Harvard and Amgen Announce LabXchange.org, an Open Platform with Scientific Content

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IBL News
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IBL News | New York

Harvard University and the Amgen Foundation announced this week the launch of the LabXchange.org platform, intended to promote science education, mainly among high school and college students.

The free online tool provides access to a library of educational content, including videos, interactive simulations, and assessments. It also offers the ability to mix and match materials, empowering teachers to create flexible learning pathways for their classes or personalized instruction for students.

The platform includes a global networking functionality, enabling teachers to collaborate across the scientific community.

Dr. Robert Lue, principal investigator of LabXchange and professor of the Practice of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard, said, “too many high school and college students lack the opportunity to directly explore the scientific process – where you build a hypothesis, understand a method, and determine how to apply it to an appropriate experimental problem.”

LabXchange builds upon other Amgen Foundation programs, such as the Amgen Biotech Experience and Amgen Scholars, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard Unversity (Harvard FAS).

The platform itself contains content from multiple partners and sources, including Khan Academy –so far the most active contributor:

The platform is built upon the open-source software Open edX. Last year, Harvard committed to releasing the whole code on GitHub, although no mention was made on the last public announcement.