Microsoft Create Free Online Courses With EdX

Microsoft is partnering with EdX to create online educational courses for software developers. EdX has recently announced on Tuesday of this week that the online courses would be the latest addition to their curriculum of interactive and massive open online courses (MOOC) programs. According to a recent release, Microsoft is EdX’s very first corporate partner for the program.

The online courses are intended to educate core development skills. The program will feature interactive coding, exercises and assessments. The first batch of these courses will begin at the end of March and will be have no cost to enrol in. But, if a student wants to receive a “verified certificate” showing they’ve passed, they must pay a fee.

The list of the first seven courses shows the emphasis is going to be squarely fixed upon programming languages or applications that are developed by Microsoft, such as Office 365, TypeScript and Transact-SQL. There also are courses on Bootstrap, which is open source and used in mobile-first website design and C# programming.

EdX has partnered with the tech industry before this move. Google has worked with the nonprofit organisation to create the Open EdX “open source learning platform” and they have also had a hand in the yet-to-be-launched MOOC.org project. MOOC.org is akin to YouTube for online courses that are created by schools and organisations that sit outside the EdX field.  Unfortunately there have been delays in this website, as it was supposed to launch in 2014 but that has yet to happen.

In the meantime Microsoft has worked closely with EdX to create software using Office Mix that enables teachers to add additional content to their programs.

EdX is a nonprofit organisation that was founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. It offers more than 300 courses created by universities, nonprofits, and businesses globally.

[Image via edx]

SOURCE: Xconomy