Rice to offer professional education courses on edX

Rice University
Office of Public Affairs / News & Media Relations

NEWS RELEASE

B.J. Almond
713-348-6770
balmond@rice.edu

 Rice to offer professional education courses on edX

HOUSTON — (Oct. 7, 2014) — Rice University will offer three professional education courses in conjunction with the online education provider edX.

Subjects will include energy sustainability, laboratory safety and health care in the digital environment, and the courses will begin in 2015 or 2016.

Unlike free massive open online courses (MOOCs), participants will pay a fee to take these courses, build their professional knowledge and skills and earn certificates and/or continuing education credits. The courses are intended for recent graduates entering the workforce and current professionals seeking to advance their careers or transition into a new field.

“Rice University is proud to be among the first universities offering professional education courses on edX,” said Caroline Levander, vice president for strategic initiatives and digital education. “We realize that keeping up with continuing education can be a significant challenge for many professionals in the working world, and we hope that the convenience of our high-quality professional education courses will help meet the needs of people around the globe.

“We have initially focused on the needs of those working in the energy and health care sectors because these areas are so significant to Houston and real strengths at Rice,” Levander said. “We look forward to growing our portfolio of professional education courses in the coming months.”

Basics of Energy Sustainability will explore the fundamentals of energy sustainability through the techno/economic frameworks and global markets to provide a comprehensive foundation for strategic business decisions. Topics will include the availability of a secure supply of energy, the affordable and competitive cost of energy and environmental responsibility in the production and consumption of energy. The course will begin in April 2015. The fee is is $495 and includes a RiceX professional education certificate.

LabSafety.1x will use an interactive online game called “Don’t Endanger the Owls” to reinforce the key concepts of safe laboratory practices in academic laboratories where hazardous materials are used. The module will help identify key areas that students need to work on and help them improve. It is intended to a supplemental resource to help bolster laboratory safety training. The course will begin in May 2016. The cost for the gaming module is $49 per user. Rice is pursuing professional education credit for completion of this course.

Medicine in the Digital Age is designed to prepare leaders in health care and allied industries to accelerate digital innovation in their organizations and adapt to the unprecedented changes happening with the advancement of information and technology. Among the topics that will be addressed are the role of social media in health care communication, the uses of wearable technologies, the potential for big data to reshape health behaviors, the ethics of personalized medicine and the impact of these new developments on the doctor-patient relationship. Baylor College of Medicine will collaborate with Rice on this course, which is thought to be the first of its kind to be offered between a major university and a U.S. medical school. The course will begin in May 2015. The fee is is $495 and includes a RiceX professional education certificate.

More courses will be added to Rice’s professional education portfolio in the coming year.

Rice became a member of edX in February 2013. In addition to offering free MOOCs on the edX platform, Rice recently added Advanced Placement MOOCs as part of the edX high school initiative to better prepare high school students for college.

To view Rice’s course offerings on edX, go to https://www.edx.org/school/ricex.

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Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,920 undergraduates and 2,567 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just over 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked among some of the top schools for best quality of life by the Princeton Review and for best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.

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