For The Largest Not-For-Profit MOOC, edX, Experimentation Is The Path To Innovation
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
01-20-2014
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
I spoke with Agarwal multiple times in recent months to ask him how edX is evolving, and what he foresees for the future of edX and for the academic institutions that they draw from.
(To hear an extended audio interview with Anant Agarwal, please visit this link. This is the seventh article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read past interviews including interviews with the CEOs of Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: As edX enters its third year in existence, what key lessons have you drawn thus far?
Anant Argawal: The power of edX and of MOOCs more generally is to democratize education. People want to learn no matter their circumstance or their age, and the experience of our students shows definitively that this is the case. We have many people who are in the workforce who use edX to develop new skills to employ in their jobs. Therefore, we are thinking more broadly.
A related example is our partnership with global steel manufacturer Tenaris. Through their adoption of the Open edX platform, Tenaris will enhance their existing training programs delivered through Tenaris University to nearly 27,000 employees worldwide. We have established a comparable relationship with the IMF.
We also have announced a partnership with Davidson College and the College Board to host Advanced Placement (AP) course modules for high school students, as well. So what began as university-centric idea is migrating to the pre and post university settings.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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