The New York Times is reporting some exciting news!

“In the scramble to stake out a leadership role in the world of online education, the University of California, Berkeley, is announcing on Tuesday that it is joining edX, the free nonprofit online learning venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Berkeley will be offering two courses, contributing new open-source technology and heading a soon-to-be-formed consortium of universities joining edX.”

This news is interesting, not only because of the prominence of UC Berkeley, but also because some of its professors have already been offering free courses online through the competing for-profit platform, Coursera. We will see how this shakes out in the near future. Another interesting part of this story is that while Harvard and MIT have both committed $30 million each to the project, Berkeley is not contributing monetarily. Instead, it will supplying a new online-education platform that engineers at the university had already been working on.

The first two courses offered by the university through edX this fall are Artificial Intelligence and Software as a Service.

I will leave you with some other sources to digest this news:

• UC Berkeley News Center
• The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Official Press Release