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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.
The other day I was looking up an open course offered by Harvard that I had meant to try my hands on for the past few years (I know, I know, I procrastinated).
I googled it up and clicked on the link - and long and behold, the Harvard server told me that the course had been deleted, due to some "incompatibility" of the video format and their new hardware, or something like that.
I did not take that course. I have no idea if it was good or not.
What if it was an excellent course ?
Now that that particular course is gone (a few lessons still can still be had on youtube), the opportunity cost for many people does accumulate.
If there was only an archive site for all the open-courses, wouldn't that be great ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Hi, thanks for taking the time to answer our questions.
Since 6.002x was the flagship course for edX, do you anticipate it being offered every semester for the foreseeable future? I have wanted to take the course for some time now, but I have been so busy I haven't had a chance. Can I count on it being available at least for the next few years?
Dear Anant,
I am a young researcher at your own institution. One might think that online courses (such as those offered by edX) will make professors (at least those who teach) obsolete. What role do you see professors playing in the future of education? As someone on that career path, I am particularly interested in your views.
Sincerely,
Nathaniel Stapleton
How do the VCs plan to make back their investments? That was not clear to me.
Any thoughts on the future of digital libraries: https://register.blib.us ?
Education is doomed and has no future beyond turning out good little worker drone consumers who follow the rules.
Even if they are stupid rules. Especially if they are stupid rules...
One finds that s/he can rigorously learn different subjects provided that s/he has access to "proper" textbooks.
Almost every field has 'canonical', seminal text on the subject matter.
According to you, is it true that having such texts and enough maturity to reason soundly is sufficient to become a proper self student/researcher ?
I find it that all I need to learn any subject is a proper set of texts, pencil, paper. Computer with access to Internet is a great tool to have as well.
PS : I still recall how fun following your 6.002 class through OCW was. Always wanted to thank you and your colleagues who made it possible for us to learn courses.
Currently, many 2nd and 3rd tier universities rely heavily on (cost-effective) adjuncts and teaching-only "lecturers" for the majority of the instructional duties. To further maximize revenue, these schools could replace adjuncts and lecturers with MOOCs taught by professors at 1st tier universities. Are lecturers and adjuncts dead?
The cost of college education has been growing at an unsustainable rate. What do you think the underlying cause is and what effect will programs like edX have?
The Honor Code seems like a holdover from obsolete old educational methods. It seeks to make the free and open sharing of information somehow dishonorable.
Often students want to help each other in the forums. The quizzes and exercises can provide interesting applications that the instructor didn't go over in the videos. Why censor a student who, of his own free will, wants to help out another student?
The Honor Code, in forbidding explicit help to questions on assignments, encourages deviousness and obfuscation in the forums. Often, posts will be made deliberately vague, so that one has to make guesses, or "read between the lines", or try to mind-read. Wouldn't it be better to encourage clear, simple explanations on the forums? Students are sometimes as (or more) knowledgeable than the instructors, and can explain things in a better, simpler way. Often the instructors have been at the subject so long that they've forgotten what it's like to look at the material for the first time. Other students can fill in the gaps. But the Honor Code works against this type of peer-helping-peer interaction, because often the most interesting applications of the subject are in the exercises.
When I've argued for the dissolution of the Honor Code before, one response has been: you just have to wait until after the deadline. However this response is not adequate, because often the deadlines are a few weeks off. When a student is engaged in a particular problem, that is the most opportune time for him to learn. I've had questions I couldn't answer, and haven't gone back to check how to do them after the deadline passes, because I'm now involved in something else...
I think the Honor Code works against the spirit of openness and freedom of speech that the internet was founded on. What kind of skills are you trying to teach, by enforcing the Honor Code? Does a client care whether you "cheated" by looking up the answer to a programming problem on the internet, when you're writing a program for him?
I think there are better technological solutions than enforcing an archaic Honor Code. Can you put a "spoiler" tag on posts that reveal how to do an assignment question, and reward those students who don't click on those posts? You're supposed to be tracking our every click...
Thanks
Do you see any possibility for a sort of "consolidated" degree program which might be applied-for once and carried out through any of several different online course offerings at different schools? Are universities talking to each other about such possibilities, or will degrees remain strictly per-school?
