“It really gives the opportunity to democratize our education and make it available as a public good,” Agarwal said.

And the attractiveness of an online education offered by a top-tier institution has been proven by the attention garnered by MITx—the platform that preceded and laid the foundation for the creation of edX. The program has had 120,000 students enroll since it debuted in February.

According to Agarwal, a program like MITx or edX markets itself.

“We launched this course and put it up on a couple of websites, and that’s it,” Agarwal said of the marketing strategy for the first course offered by MITx.

The strength of the Harvard and MIT brands also comes across in the excitement over the certificates of mastery that edX will offer upon the completion of some courses. Whereas most other online education platforms offer no university-issued recognition of completion, edX certificates will bear the name of their parent institution—Harvardx or MITx.

These single-course diplomas could play an important role for students looking to impress a potential employer or improve their odds of admission to a top college, Agarwal said. According to Harvard University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76, Harvard faculty have yet to decide which courses will offer certificates.

But experts insist that even with the Harvard name attached, certificates of mastery will in no way be comparable to a degree.

“A certificate is very different from a four-year degree. The actual deliverable, the actual product, is very, very different,” said Holland.

Because of this distinction, experts said they believe that the offering of free online Harvard classes will not make traditional acceptance to the University any less prestigious. In fact, they said that the potentially widespread reach of virtual courses might only increase Harvard’s name recognition.

EX-PERIMENTAL

While Harvard has touted edX’s ability to reach new audiences, the University also has worked to make the program a paradigm of innovation in other ways.

While online education is far from novel, experts say that Harvard’s will be the first to realize such a platform’s research potential.

One of edX’s strength lies in its ability to not only educate students but also to provide universities with the knowledge necessary to critique themselves and improve their teaching.

Among the many research projects envisioned for edX, scholars might track students’ patterns of watching and rewinding lecture videos or examine correlations between the study methods students choose and their later scores on tests.

“As we do this, we’re going to be collecting enormous amounts of information about how people learn, which kind of assessments work, who signs on. How do people learn differently in India from the way they learn in China and Cambridge?” Faust said.