Interview: Ask President Anant Agarwal About edX and the Future of Education

Anant Agarwal is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the President of edX. A massive open online course platform founded by MIT and Harvard, edX offers numerous courses on a wide variety of subjects and is affiliated with 29 different institutes of higher education. Mr. Agarwal has agreed to take some time out of his schedule and answer your questions about edX and the future of learning. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

MOOCs more about Teachers than Learners

[IRGlover]

As social creatures much of our knowledge is built from social interactions, where we integrate our own experiences and beliefs with that of others to build new knowledge and understanding (i.e. Social Constructivism). The current dominant MOOC model is extremely procedural, teacher-centred and discourages these types of social interactions. While this works well for some subjects (particularly at introductory levels), it is much less effective in other situations. How can the large MOOC platforms, and EdX in particular, encourage a more social method of learning?

Motivation in Online Courses

[Eric Hosman]

Motivation plays a large role in any educational setting, but this is especially true in online courses. How do you best maintain a learner's motivation after the initial novelty has worn off? Online educational opportunities attract a wide array of learners, and we can't expect them all to be intrinsically motivated at a level consistent enough to complete a course, even if they are taking it for college credit or future growth opportunities. What are the best techniques to keep as many learners as possible engaged throughout an online course?

What about moveing to an badges based system

[Joe_Dragon]

Where courses can be more right sized and not jammed / padded out into the older collgle time table system.

Where you don't have to take a big 2-4-6+ year block of time to get something that says to you know some thing.

It can also make ongoing education / learning new skills have more meaning as well.

What about merging Professional certification systems into an over all badges based system?

Do you think this is an good idea?

Internationalization and multilingual support

[gwstuff]

Do you foresee such courses to be conducted primarily in English? In the long run, how do you see them being made accessible to speakers of other languages?
One possibility is to get them dubbed by translators, but then there is the inevitable loss in translation. Can one imagine setting up a network around the world and get the best professors record lectures in their native language.