Ancient Greek Heroes? Global Poverty? Sign Up for New edX Courses

After a hugely successful start last year, MITx's initial free, online course morphed into edX, a partnership with Harvard and other peer universities with a burgeoning array of offerings. You can sign up now for spring edX courses including the first options in the humanities and social sciences.

The prototype course, Circuits and Electronics 6.002, was offered by MIT Professor Anant Agarwal, president of edX. “In eight months, we’ve attracted more than half a million unique users from around the world. Now we’re offering a wider range of courses from the humanities and social sciences. It’s an exciting, watershed moment,” Agarwal said.

New this spring:

• Justice from Michael Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher focuses on the moral and civic dilemmas facing societies.
• Introduction to Statistics from Ani Adhikari, the UC Berkeley lecturer who received UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
• The Challenges of Global Poverty from Esther Duflo, the MIT economist who has led a comprehensive evaluation of the roots of poverty in developing nations.
• The Ancient Greek Hero from Gregory Nagy, the professor of ancient Greek literature at Harvard who specializes in linguistic analysis.
• Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation from Umesh Vazirani, the UC Berkeley computer scientist who works on the relationship between information and quantum physics.
• Human Health and Global Environmental Change from Harvard's Center for Health and the Global Environment and Aaron Bernstein, a physician who studies climate change and biodiversity.

EdX is also bringing back several courses from the fall 2012 semester: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming; Introduction to Solid State Chemistry; Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; Software as a Service I; Software as a Service II; Foundations of Computer Graphics; and Circuits and Electronics. Get descriptions and register online.

The edX consortium now includes MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, the University of Texas System, Wellesley, and Georgetown. All edX courses are open for registration and available to anyone at no cost.