Welcome everyone, thank you all for coming. Great to see so many of you here. Also, I can't see the online camera, but the people who are online, special welcome. I'm Vijay Kumar, the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. This is our inaugural forum for the Academic Innovation Speaker Series. Usually we talk about research and entrepreneurship, but this is the first of its kind where we're looking at innovation in how we teach and how students learn. Today we're excited to welcome our special guest Anant Agarwal, our inaugural guest speaker. I've known Anant for a long time. In 2012, he founded edX, an online learning platform jointly supported by Harvard and MIT. He famously said education is a human right. Anant is still a faculty member at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an entrepreneur. Hosting Anant in a fireside chat is Richard Foreman, a Penn Engineering alumnus and chair of the Board of Online Education. Richard is an amazing entrepreneur who started Register.com. Without further ado, let me welcome Richard and Anant to the podium.
Anant, thanks for agreeing to speak with us. You and I talked last week. I think everyone here has heard of edX, but I'm hoping you can bring everyone up to date: where's edX today? How many learners? How big is it? Just talk a little bit about where edX is today.
Sure, first of all, thank you for having me, and Vijay, thank you for those kind words. I should hire you as my chief marketing officer. edX is an online learning platform with over 90 million learners from every country. We offer courses, programs, executive education, and full degrees from partners like Penn, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Berkeley, Stanford. 18 of the world's top 20 universities are partners, along with companies like Google, IBM, Microsoft. We have about 200 degrees on the platform, including in nursing, physician assistant, and midwifery. We've expanded and continue to further our mission around the world.
Do you still have that program with the state in India?
Yes. One of our most successful projects is with the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. There are 52 million people and 1.2 million college students there. Every student is required to take one edX course per semester for credit. The state pays for it, so it's free for students. In six months, 600,000 students have taken at least one course, and over 400,000 have passed and earned a certificate. This gives them a certificate from Penn or Harvard on their resume, helping their careers.
What inspired you to start edX? Did you ever have any concept of how large it would become?
The turning point was around 2011 when cloud computing, social networking, and video distribution at scale came together—a perfect storm. I was watching Sal Khan, who was my student at MIT, and I loved what he was doing. I called him for advice, and we launched edX in late 2011. We knew it would be very big; I said we wanted to reach a billion people. We open-sourced the platform in 2013. Today we've reached 200 million learners—100 million on edX and another 100 million on open-source platforms. We still have a way to go to reach a billion.
edX was acquired by 2U, but 2U has had some problems. Can you talk about the acquisition and whether those problems have affected edX?
When the pandemic hit, we merged with 2U for $800 million. All that money went into a surviving nonprofit that continues the mission. The motivations were mission alignment and product complementarity—edX had the platform and scale, 2U had great learning services. 2U had financial challenges due to debt, but it restructured through Chapter 11, went private, and emerged stronger with an additional $100 million. Our services and partnerships continue as strong as ever; not a single partner left. It was a financial engineering issue, not operational.
Is edX separate enough operationally that this doesn't make a difference?
The same management team manages the edX portfolio, and there are synergies. For example, we can now use 2U's resources to help partners create courses. The products and partnerships continue distinctly.
Years ago, the number one course at Yale was Harvard's CS50. Does that imply we only need one calculus professor? What are the implications for learning?
Universities should share more. CS50 is a great course—6 million students have taken it. But professors do more than create content: mentoring, motivating, and different teaching styles. I believe we'll have more professors sharing in a global sharing economy. We launched MicroMasters, and Penn was a leader. The idea is that modules can be mixed and matched. I wish more universities would create and adopt modules from elsewhere.
Could Penn take 10-20% of engineering courses from MIT or Stanford? Is that feasible or too political?
