Chinese Consortium Adopts edX Platform

Representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Education and more than 10 of China’s top universities met Oct. 10 at Tsinghua University in Beijing to announce XuetangX, China’s newest online education portal.

XuetangX is powered by Harvard’s edX’s open-source platform, but the initiative is a distinct, independent organization and China’s largest online collaboration of leading universities. It will begin to launch courses on Oct. 17.

Chinese government and university representatives revealed the initiative just two days after another provider of massive open online courses, Coursera, announced the launch of its own Chinese-language portal.

The XuetangX consortium includes edX members Tsinghua and Peking University, both of which have already made several contributions to the edX platform, according to edX spokesperson Dan O’Connell.

“Our platform was made open-source so that other institutions could add to it and use it, and the institutions that joined us, the Chinese consortium, decided that this platform met their needs,” O’Connell said.

Earlier this month, the French Ministry of Higher Education also launched its own online education portal using the edX open-source platform.

“The decisions of the Chinese consortium and the French Ministry of Higher Education is a testament to the open-source approach that edX and its consortium have taken,” O’Connell said. EdX currently serves almost 1.5 million students from around the world and consists of 29 institutions.

Although Harvard was one of the founding members of the edX consortium, along with MIT, there has been little collaboration between HarvardX and XuetangX, according to HarvardX spokersperson Michael P. Rutter.

“Really what's happening is that XuetangX developed it themselves and took advantage of the open-source platform,” Rutter said. “Maybe there will be the possibility that Harvard will work with XuetangX, but there's nothing definitive in the works."

Rutter noted that there is a possibility that individual members of the Chinese consortium might license classes from Harvard but added that it is too early to confirm anything.