We are at a moment of great inflection in education. The gap between traditional higher education and the competencies companies need is widening as the evolution of technology and related skills accelerate.
edX sits at the center of industry and academia, bridging the gap between in-demand skills and education opportunities. As a non-profit founded by MIT and Harvard, our mission is to expand access to high-quality education to everyone, everywhere, including corporate learners. Our corporate partners share this mission and are similarly committed to providing their employees with the skills and learning they need for the future of work.
In addition to our University Advisory Board, the Corporate Advisory is central to our ability to support the world’s learners and the companies that employ them. Members of the edX Corporate Advisory Board include industry influencers and top learning and development executives building cultures of learning at leading companies around the globe.
Read on to learn how the input from business and industry leaders on our Corporate Advisory Board helps us to:
- Map our educational content, from partners to programs, to today’s (and tomorrow’s) business-critical skills
- Build a platform with features designed for the day-to-day workflows and needs of corporate learning professionals
- Pass on valuable industry insights to our customer base
Mapping Business Needs to Learning Content
It’s clear skills gaps are of major concern to companies across sectors. But how do you identify those gaps, gauge their relative importance in your organization, and build a roadmap to address them?
At edX, learning content acquisition is directly influenced by both workforce trends research and these questions, with insights from companies leading the way in answering them. We work side by side with our Corporate Advisory Board to identify the skill sets that will help their employees and company succeed and the high-level challenges and opportunities learning and development leaders need to address. Together, we explore everything from how the changing workplace varies across industry verticals, company size, and geography to how to build pathways that match each learner with the right type and cadence of learning.
Our team uses these rich insights to determine what types of courses and programs — in subject area, length, features, etc. — best match corporate environments and needs and are most impactful to both employer and employee.
A Product Roadmap With Customers at the Center
We design the edX For Business platform with the full spectrum of enterprise users in mind: decision makers, administrators, and, of course, learners.
Our Corporate Advisory Board members help to inform platform innovation, infusing our product development decisions with real-world perspective into what works and doesn’t at companies today and helping us prioritize features that would have the biggest impact. edX platform tools, for example, include features that help program administrators manage budgets and drive enrollment, plus data insights that illustrate program efficacy across a variety of factors for all company stakeholders.
The edX in-course experience is designed with similar input, leveraging our own ranks of learning designers, billions of data points on learner behaviors collected through our Open edX platform*, and feedback from our customers and advisory board. Our robust and growing inventory of teaching and learning tools encourages effective, active learning, with features like virtual labs, 54 types of assessments, and tools to increase collaboration, which we’ve found that corporate learners in particular benefit from.
*The edX platform is informed and enhanced upon using billions of data points of learner behavior data gathered through the open source platform that powers edX.org, Open edX®.
Insights That Influence Leading L&D Strategies
Guidance from the Corporate Advisory Board shapes how edX can best meet the corporate learning and development challenges of today and the future — and how you can face them too.
Learn more about using a platform and content influenced by leaders in corporate learning: set up time to talk to our sales team about your needs and explore how edX For Business can fit into your learning and development strategies.
