Will MOOCs Transform Higher Ed After All?

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo along with my co host Michael Horn, and we're here today in Boston with Anant agwal, who is CEO of edX. Of course, edX is one of the big original MOOC providers, the online learning destination founded by Harvard and mit. And when Anand taught the first EDX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, it drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. So, Anand, it's great to have you with us today. It's always great to see you.

Thanks for having me here. It's great to chat with you.

Great. So we always open up our show with our guests to talk about how they got started in higher education. Obviously, you started kind of at the professorial level. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey through higher education and how you ended up at edX?

So in my case, I got my PhD at Stanford and looked for a job. I got a job at mit and that brought me over to the east coast and I've been a professor there for 31 years. A year here, a year there, and before you know it, it's a long time.

Well, it adds up to your age. So, yeah, there you go.

Although I've been higher ed teaching for all this time and teaching the standard way in front of a, you know, front of a large classroom. And what's amazing is that as we got to teaching, what I discovered was we really don't take it, you know, we don't sort of view it as a vocation. You know, we train. We train mechanics to repair cars and we train, you know, communications people to do communications, but for teaching. No. I remember, you know, the first day you show up and you stand in front of a big glass of 300 undergrads and you are teaching for the first time in your life. And so I thought that was pretty amazing. And I remember my first experience, it was at MIT in front of a big class was like a deer in front of headlights. And then I said, I got to wing it here.

How did you actually, just quickly, how did EDX come about for you? Did edX, when they decided to do this, did they come to you? Did you go to them? How did that happen?

It was sort of a melding of the minds. MIT had OpenCourseWare, which started a couple of decades ago, and I had my electronic Circuits course on OpenCourseWare, of course. And as part of that, about 15 years ago in 2003, I'd been playing around with online labs and always wanted to do online education, but I felt that we could never do online labs. And so I thought that online learning would always be relegated to sort of a, as a accessory to the main course, so to speak. And so I began playing out with online labs to see, look, if I can do an online circuits lab, hey, this could be worth something real. And so I built something called Websim. And even as early as 2003-2004, I was amazed. I built the circuits lab and put it online. And you could think of it as the first MOOC lab. And on the average day, 300 students from all over the world would come into circuits labs. You can still go there if you Google web sim. Mit, you can go to my site. It's a crummy site I put together and there are bugs in it right now. It doesn't quite work. I need to find some time to go fix it. But that's when I began playing with MOOCs and making public labs available. And then in 2011, a group of folks began talking about this at MIT. Rafael Reif, who was the provost at that time, wanted to see something happen. And we got to chatting and before we knew it, we decided to launch MITX. And then Harvard and MIT got together, and in May of 2012, MITX transformed into edX. And Harvard and MIT got into it in a big way.

And by the way, we should have said, congratulations, you just recently won the Yiddin Prize for education, which is a pretty big deal in recognition of your efforts. But a lot of our listeners will know of edX. They'll know the EDX story. Of course, they'll think of it as one of the maybe three big MOOCs. Udacity, Coursera, edX. They know it's nonprofit. They have some sense of that. But I suspect what they don't know is how your vision and mission for it is different from what else is out there. And so how do you think about that? How do you define the vision and mission for EDX today?

So, simply put, EDX is a nonprofit. And at the end of the day, as a nonprofit, unless you're doing something radically different, and unless you're truly changing something in a big way, there's no reason for you to exist. And so all you did was made a boatload of money go from a startup company, a for profit. And I have done a number of for profit companies. Nothing against them, but for education, we thought this could be very meaningful. So our vision is by bringing digital technology to education, we think that we can completely transform and reimagine education as we know it's. And for us, nothing short of complete transformation of this education, which is a human right. Nothing short of complete transformation is our goal. So we want to reimagine education. So what does this mean? We want to increase access to learners everywhere. Imagine there will come a time when anybody, anywhere, can get a very high quality education that could be comparable to an education you might receive at Harvard or IIT Madras for that matter. Imagine we could increase the quality of education by quantum amounts, by bringing AI and VR and AR and all kinds of instant interventions and so on. Increase engagement of learning. Imagine if we could completely transform how education is done, transform universities. So to us that reimagination of education and transformation is important. Increasing access to education in a big way is important, and increasing the quality of education is also very important. And that's how EDX is very different in that we have a very, very lofty mission of access and research and reimagination of education.

So the access part is clear in terms of the sheer numbers of lives you've changed, quite frankly. In terms of the quality, how do you think about quality? Because to your point, it's not like K12 education where teachers actually go through years of training to become a teacher. Professors are trained in research and then they teach, but they don't get that training. So a lot of the folks creating subject material and courses for you, they're not trained in pedagogy or cognitive science and so forth. What does transforming the quality experience mean from your perspective?

