(Image: edX)

Online learning is the biggest shake-up of education since the advent of the printing press, says Anant Agarwal, an MIT computing specialist

You run edX. What exactly is it?

EdX is a massive open online course (MOOC) venture founded last year by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We offer free online courses from some of the best universities in the world. EdX has a million students and we’re only one year old.

Many universities now offer free online courses. What is driving the trend?

The MOOC movement is democratising education. In the past, top universities had this funnel and admitted only the top few per cent of applicants. From the get-go, a lot of students without the right economic or language background were not able to get in. We’re flipping the funnel. We’re saying everybody can try. If you can cut it, we’ll give you a certificate of mastery.


Universities like MIT charge students a lot of money. Why give courses away for free?

Not only will it increase access to education around the world, but we can also improve education on campus. Education hasn’t really changed for hundreds of years – since the invention of the printing press and textbooks. In recent decades, great ideas have been proposed, like self-paced learning and instant feedback, but we have not consistently applied them. With online learning, we can put these ideas into practice on a large scale.

What was the first course you offered – and what insights did it give you?

It was on circuits and electronics. In the first two weeks, about 70 per cent of the students accessed the course video first, then did their homework. But by midway through, 60 per cent of students did their homework first, then watched the video. We learned that it’s more motivational to be given something to solve and then go get the knowledge, as needed.

How will this affect on-campus education?

If you combine online with in-person, you get the best of both worlds. You don’t have to drag students to a lecture at 8 am, they can learn at their own pace. Yet they can still get in-person help from the professor when they come to class. This type of model can be very successful. When our blended circuits and electronics course was taught at San José State University in California, outcomes were staggeringly good. Traditionally, about 40 per cent of the students fail the class; this time, the failure rate fell to 9 per cent.

With thousands of students taking these courses, how do you mark their work?

We have technologies that grade automatically. That’s what enables us to scale to a very large number of students. A new technology we are experimenting with can even mark essays.

Are you surprised to find yourself part of an education revolution?

Two years ago, I didn’t dream I would be doing this. The funny part is I’ve been teaching for 26 years. Until recently, none of us had really thought about education as somewhere we could innovate or where technology could be applied in a big way.

Profile Anant Agarwal is professor of computer science at MIT. He is president of edX, a non-profit company that provides free online university courses to anyone in the world

This article appeared in print under the headline “One minute with… Anant Agarwal”