A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities.
When you're teaching a hard concept and the students all have puzzled looks on their faces and then suddenly you can see that 'aha' moment, that they got it, that's just an incredible thing.
The online credential, the online certificate is very different from an on campus certificate. And we really believe that online learning and the EdX platform and the EdX portal, these are ways in which - you can think of them as a rising tide that's going to lift all boats whether for students worldwide or on our campuses.
I think we can question whether degrees are antediluvian. Online learning has flexibility. Why not master courses in energy, writing, communications, and engineering and get a credential?
Concepts like edX and online learning will transform education. This will completely change the world. I believe that people will move to online learning, both on campuses and worldwide. We have a real opportunity to be able to bring people around the world into our fold.
EdX will be a creating a platform which will be open source, not for profit, and a portal for a website where universities will offer their courses. For example, MIT courses will be offered as MITx and Harvard courses as HarvardX.
We are making sure that the courses we offer at MITx and HarvardX are quintessential MIT and Harvard courses. They are not watered down. They are not MIT Lite or Harvard Lite. These are hard courses. These are the exact same courses, so the certificate will mean something.
At the end of the day, I think the more online educators there are, I think the better off the whole world is.
There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback.
We already have a professor who's using an online social network of MIT alums to help educate students in programming. Just imagine expanding that in Facebook-fashion to tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world.