You know, first of all, it's one of those things where we ask, how do you define quality? It's one of those things where when you see it, you will recognize it. But that said, I think we can meaningfully create metrics to define quality on edX. For example, to launch a course on edX, we have developed what we call a MOOC development Checklist. It's a quality rubric for courses where unless you have active learning embedded in it, unless you have assessments and unless you have videos and engaging content, we won't launch the course on edX. So there's a way of ascribing value or quality to a course based on a certain set of attributes of it. I think we can also define quality based on outcomes. For people that sign up for a Micromasters for a certificate today, 80% of the people are completing it. So outcomes, another way of defining quality, I think Engagement is a way a learner's perception. You take course A and you take course B. Where did you have more fun? Where were you more engaged? And we are making measurements of this and so can we bring gamification into learning and can we get people more engaged? So I think over time, I think we are creating better and better definitions and metrics for quality. And frankly, I think that the future is boundless in terms of how much better we can make education. We can make it engaging, we can make it by bringing VR and ar. We can teach all kinds of things to students that we could not dream about before. We can increase learning outcomes by taking active learning to the next level by applying cognitive science. There's an amazing sort of research going on at Mightily at MIT by a number of researchers about how various forms of cognitive science based approaches to learning can increase retention. And frankly, learning science has looked at retention, things like space, repetitions, retrieval, learning, the number of techniques that we can apply to learning using computation in a very natural way. So I think we can truly make education much, much better in quality and provide a lot of metrics for it as well.

Anand how far is that future away? I think of the promise of EDX and others when you started five, six, seven years ago. And we've seen incredible advances in online education since then. But for the most part, American higher education and even education worldwide is still teacher at the front of the room. Students face to face in the US paying a lot of money, not being necessarily retained, not necessarily getting a degree. All the issues and problems that you're trying to solve still exist at a huge scale. So are we talking this is a generation away? Are we talking this is a decade away? When you talk about this transformation of, of education as you're describing it, the

way I see it is you look at all technologies. I remember I began first working with search engines or playing with search engines from AltaVista from my dorm room at Stanford and trying it out. So this is pretty cool. And this was in the mid-80s and it took a long time. Google started and so on in the 90s. Look at cell phones. I remember the early cell phone was a big box. It was called a mobile because it was in your car and was mobile because the car moved. And if you had given up on cell phones in the early, in the late 80s because they were the size of a loaf of bread, we would not be where we are. And it's 30 years from when mobile phones started. And with the kind of work that online learning and MOOCs are doing today, it's been about seven years and so I would say so it's a very short time in the history of. When you chart the history of education, this is but a tiny sliver right now.

Although we're kind of impatient people, so.

And we should be. I'm the most impatient of them all. I think. I would say that in terms of prototypes and experiments where we show a few people getting through some of the amazing technologies, I think we'll have it in five years. We already have a course from Harvard on EDX on super Earths. You can go check it out. It uses AI based personalized learning. Today it's been there for a year and a half. You can check it out. Harvard and a number of others are working on building open source machine learning based personalized learning and AI tools into the open EDX platform. So we already have some personalized courses. EDX was launched with active learning at the foundations of the platform. And so we already did that. We have one course on EDX where a student from MIT worked on space repetition. He wrote a thesis on it. So we have one course. So I think within five years we'll see prototypes of cognitive, much better cognitive science approaches, AI based personalized approaches, VR and ar. We'll see a lot of this in prototype form in five years. Now in terms of this impacting in a much broader way, in terms of acceptance, I think that's a much longer time constant, I would say in terms of, let's say, broad applicability, where universities transform themselves, where blended online learning becomes part of could be 2050 by the time education truly begins to adopt all of these technologies on campus education as well as online education.

And who has to lead this movement or who should lead this movement? You've been dropping a lot of names here in the last couple of minutes. Mostly elite selective universities. Is that who's going to lead the MIT's and the Harvards and the Stanfords of the world? Or is it going to be the big publics that we've seen in terms of scale, Arizona State, University of Central Florida, Georgia State? Is it going to be the small struggling colleges that are going to try to be the early adopters because it's the only way they're going to survive? I mean, who's going to really lead this charge in your mind? Or does it have to be the entire sector of higher education?

As with everything else, the leaders in any movement are not necessarily, they don't necessarily come from one category. I believe that Here, the most innovative institutions will lead the charge. So for example, we are seeing some radical innovation from very innovative universities like Harvard and mit. So those are elite world's top institutions. We see some amazing innovations. I'll give you one example from Arizona State University. It's a large public. We are seeing some amazing innovations from Berkeley in partnership with community colleges. So publics, community colleges, large publics, elite publics. So really, I think the key here is not whether you're elite or public or community college. I think the key is the I word is are you innovative? Are you transformative? And I think the innovations are coming from there. Just as one example on edX, Arizona State University launched a master's and fully online master's in supply chain management. It's radical in that, you know, a piece of it is a micromasters from MIT and the rest of it comes from Arizona State. And you combine the two pieces in a fully online experience and you get a master's in supply chain management at a fraction of the cost of college education. You get a. If you just want to do the micromaster's piece from mit, you can do that and get a credential. So I think these are just some examples of amazing policy level and credential level innovations in addition to content level innovation.

