Berklee Adds Courses to edX's Online Learning Platform

The edX online learning initiative founded by MIT and Harvard is adding 15 new universities to advance its vision of making education available to students of all ages, social status, and income. Berklee College of Music is among the edX consortium's newest members and will offer its first courses on edX’s open source platform, edx.org, later this year.

The not-for-profit edX is transforming online and on-campus learning through groundbreaking methodologies, game-like experiences, and cutting-edge research on how students learn. While massive open online courses (MOOCs) have typically focused on offering free online courses, edX's vision is much larger: to build an open source educational platform that now includes 27 of the world's top universities. To date, edX has more than 900,000 individuals on its platform.

"This partnership is a wonderful extension of Berklee's commitment to providing quality music education to people around the world, particularly for those who would never be able to study on the Boston campus,” said Carin Nuernberg, dean of continuing education at Berklee. “It will also help prospective students better prepare for their degree programs, whether in Boston, our new Valencia, Spain campus, or through our online extension school."

Other new members of the edX consortium include the first institutions from Asia: Tsinghua University and Peking University in China; the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Kyoto University in Japan; and Seoul National University in South Korea. From the United States, other newcomers are Cornell University, Boston University, Davidson College, and the University of Washington. Also, from Europe, Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, Belgium’s Université Catholique de Louvain, and Germany’s Technical University of Munich have joined. The University of Queensland in Australia becomes the second Australian university to join the edX consortium.

In addition to offering courses through edX, Berklee’s online continuing education program, Berkleemusic.com, has a menu of 150 online courses and certificate programs that will teach more than 13,000 students from 130 countries this year. This partnership with edX joins Berkleemusic's other popular free lesson initiatives, including Berkleeshares.com and Berkleemusic's robust YouTube channel.

Read the Boston Globe's coverage of Berklee's inclusion in edX here.