MOOC（大规模在线开放课程）三座大山里的Coursera和edX纷纷宣布，正式开启国际化战略。

edX is a massive open online course platform founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. The two institutions have each contributed $30 million of resources to the nonprofit project. edX launched in Fall 2012 and builds on MITx, a similar project launched by MIT in December 2011.

The "learning platform" will be developed as open-source software and made available to other institutions of higher learning that want to make similar offerings; there are plans to allow other schools to offer courses on the edX website also. Plans are to create online learning software that moves beyond videos of lectures to interactive experience.For a modest fee certificates of successful completion will be offered but not college credit. Neither MIT nor Harvard students may take the online courses for credit; they will be used to enrich their learning experience.In addition to educational offerings the project will be used to research learning and distance education.

edX宣布 旗下加盟学校新增 6 所，包括欧洲荷兰的 Delft University of Technology、瑞士的 Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne，亚洲则是澳大利亚国立大学。另外三所分别是加拿大的 McGill 大学、多伦多大学，以及美国的莱斯大学。

edX 是由 MIT 和哈佛联合在去年 5 月份推出的非盈利性教育网站，两所大学各自投入 3000 万美元。其课程的形式主要由在线视频、网页插入式测试以及协作论坛组成。目前已经吸引了超过 67.5 万的学生，其负责人 Anant Agarwal 说今年有望达到 100 万学生，其主要目标是同时服务于在线和学校里的学生。

Coursera is an educational technology company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other areas.

而由斯坦福大学教授创立的 Coursera 今天也公布了自己的国际化战略，新增 29 所学校、90 门课程以及 4 种新的语言。这 29 所大学（包括香港中文大学，详细清单见此）将为 Coursera 提供免费的课程，而 4 种新语言包括法语、西班牙语、中文以及意大利语。

2 月初，Coursera 宣布5门课程的学分获得美国教育委员会认可，标志着在线教育进入新的里程碑。而另一家专注于实用课程的 在首轮融资 1.03 亿美元后，在本月中旬收购了欧洲在线视频教育网站Video2brain，也开启了国际化拓展之路。