Bangalore: The top U.S. universities are now all set to launch free, online education courses and are also geared up to give stiff competitions to each other. The most prestigious institute of the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology declared that it will soon roll on free online courses globally, and is also planning to award certificates to students after successful completion of the course. On the other hand, Stanford is also set to dispatch its free second semester online tech courses.

The online free course that MIT is planning to launch named MITx, will exhibit the university's well-instituted OpenCourseWare, which furnishes course materials on 2,100 courses that has already been availed and utilized by more than 100 million people. The university anticipates that MITx will eventually manage a virtual community of global learners.

This new move taken by the MIT is very similar to that of Stanford University's online courses, in which lecturers from the past semester in fall, handles three open, online courses, and is all set to extend the online courses to include 10 more computer science classes soon. This includes startups, technology entrepreneurship, software as a service, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. However unlike the MIT course, Stanford does not extend certificates to candidates after successful completion of the coursework. Rather the California based university, Stanford furnishes statements of accomplishment signed by the teachers to non-matriculated students. On the other hand, MIT may charge a little fee for the course certificate, which will be utilized in the funding program. The university claims that MITx will run as a non-profit exercise backboned by foundations, companies and individuals. MIT claims to avoid confusion, with a definite name, the nonprofit figure will be developed within the university that will give the certifications for the various course work .

According to the MITx organizers, the new program will exert to break the boundaries of education in two ways. Firstly, it will teach online MIT courses to global learners and is also offering a great opportunity for eligible candidates to receive certification and knowledge through the MIT course. Secondly, the open-source software infrastructure on which MITx is hinged on can be availed freely by educational institutions around the world. The university also plans to unleash the open learning software, MITx available for free so, that the other universities can uplift the quality of their education system using the same software for their online courses.