Dive Summary:
- Anant Agarwal, edX's president and the service's first professor, answers questions at SmartPlanet about how he believes massive open online courses (MOOCs) will change higher education, as well as how they compare with traditional classes.
- Agarwal believes "that online learning can really transform education in quality, scale and efficiency" and that students can be more engaged with their material in MOOCs.
- He balked at agreeing with Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun's assertion that only 10 universities will be left in 50 years, but he said that 2012 "is the year of disruption, and things are not going to be the same going into the future."
From the article:
"... We really want to reinvent education. We want to offer education on a planet scale to people all around the world. Anybody who has an interest and the capability to master the material should be able to access the content for free. We also really want to revolutionize campus education. We’ve been finding that online technologies can be applied on campus to create new blended models of learning. ..."