Episode 75: Affordable, Accessible, Highest Quality Education for all with Anant Agarwal, Founder and CEO of edX and Chief Open Education Officer of 2U
Anant Agarwal is the Chief Open Education Officer of 2U/edX. He was the Founder and CEO of edX, an online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT. Anant taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries.
He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.
Anant won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, the Yidan Prize for Education Development, and MIT's Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He holds a Guinness World Record for the largest microphone array, and is an author of the textbook "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits."
His work on Organic Computing was selected by Scientific American as one of 10 World-Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named in Forbes' list of top 15 education innovators in 2012. Anant is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of ACM.
He hacks on WebSim, which is an online circuits laboratory in his spare time. Anant holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor's from IIT Madras.
00:00-02:21-Introduction
02:22-05:52-What shaped Anant's Journey
05:53-10:15- What did Anant see as a difference between different educational paradigms
10:16-14:37- What is the difference between the three modalities of teaching
14:38-17:59- What support does a student get in a massive open online course
18:00-21:52- How to help a student who is struggling to learn
21:53-26:23- The merger of edX and 2U
26:24-29:06- Motivating the students
29:07-34:42- Affordability
34:43-37:34- Are there opportunities to merge online and immersive programs for things that require real work areas
37:35-40:39- What inspired Anant to start edX
40:40-43:42- How is Anant doing on his goal of educating a billion people?
43:43-45:37- What drives Anant to focus himself on education and what leads him to focus on creating a learning environment?
45:38-49:32- Will traditional 4-year colleges will be open to the idea of separate teaching from learning?
49:33-53:13- Trends in future education
53:14-54:11- Closing
Passion Can Lead to Student Success
The one thing that stood out in respective whether it was in-person teaching at a high school level in Bangalore or IIT or Stanford or whether it was the experiences with edX with the online teaching and learning, one thing stood out that the modality of learning whether it’s online or in-person was relevant. The feedback that I was getting back from students. This was from both students personally talking and from students around campus. They all said that ultimately, it was the passion of the teacher that mattered the most. It did not matter whether the teacher was teaching online or if the teacher was teaching in person. People can be motivated and people can be inspired by any medium but in the end, for the students to get an understanding, the teacher must be passionate about what they are doing and what they are teaching.
How to Overcome the Struggles of Studying and Learning
One of the most important methods to overcome studying struggles is to find a study buddy. Studies conducted by researchers at MIT say that students that worked with a study buddy have succeeded at a higher rate than students who work alone. This can be in many shapes from having students actively interacting with each other through discussion forms to planning study sessions. There are also synchronous live interactions with instructors and staff members who can personally help you and hold your hand to give you support. This is especially true for boot camps where the students who complete them will be more successful. The third approach is where you have built platform features where the platform automatically sends emails of encouragement to students and when the student completes their assignment, they will get a celebratory message. Just like getting positive feedback in a classroom, the platform gives positive feedback for online learning. Instructors sending out weekly reminders and weekly summaries to their students also help the student stay on task to complete their education.
Affordability
First of all, if a university can be online, it will be better because it will increase access and make it easier. Not everyone can be in person due to working for their family. Likewise, not everyone will want a full degree, some people might just want a micro degree or a boot camp certification. This way there are alternatives for a wide variety of people with their situations. The micro degree can even be stacked into a full degree. There are price points set by universities but with edX, students can pick what class or track they want to do. With the programs being accessible and affordable, more students will come to get a higher education and complete it to be successful and all while saving money and time.
Get in contact with Anant Agarwal:https://www.linkedin.com/in/agarwaledu
Learn more about edX: https://www.edx.org/
Learn more about 2U: https://2u.com/
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