Summer 2014
Around the Quads
Columbia Joins edX
Columbia has launched a partnership with edX, a nonprofit online learning platform founded in 2012 by Harvard and MIT. The first Columbia course offered through edX will be “The United States in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” taught by Eric Foner ’63, ’69 GSAS, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History and a Bancroft Prize, Lincoln Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner.
“Professor Foner is a legend,” said Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, which has offered more than 150 courses from 33 colleges and universities in a range of subjects. “Having his course on the Civil War on edX will significantly enhance the quality of the courses on edX.”
Foner plans to retire at the end of the 2014–15 academic year and taught his Civil War course for the last time this past spring, when the lectures and discussion sections were recorded. Of the partnership with edX, Foner told Spectator, “To me, this is just a way to disseminate knowledge to a broad audience.” He added that he was glad that the course “can be available to people long after I’ve left the University.”
Though Columbia professors have taught massive open online courses through other platforms, including Coursera, no University-wide partnerships had been established before the March 13 announcement about edX.