Notes from the Vice Provost: Professional Education Strategies

Colleagues,

I wanted to let you know in advance that on October 2nd edX will announce an integrated effort in professional education. As with the edX for High School Initiative, targeting students preparing for AP exams and enabling general college readiness, the aim of professional education courses is to further expand edX's audiences and experiment with additional revenue models.

The edX professional courses will include professional and executive education, continuing education, and management training in topic such as IT, business, engineering, communications, and energy. As part of this effort edX will also make available to its partners a "white label" service, or an instance of the Open edX platform that an institution can fully brand and manage.

In some cases, an institution may offer some form of credit through these professional offerings---but it would be the institution, not edX, offering such credit. All the professional education courses offered via edX will be fee-based. This puts edX more in line with other MOOC providers such as Coursera, Udacity, and Canvas Network, providing learners with a continuum of offerings, from free to paid; from individual courses to series and certificates; and from introductory level to high-level content.

At this time, HarvardX is not participating in the new professional education effort, either in terms of developing courses or standing up a Harvard-branded version of the edX platform. The initial set of courses will come from TU Delft, MIT, and Rice (with prices at the $500 mark); UT Austin and MIT Professional Education will set up white-labeled websites.

I want to be clear that we are agnostic when it comes to the best solution, from working with DCE to developing custom platforms, that a Harvard school or program might want to use when offering online or hybrid professional education courses, certificates, or even full degree programs.

In fact, Anne Margulies and Kristin Sullivan from HUIT are working on a document that outlines various options (internal and external) for standing up professional learning efforts.

Finally, I would encourage all of you to keep me and others aware of your plans in the evolving professional and executive education space so we can leverage existing solutions, identify practical alternatives to what we have on campus, and share common needs or point out gaps that we could potentially support through a centralized strategy.

Best,

Peter