So I was going to harp on that actually, because one of the biggest things I think you all have moved the needle on is just that the credential level innovation of the Micromasters, which you just said it cavalierly, but a couple of years ago no one had heard of it because you hadn't invented it yet. It seems to me that ability to take that credential and stack it into other degrees and so forth at the price point that you've been able to do it is, is huge. What else do you have coming down the pipeline that is going to alter that affordability, that credentialing experience for students?

I think Micromasters program is certainly very radical in how it's credentialing. It is policy level work. I remember when MOOC started and when EDX was the first MOOC provider to launch sequences of courses, which the legacy term for those were X series, we're the first ones to launch those. I remember an article with Tamar Lew in the New York Times that says, ooh, MOOC providers offer sequences of courses, what's next? Degrees? And I was cringing because I knew I would get calls from partner universities saying, hey, edX, what's going on here? So even offering sequences of courses when we first launched them was difficult. Then we launched certificates for sequences of courses and then MIT pioneered the micromasters on EDX. And today we have 50 micromasters. We have sequences of courses with a certificate with the name, with the word Masters in it, with endorsement from companies and partnerships with companies. And these are credit backed. So if you complete that and get admission to a university, you get credit for it. So these are radical innovations and all of this has happened in the space of seven years now. Micromasters are the graduate level and you can only dream about where else these concepts can go. Where are the challenges we face in this country and in the world. And trust me, whether a challenge is an opportunity, we are going to be there.

Well, we're looking forward to watching the continued innovation journey and the seismic changes that it'll produce, not just in this country, but across the world. Anant, thanks so much for being here and we'll be right back.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future. You just off a great conversation with Anant Agarwal of edX. And Jeff, I'm curious because you know, you've been in the media for quite a while. 2012 was the year of the MOOC. There's been a lot of hype. You and I have been more MOOC skeptics. I think in the continuum of, of people watching this unfold. When you hear Anand talk there is a lot of exciting stuff. But I was struck by your question of, you know, when is it all gonna transform and so what should our expectations be from the Mook quote unquote movement?

I mean, he's right. I mean it's been only seven years and he talked about the great story about the cell phone, right? We're going on 30 years. I just think that, I think for this really big transformation where it's going to kind of uplift people around the give them access to education that they haven't had before, I just don't see that happening in the next five to 10 years. I do think where the transformation is going to happen is where it has happened. And that's among people who already have access to education. We know most of the people, for example, taking these courses are people who already have degrees and they're using them now for the Micromasters and other types of small chunks of education. And it seems like the products and the way they're delivering them are still around and focused in that area. Right. You know, EDX and others have experimented with the freshman year of college and again, the expectation was we're going to increase access to larger numbers of students. And that hasn't happened at the scale that they thought. And so I still think that for this broader transformation, I'm just skeptical it's going to happen in the next 10 years. Which is why I think, Michael, we've been seeing a lot of these providers, the edx, Coursera and others, kind of pivot in the last year or two in terms of their products.

Yeah, absolutely. Udacity was the first, I think, to pivot coming off Sebastian Thrun's mega hit courses. And their first pivot was to really stop working through channel partners of universities and to start very carefully curating courses for people trying to get ahead in business and in employment. And so they very carefully curated courses, put a lot more instructional design into them, made them much more active learning experiences, less sort of the MOOC video thing that we're used to, and carved out a pretty good market there among employees and employers. Had some big agreements with AT&T and the like more recently. I think that they then had the nano degree. And it seems like Udacity has become a business predicated on obscure subjects that are important. So driverless cars and things like that. And they've become a real movie hits sort of platform, it seems to me. Coursera, of course, was sort of, we're going to get as many people as we can and they have over well over 30 million users of the Coursera platform. But pretty quickly when Rick Levin came in, they really started figuring out where's our actual niche to make some money in all this. And they came similar, I think, in certain respects to Udacity, that we're going to focus on serving employers and serving people who are trying to get into jobs or upskill in the workforce and built a pretty good business, it seems, around that. And then more recently they've seemed, I don't know if pivot's the right word, but they've really become an OPM in many ways. And they're, you know, University of Illinois is the IMBA program, really low cost OPM programs. What I've been excited about that, I'm not sure it's a full strategy, but what I've been excited by that is that we're finally seeing cost come out of these programs and online do what it should have done all along, which is actually lower the price of education.

