Alex Tabarrok, Left, and Tyler Cowen teach economics at George Mason University and are the two men behind MRUniversity, the Huffington Post. Two George Mason University economics professors are teaching on a new campus: in the cloud. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have launched MRUniversity, named after their blog MarginalRevolution.com, where they’ll enter the booming world of free online education alongside projects like Coursera and companies such as Udacity and edX. But Cowen and Tabarrok plan to do things a little differently. For one, they want other people to contribute their knowledge to the curriculum, much like they would on Wikipedia.
“[People] don’t have to pay $50,000 a year to Harvard,” Cowen said, “you can go online and get something for free.”