Opportunities



This is an incredible moment in time in higher education. Harvard and MIT came together to seize this exciting opportunity. EdX is more than the website and platform that you have read about. It has been less than a year since we started and we have already learned so much. We have an unprecedented opportunity to learn more.

This is just the beginning.

Our aim for HarvardX is to empower and inspire the teachers and learners on our campus and beyond.

With that in mind, stay tuned for information about future courses and modules; opportunities to attend workshops and training sessions on how to create and launch a course or module; and how to best use research data to inform teaching and learning.

HarvardX and Harvard Students

HarvardX and Harvard Teaching

HarvardX is dedicated to provide support for our faculty to...

  • Reimagine their courses
  • Enhance peer teaching and use automated grading, resulting in more time
  • Enrich on-campus learning through improvements created for online environments
  • Teach on such a large scale and reach a broad, global audience

Through research, faculty will have the opportunity to learn about their own courses and pedagogy in general by exploring such questions as...

  • What motivates students?
  • How do they learn best?
  • How can we assess what they’ve learned?
  • What can we do best online?
  • What can we do best on campus?

The Provost has tasked the HarvardX Faculty Committee with encouraging broad faculty participation in HarvardX/edX, establishing guidelines and standards for HarvardX courses and modules, and helping to allocate resources for developing these materials. The specific responsibilities of the Committee are to...

    1. Define quality standards for HarvardX courses and modules, and ensure that offerings meet these standards -- a curatorial approach.
    2. Solicit and encourage Harvard-wide participation, and ensure that courses selected for HarvardX meet School priorities.  A goal of HarvardX is to portray the breadth and diversity of Harvard programs and disciplines, instructors, and pedagogical approaches.
    3. Oversee HarvardX support for faculty who are developing courses or modules, and integrate school resources and other Harvard resources for efficient design and development.
    4. Foster adaptation of innovations for campus educational programs.
    5. Disseminate information about HarvardX, including teaching and learning best practices that emerge from HarvardX work over time.
    6. Ensure the integration of course development with the research guidelines and approaches developed by the HarvardX Research Committee.
    7. Oversee the review and subsequent revision of courses based on assessment data.

If you are interested in creating a course on the edX platform or conducting research, please contact the HarvardX team.

Guiding Principles for HarvardX Courses

General Principles

  1. HarvardX should reflect the diversity of disciplines, ways of knowing, and intellectual priorities of all the schools of Harvard University.
  2. HarvardX should support modes of learning and curricular approaches for a variety of student backgrounds.
  3. HarvardX should provide high quality educational engagement and learning experiences to the widest range of individuals with an Internet connection.
  4. HarvardX should enhance learning opportunities for all Harvard students.
  5. HarvardX should support ways to address a wide range of educational research questions at the individual course level and across multiple courses/pathways.
  6. Courses proposed for HarvardX should be reviewed and approved by a broadly representative faculty committee that will also solicit feedback from the Curriculum Committee of the school or department most appropriate for the subject matter.

Content and Connectivity

  1. HarvardX courses should be lead by Harvard faculty.
    - The faculty lead for each course will be responsible for both its intellectual development and its execution at a level of quality appropriate for Harvard.
  2.  HarvardX courses should adhere to the educational expectations defined by the relevant Harvard school or department.
    - This principle will accommodate variation from the usual on-campus courses in areas such as content coverage, duration, and forms of assessment, while ensuring that HarvardX courses remain aligned with each school or department’s intellectual vision.
  3. HarvardX courses should explicitly enhance teaching and learning in Harvard’s schools or departments.
    - Entire HarvardX courses or their components should contribute to Harvard’s on-campus courses or other educational efforts, either internally or externally directed.
  4. HarvardX courses can address any topic that an on-campus course at any Harvard school would address.
    - HarvardX courses are not limited to topics that have been previously covered and can certainly break new ground, while maintaining the principle of connectivity to Harvard’s other teaching and learning efforts.

Pedagogical and Research Format

  1. HarvardX courses should have clearly articulated learning goals.
    - These can include engagement with specific bodies of knowledge, learning of particular skill sets – both qualitative and quantitative, and exploration of particular ways of knowing.
  2. HarvardX courses should align explicit learning goals with the teaching framework of the course.
    - The teaching framework includes the various ways information is delivered, how student understanding is assessed (formative and summative), and what modes of interaction between students and between students and teaching staff are supported.
  3. HarvardX courses should support different kinds of assessment.
    - These include both formative and summative assessment of student learning, as well as assessment of the course design, instruments and student pathways through the material.
    - All available data about the course and student performance will be collected, preserved, and shared with approved researchers.
    - Individual students' identities will be kept confidential, but not necessarily anonymous; all data is subject to use for ongoing research to improve teaching and learning.
    - Assignment of rights to use all data gathered should be a principle of participation in HarvardX.
  4. HarvardX courses should include some mechanism for reviewing and updating the content and pedagogy if appropriate.
    - There should be a process whereby assessment data are easily used to refine the content and pedagogy of the course. 

HarvardX and Harvard Research

The HarvardX Research Committee is charged with the coordination and support of HarvardX research.
Recent developments include:
  • An NSF-funded grant with MIT that analyzes student participation, persistence, performance in open online courses;
  • A HarvardX Research Registry for the coordination and support of ongoing and proposed research in HarvardX courses; and
  • A HarvardX Data Repository that stores HarvardX course data for secure secondary analysis by registered researchers.
The research committee welcomes all proposals. Examples of high-priority research topics include the following. (Note: This list is a sampling of ongoing work and is not intended to be representative or exhaustive.)
  • Who stays? Who learns? Understanding persistence and performance in open online courses.
  • In Real Life: The impact of in-person “meet-ups” and instructor contact in open online courses.
  • Around the world and home again: How Harvard learns from HarvardX.
  • Trust in numbers: A validation agenda for assessment use in open online courses.
If you are interested in research using HarvardX data, please fill out the HarvardX Research Study Form.

Research Committee Members

HarvardX Research Committee (chaired by Andrew Ho)

  • Bharat N. Anand, Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration, HBS
  • Joseph K. Blitzstein, Professor of the Practice in Statistics, FAS
  • Mary Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology, FAS; Chair, Department of Sociology
  • Thomas Kane, Professor of Education and Economics, HGSE
  • Gary King, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor
  • Dan Levy, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, HKS
  • Bridget Terry Long, Xander Professor of Education and Economics, HGSE
  • Xiao-Li Meng, Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Statistics; Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
  • Fernando Reimers, Ford Foundation Professor of International Education, HGSE
  • Daniel Schacter, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology, FAS 
  • Jeffrey Schnapp, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, FAS; Director, metaLAB (at) Harvard; Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
  • Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, SEAS
  • Judith Singer, James Bryan Conant Professor of Education; Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity

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