SINGAPORE - The National University of Singapore (NUS) is tying up with popular online education provider edX to offer courses on its platform from next year.
For a start, it will have at least four massive open online courses (MOOCs) on edX next year, and plans to introduce more over the next three years.
This is the university's second partnership with MOOC providers. Its first was with another key United States-based education provider, Coursera, in 2013.
Students and staff at NUS have also since August had access to more than 2,000 online courses on edX offered by some 120 institutions and partners across the world.
They include reputable institutions in the United States like Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley.
NUS undergraduates have the option of counting completed online courses as part of their curriculum with the recent introduction of an initiative that lets students design a portion of their course components.
They can earn up to four modular credits in pursuing subjects on edX as part of their Unrestricted Electives modules.
In a statement on Thursday (Nov 14), NUS provost Ho Teck Hua said that partnering edX, which was founded by Harvard and MIT, gives NUS students and staff "greater access to knowledge across diverse topics and specialisations, including technology, business and the humanities".
In addition, the courses NUS plans to offer on edX will be open to the public and users around the world.
The first programme, to be launched on edX in January next year, is Spatial Computing Thinking. It will cover the theory and practical skills needed for generating, analysing and visualising complex 3D-spatial data sets.
The professional certificate programme, which consists of four courses spread across four months and requires learners to complete assessments, will be taught by Associate Professor Patrick Janssen from NUS' architecture department.
The other MOOCs are intercultural communication at work, to be offered by the NUS Centre for English Language Communication; a data analytics skills development courses for professionals in the built sector by the NUS' School of Design and Environment; and a course on the future of US-China relations, by the NUS Asia Research Institute.
