Abstract

Digital technology has transformed countless areas of life from healthcare to workplace productivity to entertainment and publishing. But education hasn’t changed a whole lot. EdX is a MOOC (massive open online course) initiative founded by Harvard and MIT that aspires to reinvent education through online learning. EdX’s mission is to dramatically increase access to education for students worldwide, while substantially enhancing campus education in both quality and efficiency through blended models that incorporate the best of both online and in-person elements. This talk will provide an overview of MOO Cs and edX, and share student stories that reveal how they are increasing access to education worldwide. The talk will also discuss where MOOC technologies are headed, and how they can enhance campus education. Finally, the talk will provide some recent research results from some of the edX xConsortium university partners that will allow us to improve education online and on campus, and discuss how MOO Cs might evolve in the future.

Speaker Bio: Anant Agarwal is the President of edX. Anant taught the first course of edX 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 also a founder of Tilera Corporation which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of the Raw multicore processor, the Sparcle multi-threaded microprocessor, and the Alewife parallel computer. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. Anant won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture, 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 holds a Ph.D. from Stanford and a bachelor’s from IIT Madras. Anant is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM . He hacks on WebSim, a web-based circuits laboratory, in his spare time. Anant’s twitter handle is @agarwaledu.