So Anant, welcome to Gal University. It's a real pleasure to have you here.
It's a real pleasure to be here, Rael.
Thank you very much. It has been such a journey working with you at edX and the global consortium, reaching learners across the globe. And here we are today for the honor of Dr. Honoris Causa, which has been given to very few exceptional individuals by Galileo University. So from the very beginning, edX said their main mission was to democratize education, to reach millions of learners with the best education and professors available. And I think edX has done a great job, but also Galileo University has done that as well with the help of edX and their own initiatives. So how do you see, how do you feel today before this important doctoral degree and during this journey of working together all these years towards the same mission of democratizing education?
I'm very excited because this year is 10 years since Galileo teamed up with edX in a partnership. When we started edX, our vision was to reach 1 billion students all over the world through digital technology. And in the 10 years we've been partners with Galileo, they've been very helpful. Galileo has helped us reach 1.2 million students from all over the world from 150 countries. Partnerships like this have enabled us to reach our combined goals. edX is all about innovation, and we partner selectively with top universities not just by rankings but by innovation. Galileo has been right next to us in all the innovations we have done. When we launched MicroMasters, Galileo launched MicroMasters along with us in online education and technologies. There have been many innovations that Galileo has helped us achieve through the years.
Yeah, that has been an incredible journey. I think also the capacity of the university has been growing a lot because reaching a worldwide audience has its challenges. It has been a great journey not only for the university as a whole but for every individual that participated in the process. Teaming up with your team at edX has been incredible, and we are grateful. If we go a little bit back into the history of edX, when you started in 2012, pioneering something new, not everybody believed in it. Can you recall some of the challenges you faced and how you overcame them as an organization?
My goodness, if you talk about challenges, I don't even know where to begin. But when we started, the goal was to reach 1 billion people. We were a nonprofit founded by Harvard and MIT with a very small team. A big challenge was how to reach students when we announced a new course. But sometimes those challenges were magically solved when we launched our first course in circuits and electronics from MIT. We put it on our website, and within one hour, 10,000 students from all over the world had signed up. People were very hungry for online learning. Another challenge was creating learning that would count towards a degree. Students wanted smaller credentials, so we launched the MicroMasters credential, which is about 25% to 50% of a full degree. Universities were worried about the name 'Masters' being completely online without admissions. We overcame that challenge through partnerships with Galileo, MIT, and others. Once a few universities launched these programs, we got many other partners to launch MicroMasters that count towards credit.
Yeah, well, it's said very shortly but involves a huge amount of work and innovation, getting all the pieces together.
But the key innovation of edX was to crowdsource innovation. We have 275 partners: MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, Galileo University. They are all partners of edX. This ecosystem allows everybody to innovate with us. 1 million students came because of Galileo, another million because of Oxford. Through these partnerships, edX has grown to more than 99 million students from every country in the world.
That's a great way to say it. Right. Right.
Nowadays we are in a transition to a new world with AI, robotics. You are at the forefront of using AI in education. How do you see AI technologies changing the way we learn and educate? What are your thoughts?
I think we're all discovering how education will look in the future, and AI will play a huge role. AI will help students and faculty. I'll tell you a story: I visited Galileo last year and saw AI avatar video generation tools. I learned about that and went back to Boston, and we began experimenting. Two months ago, we launched a completely AI course teaching generative AI in partnership with Georgia Tech. In my mind, it started one year ago on my visit with Galileo. We have to keep experimenting with AI to author courses and help students. The key is continuing to experiment with AI to help both students and professors.
It's a pleasure to hear that you were motivated by the innovations here. I agree there is a lot happening with AI. It's important to take decisions and try new projects. Thinking about innovation, it has always been a challenge to adapt learning paths to individual learners. How do you see AI helping in that regard?
AI will help in many dimensions. For learners, AI can help at 2 a.m. when they need help. On edX, we launched an AI socratic tutor that doesn't answer immediately but asks the learner questions, so they learn rather than just get the answer. For professors, recording videos is expensive and hard to change. With AI tools, we can create avatars and produce a video in minutes, and easily update it. The same video can be dubbed into 100 languages instantly, and you can slow or speed it up. In the future, I envision a 'course zapper' where a student can customize a course to their needs, like a one-week version or a one-hour executive summary. This way, you can create millions of versions of a course.
Thank you for that enthusiasm and insight. I want to ask about the concern that AI might widen the gap between those who have access and those who don't. I heard Jensen Huang from Nvidia say the opposite: AI makes technology easier and more available, like creating software just by interacting with AI. What are your thoughts?