I received an under graduate and master’s degree from traditional universities. I also received two masters’ degrees through on-line classes. In my opinion programs like edX are the future of education, but on-line degrees are still not regarded with the same level of prestige as those received through traditional education. In part this has been due to questionable practices of some on-line educational institutions. How can this perception be changed and do you have and do you have any plans in that regard?
It seems one needs a PhD in CS to create an online course - shouldn't teachers really be able to create content on their own?
Will MOOCs co-exist with small/private/expensive liberal arts colleges, or will MOOCs accelerate the commoditization of higher education, causing mass extinction of the traditional small college?
First let me say thank you, I really appreciate edx.org and the freedom it allows for me to continue learning new subjects. I just started taking my first class on edx yesterday, Leaning from Data, via Caltech, it looks to be a very interesting course! My question is about the future graduates from edx or similar online learning centers. Will people from around the world be able to compete in the global job market while using a degree or certificate from an online institute instead of a degree from a physical institute? If so, how do you see that changing our world? Cheers, Scott Arendt
I enjoyed taking MITx 6.002x with you last year. Is there any chance there will be a EE certificate program or graduate level courses (specialty courses) in the future?
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?
So what's the feedback mechanism for ensuring not only quality, but efficiency in teaching the subjects?
Recently Google and EdX partnered up to create Mooc.org, which is being called by the Chronicle of Higher Ed the "Youtube for MOOCs". Will we start seeing less of a walled garden where experts in their own field can create these kinds of classes without having to be chosen as being part of a "worthy" institution like we've seen with EdX, Coursera, and FutureLearn? The trend towards inviduals becoming "superprofessors" is troubling, and I see very little collaboration between institutions to make these courses.
real work places are open book / team based / learn on the job.
Also lot's lots of the times the book may say this but in the real world setting it's some what different.
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?
To what extent has the knowledge that the NSA can watch all of your students, both foreign and domestic, affected the number of people signing up for your courses? Do you expect to be able to do business outside the US now it has been confirmed that the US government has access to all your student data, one way or another?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
Clarence Page at the Chicago tribune thinks we should what do you think?
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-11/news/ct-oped-0311-page-20120311_1_college-costs-rise-kayla-heard-college-attendance
They pull BS like
‘Well, sure, you completed English composition, but you didn’t take our class,’ and sort of cheating students out of transfer credits by insisting that they retake essentially the same classes,”
And in some cases the sates had to pass laws forcing colleges to take community college credits.
I've done courses via EDX, Coursera, and Udacity, and I'd say EDX was by far the worst experience.
The key flaws I've seen were
1) Difficulty of downloading materials for working offline - I don't have availabity of fast network access at home, so I need to be able to download stuff at a public library or such and then watch the videos offline. For Coursera this was extremely easy - go to a single lecture page and use 'download them all' and I get every video lecture and every lecture notes file. For EDX this was extremely frustrating - the only access to the video was often as an embedded video on seperate pages.
2) For coursera the videos are generally digital whiteboards/slides with a small area dedicated to the 'talking head' - without interuptions and with well organized lectures optimized for watching - for EDX they are generally a filming of a regular class, with all of the delays of instructors making mistakes and correcting themselves, of audience questions, and of the general 'looser' progression that happens during classroom lectures. Thus coursea is more efficient in terms of bandwidth and time.
At this point for me it seems that EDX has a lot of ground to make up, currently I'd only go there if there is some unique course that I can't get via coursera or udacity.
So my question is - do you think EDX is 'behind'? Have you experienced the other massive online classrooms and do you feel that the experience of EDX is comparable?
Greetings! I am one of the many people out there who want to better themselves by gaining higher education, mainly for my own benefit. one of the problems I have found is a lack of engagement in video lecturing. It is NOT that the lecturers or instructors are lacking knowledge on a subject, or even that they fail to explain a subject sufficiently. Rather, its that they speak to a camera as if it were a camera and not a student, simply a device to record rote knowledge instead of teaching through. There is a sort of wall there that very few of those who would love to share their knowledge seem to even be aware of, let alone have a clue how to breach.
So my question is: have you and your associates in this even considered something like this might be a problem, and if so what are you doing to address it?
I asked one of the edX higher-ups (not Dr. Agarwal) about this.
Apparently, there's a lot of interest from companies looking for good talent. For example, people who score in the upper 10% of a high-tech course would be of interest to many companies. Especially in today's market, where putting out a job listing will get thousands of inappropriate resumes.
