As MIT celebrates its first 100 years in Cambridge and prepares for the future, a symposium is analyzing what comes next. Addressing the challenge of online education, Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, said that “it is senseless to think that what you learn for four years at age 18 will help you keep pace for the rest of your life”.
To help address the needs of people who want to learn new skills, edX recently began offering a degree called a “MicroMaster’s,” which requires five courses followed by a capstone exam to demonstrate mastery of a subject.
One of the challenges still facing online education is how to replicate the experience of working together, as students in physical proximity often do.
To help tackle this, edX recently launched a feature on the Open edX platform that allows students around the world to form teams that can work on projects together. “You can do all of this online, we just have to innovate,” Agarwal said. “We’re just scratching the surface of what is possible.”