And as you were going through all those other providers, one of the things I realized is Anant is one of the early founders that still is there.

Yeah, that's actually a good point. Right. Because Daphne, Andrew. Yeah, Daphne, Andrew and Sebastian are all gone. Yeah.

So it's interesting. I mean, the other thing that we asked him was about this kind of who's going to lead this movement. I mean, one of the things, one of the legacies of MOOCs, I think is that it basically gave the seal of approval to online education from the elites and from the selective colleges and universities, Stanfords of the world, the MIT's of the world, the Harvard's of the world. But at the same time, those institutions on the ground have not been leaders in kind of the equity movement or in the access movement in the United States.

Right.

It's been the big public universities and the community colleges that have led on that front. So I'm also kind of skeptical on one hand that those could be the types of universities that would lead on access and transformation. On the other hand, we need them, right? We still need them to be part of this conversation. We need them to be leading for a couple of reasons. One is they have the money to do this. They have the money and the access to the people. You know, the leading AI folks are at many of these universities. And second, it does give them kind of that, it does give whatever comes out of this legitimacy that it needs. Right. When, when, when the Stanfords of the world do it, it gives them that legitimacy. And so I think that we need them for that reason. The unfortunate part is I just don't think they've been leading in terms of the access movement up to this point.

Yeah, I agree with you. The other thing though, that I think they could do, and it's an open question, right, But MIT is one of the few clear places that does applied research. They have such, I mean, mit, my, my appreciation for their model and clarity of purpose has grown just year over year because, you know, they're not one of these institutions that tries to be all things to all people. They really know who they are and the applied research piece of it is really important and they do some really interesting research in cognitive science and learning science and memory and things of that nature that they then are trying to translate into this EDX platform. And if they can embed really sound principles of instructional design and learning and so forth into these platforms, I do think that could lift the game, if you will, for online education more generally, which from my perspective continues to be sort of dry and, you know, video based is not an incredibly active experience and the like. And I'd love to see them up, level it. And along those lines, something that he's talked about in the past and he's talked to us, we didn't talk about on the podcast, but he's talked about this transferable learning record TLR that they've been building out of edX. And it seems to me the basic idea is how do you break up and modularize higher ed into its components, parts and allow people to be much more fluid through the experience? Do you think that could be a game changer?

Well, and I'm wondering if that could be part of their legacy. Right. Is that the fact that not, not online education, but the, but the, but the, the assets of it, right? The, the, the degrees, the, the badges, the micro degrees, all that stuff that comes out of it, kind of the credential piece of this could be the transferable and transformative piece. Right? Because we all know that kind of the legacy degrees, you know, the bachelor's, the associates, they're kind of dying out, they're expensive, they're lengthy. We're not sure, we're not quite sure what you actually learn from those. You know, Ryan Craig and others have talked about kind of this new credential and you have talked about this new credential marketplace that is emerging. And to me it's, it's places like EDX and others that have been giving legitimacy to that. Right. Because again, whatever marketplace emerges, if employers, particularly who are the buyers of this, don't buy it, students won't buy it. But as employers start to consider, hey, they're not everybody has to have a bachelor's degree or not everybody has to have a master's degree and maybe these other types of degrees that are being produced out of, out of EDX and others, that could be potentially the future that we need.

Yeah, because credentials actually have to have value. They have to have value in the marketplace. We see so many credentials out there and they're meaningless. Here's my hope. I don't know if you can call it a Christmas wish, since we're several months late for that. But here's my hope though, is that yes, MIT can confer value on it because their MIT and employers will listen. But I hope they don't just stop at a new sort of opaque with a new name that's smaller in chunk size and it's backed by mit, the currency backed by mit. I hope that there's a real assessment and learning principle that is practical behind it so that it actually does change the rest of higher ed. And all of higher ed can play in that. I mean, I think it'd be unfortunate if it was just sort of another degree backed by, by an elite brand that kept, sort of kept a monopoly.

Right, so then we know what actually students learned in these, in these courses.

Exactly. And it has the weight of some psychometricians maybe in validity behind the assessments. So. And then the last thing I'll say as we come come to the end of this podcast is it always points to me that it's not about the technology, it's about the model in which it's used. And if MIT can innovate the model through the Micromasters and everything else, this transferable learning record, that will be a huge shift and commendable for transforming higher education over probably a longer time period than we want, but certainly transforming it. So thanks again to Anant Agrawal for joining us today. We'll certainly be keeping a close eye on other developments out of EDX and what Anant does specifically. And thanks to all of you for listening to Future you. If you have ideas or feedback about the show, you can write to us at future podcast, futureyou podcastmail.com and please make sure to rate us on itunes or wherever you get your podcasts. And for Jeff Selingo, I'm Michael Horn. We'll see you next time.