Dive Brief:
- An Inside Higher Ed analysis of the country’s largest massive open online course providers finds many institutions use both, benefitting from their differences to reach more students online.
- Inside Higher Ed reports that nonprofit edX has now recruited all of Coursera’s early adopters and continues to grow slowly, while none of the institutions that first joined edX have looked to for-profit Coursera as a secondary engine.
- Those that partner with both say they are different enough and the MOOC landscape is new enough that experimenting with both platforms gives them a way to get the most out of the format.
Dive Insight:
Coursera has been a powerhouse in the world of massive open online courses since it was founded by two Stanford faculty members in 2012. It reached its 10 millionth online student in 2014 and still far outpaces edX in the number of courses offered. The smaller platform, an open source partnership between Harvard and MIT, is accepting new partners all the time, however. While edX focuses on one-off classes from leading institutions and offers its code to other platforms, Coursera has begun to explore specializations that prepare students with specific job skills. It truly does seem pragmatic for institutions to diversify with both.
