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

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Contact Anant Agarwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agarwaledu

Learn more about 2U: https://2u.com/

Learn more about edX: https://www.edx.org/