IIRC, the top 2% of the original AI course (Udacity, not edX) students could optionally have their resume sent to Google for consideration.
The edX higher-up was of the opinion that the future of high-tech hiring would be in the form of online course grades - you would list the courses you took and the grades you got as part of your resume. Companies would advertize for people who had taken specific courses and received certain grades.
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.
I've been in several online courses.
The honor code doesn't disallow you from helping someone else through a problem, it disallows you from solving the problem for the other person.
We see this all the time in the discussion forums - someone comes in with "I don't know how to do this", and everyone jumps in to help. If it's a homework problem we can rephrase, use analogy, and solve a similar problem... but we can't outright give the answer or the exact steps for solving.
What about trades / tech school like skills that are not really the best fit for an 4+ year college setting but have jobs that want the collgle credentials when some with HS and on job training / trades / tech school can do the job?
I am very interested in considering the process to get my Ph.D. in Computer Science, online?
Agarwal,
As a scholar of non-jewish/wasp extract, what do you think are the pro`s and con`s of the efforts of the late Aaron Schwartz, regarding the opening of libraries for a broader readership?
Mr. X
People tend to focus on surface issues when considering how traditional Higher Education (HE) will relate to Online Education (OE). Things like the concept of lectures, or the character of universities if research and teaching are severed.
But much of the value (and much of an instructor's effort) actually goes toward establishing some measure of competency of the student: a grade. Other comments here have mentioned Honor Code, for instance, but that's not so much a problem as simply an attempt to ensure that a face-to-face course's grading is accurately assigning competence to individuals. for OE, it's even more natural to seek some form of collaborative learning (or outside assistance), especially if the OE course is self-paced. And really, why shouldn't a student simply continue to take the OE course until they are competent (or give up)? In which case, the import of an OE course is mainly in the competency testing - it's certification aspect.
So, is certification the way that traditional HE institutions become relevant to the future where everything is OE?
Will MOOC eventually have advanced courses? Or will they only have introductory ones?
What HR departments are you talking to? I noticed that you set up a ID verified certificate, which is an important first step to helping unemployed individuals gain a job.
However, I used to interview candidates at my previous employer, and that's NOT really the role degrees play in most U.S. interviews. To verify identity, we use passports/driver's licenses/etc. combined with a background check. Rather, we used the *selectivity* of the applicant's university as a proxy for EQ, IQ, work ethic, etc. In fact, we didn't even need the applicant to graduate -- we just needed to see if they got in and what program they got into.
I'm curious to know if there are any HR departments who are willing to accept these certificates, and if so, what other adjustments they need from non-traditionally educated individuals.
I know that due to the randomness of the universe it turns out that Arthur Dent keeps killing you over and over, but hey, that's just how the universe works. Did you really need to try and take it out on him personally? Get over things already!... Wait..., isn't this an interview with Agrajag???
As production value becomes more important , will professors eventually be replaced by actors who may not have a command of the material, but can use a well-written script to deliver course material in a more engaging fashion?
As a hiring manager, I would not care if a candidate had completed their degree online or offline so long as it was a real degree (we can test some things, but the whole point of a qualification is that it's supposed to mean something). However, there seems to be a big reluctance by established universities to give degrees based on these online courses so far. What needs to change for that to happen and will it ever?
Greetings Dr Agarwal,
The invisible part of MOOCs is the massive collection of data on the behavior of students. Here, we're talking about Learning Analytics and Big Data which should be used to improve the next generation of MOOCs. This is a common practice of Web 2.0, the improvement process à la Google that exploits the data of its millions of users to improve its search engine. Here, students' data are a goldmine.
It is not easy for a teacher to find the sources of confusion and less effective pedagogical approaches from the small samples of data collected with a class of 20 students each year. Moreover, those students are pretty similar (the sample is statistically pretty homogenous). At the contrary, a MOOC with its thousands of students from all around the world and with very different backgrounds can use effective statistical data mining methods to detect problems and improve teaching. MOOC can also use machine learning to discover situations (or patterns) where students have common problems, in order to present evidence or explanations to help them.
More, compared to human, a computer never gets angry and it is always ready to resume its explanations, making it an ideal teaching tutor.
Do you see the potential for continuous improvement of MOOCs mainly due to Big Data, the secret ingredient of MOOCs in the long term?
Claude Coulombe
Montréal