An Ivy League in Every Home: the Live-Streaming of University Classes Worldwide

It’s simply a given that a large percentage of the top-ranked colleges and universities in the world are located in the United States. With perennial powerhouses like MIT and Harvard University vying for the coveted “#1 spot”, the quality of top-tier education has, in some degree, never been healthier than it is now. As evidence of this fierce competitiveness, a “building boom” of sorts is happening among Ivy League and other renowned American institutions of higher learning, all of which seem to be in friendly competition with each other in attracting a larger percentage of the global student body. Cornell University, for example, is slated to open a new Manhattan-based campus that focuses on developing technology directly applicable to entrepreneurial business. Yale University has developed a joint program (and a sprawling new campus) in conjunction with the National University of Singapore. Duke University is set to open a new business administration campus in Kunshan, China come 2014.

But while these universities are making inroads into cities across the Middle East and East Asia, all of them bristling with new, state-of-the-art campuses geared for the high-end needs of elite global students, another and different sort of program is taking shape in Cambridge, MA. A partnership between MIT and Harvard University that’s dubbed “edX”, the program seeks to livestream Harvard and MIT classes onto the laptops and desktops of students across the world. These aren’t simply “recorded classes” posted online for anyone to access via YouTube. We’re talking about live, interactive web experiences for students living anywhere in the world; anywhere that has access to the necessary broadband encoding systems. Suddenly, students from Kampala to Kamchatka will have the ways and means (for a nominal fee) of receiving a truly world-class education.

Using open-source software that can be accessed at other college classrooms around the world, MIT and Harvard have contributed $30M apiece in order to make this program into reality. Here at Telairity, we make it our business to help develop and facilitate such groundbreaking new means of higher education. With our livestreaming H.264 encoding platforms and our HD graphics, we see a strong potential to help usher in a new era of trans-global learning. The world remains a vast space, to be certain. But more and more, the speed of its student body moves  at the speed of Telairity.