Purdue University became the 7th edX partner to launch a MOOC-based Master’s degree with the company.

The Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering costs $22.5k and consists of 30 credits ($750/credit). It can take anywhere from 1 – 4 years to finish.

This degree competes head-on with a similar degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder which will be offered through Coursera. The degree is similarly priced and costs $20k for the same number of credits ($667/credit). The CU Boulder version of the degree also allows students to earn a smaller 9 credit graduate certificate.

The CU Boulder degree, which was announced much earlier, has initiated a limited launch this month. The full program launches in January 2020, the same as Purdue (which probably isn’t a coincidence).

As always what excites us are the courses that are part of these degrees being launched to the general public for free to audit. Early this year Class Central compiled a list of over 400 such courses.

CU Boulder has launched 21 courses in the field of Electrical Engineering (EE) while Purdue has 8 courses. CU Boulder plans to release around 100 courses. Overall around 300 EE MOOCs have been launched by universities around the world.

The other thing that differentiates CU Boulder’s degree is that there is no application process and is purely performance based. i.e Students need to complete a series of courses for credit in a “Pathway Specialization” and pass with an overall GPA of 3.0 or better.

This degree from Purdue is edX’s 11th degree and edX also lists another 13 degrees in its upcoming degree partners.

So far MOOC-providers have announced over 35+ Masters Degrees. A complete list of currently available MOOC-based online degrees, along with their prices, can be found in Class Central‘s pricing charts.

Besides its master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering, Purdue plans to launch two other online degrees on edX in 2020:

• An online master’s degree in mechanical engineering
• An online master’s degree in civil engineering

The civil engineering degree will be developed from the ground up. By contrast, the other two will be based on master’s degree programs currently offered by Purdue on its own online education portal, where they cost $40k. On edX, the degrees will cost less than $25k.

In 2017, Purdue acquired Kaplan University, a for-profit online university until then managed by the Kaplan Higher Education corporation. Following the acquisition, Kaplan University was re-branded as Purdue Global and turned into a nonprofit.

Although the upcoming engineering degrees will be offered on edX and not on Purdue Global, Kaplan Higher Education will remain involved in the degree programs by providing admissions and analytics support to Purdue.