10gen, the company behind the MongoDB open-source "NoSQL" database, has teamed with EdX—the free online education collaboration between MIT, Harvard, and the University of California Berkeley—to bring MongoDB training to the Web and to accelerate the release of EdX's online learning platform as open source.

In an interview with Ars Technica, 10gen Vice President of Education Andrew Erlichson said that the company would release two free training courses for MongoDB—one for developers, and one for database administrators—starting in October. "As part of this collaboration, we have access to (EdX's) software," he said, "and we will contribute back our changes to the software." Some of those contributions will include integration of MongoDB into EdX as a data store.

The eventual goal of the collaboration is to both provide all of 10gen's training for free online and to release the entire EdX platform under an open-source license. "They [EdX] were interested in collaborating with us because we're an open source company who runs things in a similar way," said Erichson. "We develop out in the open, which is a model they were interested in emulating for the development of their own source code."

Harvard and MIT officially launched the EdX project in May, and both schools have committed over $30 million to the nonprofit collaboration. MIT offered a preview of the platorm in March when it offered a free basic course on electronics and circuits, which initially enrolled over 100,000 students—though only 10,000 stuck with the class through the midterm exam.

For its part, 10gen has been providing on-site training to individuals for about $1,500 per course. But a lack of a formal, widely available certification program was getting in the way of greater adoption of MongoDB, Erilichson said. "We're on target to train 1,000 people in the last year," he said. "But in the last few days we've had 4,000 people sign up for the developer and DBA courses. There's been a pent up demand for a certification program."