EdX Expands xConsortium to Asia and Doubles in Size with Addition of 15 New Global Institutions

EdX also welcomes nine universities from North America, Europe and Australia. In the United States, in addition to Cornell, the Consortium has added Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Davidson College, and University of Washington. From Europe, edX welcomes Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, Belgium's Universite catholique de Louvain, and Germany's Technical University of Munich. The University of Queensland in Australia becomes the second Australian university to join the xConsortium.

EdX also welcomes nine universities from North America, Europe and Australia. In the United States, in addition to Cornell, the Consortium has added Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Davidson College, and University of Washington. From Europe, edX welcomes Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, Belgium's Universite catholique de Louvain, and Germany's Technical University of Munich. The University of Queensland in Australia becomes the second Australian university to join the xConsortium.

"As we continue to grow the xConsortium and offer courses from institutions as diverse as our global community of students, we are moving forward with our mission to reimagine education," said Anant Agarwal, president of edX. "These schools, with their unique faculties and student bodies, will help us conduct collaborative research on best practices which improve education online and on campus."

While MOOCs, or massive open online courses, have typically focused on offering free online courses, edX's vision is much larger. EdX is building an open source educational platform and a network of the world's top universities to improve education both online and on campus while conducting research on how students learn. To date, edX has more than 900,000 individuals on its platform. The addition of these new higher education institutions will add a rich variety of new courses to edX's offerings:

Asia –

Australia -

Europe -

United States -

In addition to adding these institutions, edX recently launched more than 20 new courses ranging from HarvardX's Science & Cooking to UTAustinX's The Ideas of the 20th Century to DelftX's Solar Energy to GeorgetownX's Introduction to Bioethics to BerkeleyX's Introduction to Statistics: Inference to MITx's Mechanics ReView to WellesleyX's Introduction to Human Evolution.  These and other online and blended courses offered by xConsortium institutions are designed to take advantage of the unique features and benefits of online learning environments, including active learning, game-like experiences, instant feedback and cutting-edge virtual laboratories.

The new member institutions will join founding universities MIT and Harvard, as well as the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas System, Wellesley College, Georgetown University, McGill University, Australian National University, University of Toronto, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Delft University of Technology and Rice University in the xConsortium. The new X University Consortium members will offer courses on edX beginning in late 2013 or 2014. All of the courses will be hosted on edX's open source platform at www.edx.org.

About edX

EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise composed of 20+ leading global institutions, the xConsortium. Founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, edX is focused on transforming online and on-campus learning through groundbreaking methodologies, game-like experiences and cutting-edge research on an open source platform. EdX provides inspirational and transformative knowledge to students of all ages, social status, and income who form worldwide communities of learners. EdX is focused on people, not profit, and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the USA.

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