The EdX learning platform has been offering free access to courses from the world’s leading universities for several years. In that time, it has amassed about 40 million users from all countries and has partnered with more than 150 institutions of higher education, including some of the world’s top universities.
EdX was founded by Anant Agarwal (MIT) in the spring of 2012, then Harvard University joined the initiative, and in the summer of 2012 the University of Berkeley also joined. In the fall of the same year, The University of Texas System (UT), the largest association of state universities in the United States, which includes 9 universities and 6 medical institutions, joined EDX. As of 2021, the platform has already cooperated with 150 of the world’s best universities. That’s a huge leap in just nine years of existence.
Today on the platform you can take courses in a wide variety of areas: biology, chemistry, information technology, business, economics, finance, applied sciences, statistics, mathematics, physics, medicine, nutrition, history, humanities, law, literature, philosophy, music and many others. Some of the courses at EdX are taught personally by its founder and CEO, Anant Agarwal, a 30-year MIT professor and a funder of several successful tech startups.
Before you start studying you need to register on this service, then you need to choose the best time for daily training and lessons on the topic of interest. Registration takes place only after designating the university whose training program you are interested in. For example, you can register for the program of such prestigious universities as Berkeley, Harvard, MIT. The courses are quite complex and require regular allocation of time to study the lessons. Therefore, on the one hand, EdX has the lowest completion rate compared to other platforms, but on the other hand, EdX certificates are more highly regarded.
The technology and methodology of training is not very different from other MEP projects. Lectures are also divided into modules lasting up to 10 minutes and alternated with exercises for better assimilation of the material. If an incorrect answer is received, the program analyzes the error and provides recommendations for its correction.
What is edX?
edX is the name of the most sophisticated and academic free distance education platform, a joint project of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Harvard University and UC Berkeley, which was established in 2012. The system is designed to be used throughout the learning process by several groups of users: learners, course organizers and teachers.
In terms of visual identity, EdX is pretty modest. The platform only got one major redesign (as of 2024), and it was more about minimization and simplification. The main accent here is on the professional qualities and reliability.
The original logo of the edX platform was created in 2012 and stayed active for almost eight years. It was a bold stylized inscription, made of three semi-transparent characters in a strict geometric serif font. Each character was drawn in its own color: dark pink, gray, and blue. The edges of the letters were overlapping, creating darker accents in the badge.
The redesign of 2020 has made the edX logo even stricter. The lettering was rewritten in a clean medium-weight slanted sans-serif typeface, in white, and placed on two shifted solid parallelograms drawn in a dark shade of green, close to black. The “X” was enlarged and emboldened, while its background was narrower and longer than the “Ed” one.
The clean title case lettering from the primary logo of the edX platform is set in an italicized sans-serif typeface, which is quite close to such commercial fonts as Werksatz, Abitare Sanstrade, or Glot since they all have quite simple shapes of the characters and straight cuts of the bars.
As for the color palette of the edX visual identity, it is based on the combination of white and dark green, where white stands for transparency, reliability, and professionalism, and green represents progress, growth, and development, which are the main aims of any educational project.