[itsbenweeks]

I was originally worried at how dishonest seemed to faculty and TAs who have spent years creating many textbooks' worth of content for edX. Something akin to MIT Press selling their catalog to Elsevier or Pearson wouldn't be tolerated by the faculty. But, in the press release they do mention that MIT faculty can opt-out and operate in a MIT-only instance & fork of the Open edX platform:

"MIT will continue to offer courses to learners worldwide via edX, as well as on a new platform now known as MITx Online. MIT’s Office of Digital Learning will build and operate MITx Online as a new world-facing platform, based on Open edX, that MIT is creating for MITx MOOCs.

MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."

With that in mind, it seems that Open edX development will be under a new non-profit held by MIT and Harvard. I hope this new non-profit will be less at odds with itself in respect to maintaining openness while creating profitable pay2play courses.

[nverno]

MIT is the gold standard of education. Most of their computing classes already give you full access to all the course materials, videos, labs, readings, handouts, etc. directly from the course page. These direct resources are far better than typical edX/Coursera courses.

The same is not generally true of Harvard courses (with a few exceptions like cs50), which hide all materials behind paywalls.

[dragonwriter]

> MIT is the gold standard of education

A complete tangent, but its somewhat amusing that this idiom remains popular when the literal gold standard itself is no longer generally considered a figurative gold standard of anything.

[oceliker]

I didn’t know where the term “gold standard” came from up until a couple of years ago. I thought it simply meant top standard (and there would be a silver standard, bronze standard, etc)

[nverno]

Orwell says something along the lines of never use outdated idioms in his Politics and the English Language. I'm withholding judgement on the extinctioness of this one until we see how the whole debt bubble plays out though :)