2. Harvard Launches edX
The University made a Harvard education available to the masses in May when it announced the creation of edX—a free not-for-profit online learning venture founded in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Diving into the the rapidly growing realm of virtual education, each institution invested $30 million in the program. Administrators touted edX as an opportunity to research the way that people learn as well as its potential to be integrated into the traditional classroom. “This is about experimentation; it’s about research; it’s about rethinking education,” Garber said at the time of the program’s launch.
By the time HarvardX—the University’s branch of the virtual learning platform—officially went live for its first day of school in October, over 100,000 people had registered to take Harvard courses online. The platform grew throughout the fall semester. The University of Texas, Wellesley College, and Georgetown University signed on to edX, joining Harvard, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley, which had become a part of the program over the summer. Two local community colleges announced plans to offer a modified version of edX’s “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming,” an online class based on MIT’s introductory computer science course.
In December, edX announced an expanded roster of spring semester classes that includes its first courses in the humanities and social sciences. Still, the realm of virtual learning is new and relatively unexplored territory, and Harvard affiliates remain uncertain about what impact edX might have on the future of higher education.
1. Harvard Investigates an ‘Unprecedented’ Cheating Scandal
Five days before the start of the fall semester, Harvard administrators took the unusual step of calling in media outlets to make an announcement: they had a cheating scandal on their hands bigger than anyone could remember. After being tipped off by a professor who had spotted suspicious similarities in his students’ final take-home exams, the Administrative Board had launched an investigation that expanded to include 125 undergraduates in last spring’s Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress” course. The students were accused of plagiarizing or inappropriately collaborating on the exam, and if found guilty, faced a punishment that could be as severe as the requirement to withdraw from the College for a year.
It was a scandal that would rock Harvard’s campus. Within days, media outlets reported that Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry, the co-captains of the men’s basketball team, planned to withdraw from the College due to their involvement in the scandal. In the classrooms, professors included new guidelines about appropriate collaboration on their syllabi, while still defending take-home exams as a valuable method of assessment. In University Hall, administrators redrew their schedules and pushed aside longterm projects to cope with the fallout of the investigation, and a dean started work in a new position created to address academic integrity on campus.
Shockwaves from the scandal reverberated beyond Cambridge. At Yale, administrators discouraged their own professors from administering take-home exams in the wake of the scandal at Harvard. And on the national stage, the scandal sparked a debate among pundits and observers about academic integrity in the digital age, the proper limits of peer collaboration, and the intersection of athletics and academics on college campuses.
Since their first announcement, administrators have stayed tight-lipped about the ongoing investigation, ensuring that the conversation will continue into 2013.