E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Yesterday EdX and Stanford announced that they will team up their efforts in developing the EdX platform. This means that Stanford will merge their open-source mooc platform Class2Go into the EdX platform. The Chronicle wrote about this:

The move is a merger of sorts between two previously competing software-development projects with the same goal. EdX has long said it would make the software it built to power its MOOCs freely available to anyone as an open-source package. And Stanford was working on Class2Go, its own free software for online courses. Now the two software teams will work together and focus on developing a single platform.

In the same announcement EdX announced that the entire edX learning platform will be released as open source on June 1, 2013. The release will include the learning platform; edX Studio, our course authoring tool; edX101, an online course on how to teach an online course on edX; and assessment tools, such as our peer grader and our AI grader based on machine learning.

Interesting is that Stanford is not a member of the EdX Consortium and according to the Chronicle also doesn't have plans to join:

Despite the joint work on software development, Stanford has no plans to join edX as a partner, and it will not offer courses via edX. Instead, Stanford will create its own branded presence, with the jointly built software platform powering it in the background.

Via: Steve Carson