools such as circuit simulators and chemical bond simulators. DemoX showcases some of the most ingenious assessments, including those designed for the K-12 market (e.g. a drag and drop tool for counting) and introductory sciences (an interactive periodic table).
When it comes to assessment, faculty and students alike benefit from edX’s open-source approach. Thanks to the Open edX platform, universities can draw upon existing modules, or XBlocks, when building classes. If they cannot find the tool they need, they can develop and share it with other users. By avoiding reinventing the wheel each time they build a course, faculty save time on set up, which can be used to experiment with course structures. In the case of her Frankenstein class, Professor Sokolik explained that building the class was not terribly onerous given an elementary understanding of coding (and an exceptional research assistant).
Of course, not all faculty may be so tech savvy, or so fortunate to work at university that generously supports MOOC development. To its credit, edX contributes to course development. In addition to paying for the subtitling of videos, edX also supplies point people for faculty. Professor Sokolik mentioned that she had a direct edX contact; Professors Schmidt and Paul Francis listed three edX contacts on their credits list.
As a not-for-profit, edX commits much of its revenue directly to the creation of new courses. Sometimes, the site’s pleas for support can get tiresome (NPR Pledge Drive, anyone?); however, because edX does not need to turn a profit or develop new modes of assessment (developers do that), it can invest in amenities such as support and video transcription.
Such support is important because making a MOOC is labor-intensive, technical, and damned expensive. Exoplanets, for example, lists nineteen contributors, as wide-ranging as project managers, teaching assistants, administrative support, and film crew, plus another eleven testers. This is why large and elite institutions dominate the edX catalog: Large institutions have the resources, and they benefit by building their brands and driving traffic to their campuses. In some instances, as with Harvard’s Ancient Greek course, institutions even up-sell students to lucrative, for-credit online courses.
An Opening for a Different Kind of MOOC
In my review of Coursera, I commended the platform’s large and diverse catalog. The edX catalog, by contrast, has depth but lacks breadth. When it comes to courses in the humanities, I was forced to take what I could get. If I wanted more courses like Exoplanets, however, I had numerous options. When it comes to the sciences, the edX catalog is about as well stocked as Coursera, and I expect that the edX catalog will continue to grow via high-profile partnerships with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
EdX secures our Editors’ Choice designation for its welcoming platform for faculty and students. Students will delight in its innovative assessments, free (honor) certificates, and a growing catalog of excellent courses. Faculty ought to appreciate the platform’s open-source code, generous support, and institutional backing. And you can see what all the fuss is about by auditing a class for free.
Pros
- Large catalog of online higher education courses, particularly in the sciences.
- Enroll in either self-paced or timed classes, ranging between four and twelve weeks.
- Open source platform (Open edX) enables developers to build and share assessment modules.
- Students may audit or pursue Honor Certificates for free.
- Video transcripts.
Cons
- Discussions need a refresh.
- Outside of the sciences, edX catalog has gaps.
The Bottom Line
Thanks to its open source approach, edX has attracted a large portfolio of online higher education courses with the most versatile course assessment currently available.
