This is a good idea.

Good old degrees with 4 years in college, in stove-piped departments are an antediluvian concept. Why 4 years? My bachelor's degree at IIT madras was a 5-year program, and I probably use 20% of that in my job at this point in my life. Why specialize in one field? In today's fast moving, nimble world, learners and employers are looking for multidisciplinary education. Further, they are looking to refresh their skills as the workplace needs change.

A degree, fundamentally, is a signalling mechanism. It tells an employer that the holder likely has a set of skills. In the modern world, employers are looking for a diverse set of skills. So a promising alternative is one where learners acquire a traditional degree for 2 years (certainly less than the traditional 4 years), so that they can satisfy the bean-counting HR folks that need to see something that spells degree on the resume (and that will go away too with time). Then, the learner augments that with various other signals -- call them badges, or mooc-style certificates, so that employers can now see the whole portfolio.

A couple of weeks ago, edX also announced another interesting signalling mechanism, an XSeries certificate. Here a learner can take a sequence of courses in a given discipline on edx, and by passing all the courses in the sequence, earn an XSeries certificate. MIT and edX announced XSeries certificates in foundations of computer science and supply chain management for a start. Some of you have commented that individual courses do not mean much to employers, but mastery of a discipline is akin to a mini-masters or a minor program, and is meaningful. We believe these XSeries credentials from edX will have strong signalling value to employers and take MOOC credentialling and badging one additional step forward.

I can go on and on about this. I believe that in the future degree transcripts will be replaced by a colorful portfolio of credentials, including badges and certificates. OK OK, and degrees too, for backwards compatibility.

edX is a non-profit startup, but we still need to be self-sustaining. So we are exploring several business models spanning both B2C and B2B. Unlike other MOOC providers, since edX is a non-profit, we do not have VC investors, rather we have institutional funders including MIT and Harvard. Many of our university partners such as the UT system have also contributed $s to our cause. One can view these initial contributions as an early round of investment in edX.

In the B2C space, we use a freemium model. Students can take our courses for free, and they can even get an honor code certificate for free. However, we charge a small fee for ID verified certificates. In addition to the fee for the ID verified certificate (typically between $25 and $100 for a course), we offer the students the opportunity to contribute voluntarily to our cause by paying more than the minimum fee.

In the B2B space, we work with corporations, NGO, governments and state university systems. Here, edX hosts the platform for the institution, and the institution offers its courses on our platform for their employees or for other targetted learners. They pay edX for various services such as hosting, education services, training, etc. We have a number of such partnerships underway, including one with IMF.

First, let me point out that professors have been using various forms of online learning for decades, so what edx and others are doing with moocs is simply taking what we have been doing to the next level in terms of scalability and quality.

Think of online learning and platforms to create great online course material not as making teachers obsolete, but as tools for teachers, which will enable them to do a lot more than they could previously with the time they had. Sadly, among the few teaching tools we have given professors in the past few centuries has been a piece of chalk. Blogging sites and online news did not make journalists obsolete, rather created 10 million journalists, while making news much more interactive and exciting. In much the same manner, online learning has the potential to transform education. Online learning and moocs can give existing professors new tools to create additional modalities of teaching. Professors and soon-to-be professors like yourself that are quick to experiment with these new tools, are likely to find success, creating new ways of engaging our millenial generation of students who are perfectly comfortable texting, tweeting, blogging, emailing, moocing, youtubing, slashdotting ( :-) ) and snapchatting.

We have also been experimenting with blended models of education where you combine the best of online and inperson. Initial results are promising. In one these blended model experiments in which we collaborated with san jose state university, the students watched videos, did online exercises and virtual labs on the edx online platform, and then came to class for in-person activity including working in small groups and interacting with the professor to get a deeper understanding of the material. The pass rate for this course went from a traditional average of about 60% to 90% with the blended class. Research by Brewlow et al (you can see paper at https://www.edx.org/research) also shows that student success in a mooc course was positively correlated with working with an instructor or mentor.

I know, why do today what you can put off till tomorrow :-) Seriously, a large number of our learners like you just want to audit a course and prefer it to be always available. For that reason, a significant number of our previous courses are indeed offered as "past courses" or "archived courses". You will see this on the announcements page when you go into such an archived course: "This is a past/archived course. Certain features of this course may not be active, but we still invite you to explore the available materials." To see archived courses you can click on courses at edx.org, select courses, and then select past courses. For example, the justice course from HarvardX is available as an archived course at: https://www.edx.org/course/harvard-university/er22x/justice/571 In general, we strongly encourage our university partners to offer their past courses as archived courses. A few courses (like the one you tried perhaps) are not offered as an archived course. There are several reasons why a university might choose not to offer their course as an archived course. The next version of the course might have started, and so they might take down the archived course because they reuse some of the questions which have their answers available as handouts. Or, the course might need significant resources to run, for example, special grading servers may need to be maintained, for which they may not have resources.