Welcome to Raise the Line with osmosis.org. Seeking solutions with leading experts on how to increase healthcare capacity so people can get the care they need during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
Hi, I'm Shivlani and today on Raise the Line, I'm privileged to be joined by Dr. Anant Agarwal who's the founder and CEO of edX and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. If you haven't heard of it already, edX is a major online learning provider founded by Harvard and MIT and it offers more than 200 online courses from 140 top institutions. Since it started in 2012, it served over 30 million learners. Anant is also the founder of several successful technology companies and he's considered to be a pioneer in computer architecture. So, thank you so much Anant for joining us.
Oh, it's my pleasure, Shiv.
And so, I wanted to start just with your background. You know, you have a very impressive resume and I'm just curious in your own words how did a background in computer architecture lead to starting edX?
You never know where life leads you, take it one step at a time and sometime you step into an online learning venture. I grew up in India, I went to IIT Madras as an undergraduate and I still remember there in my first physics exam on campus I was one of two students in the whole class that year that failed that exam and so I thought my life was over. And part of my challenge was, I simply didn't have the background in calculus-based physics and it was quite unreal for me. I came from a small town where the level or the rigor of education wasn't the same as in the big cities. And since then, I've always been thinking about, you know, how do we make education more democratized? Education is a human right. I went to Stanford, got my PhD. I've been a professor at MIT for 32 years. And about nine years ago, technology had been completely changing so many fields and cloud computing, video distribution at scale, social networking, gamification had all come together and was sort of the perfect storm for education. And my colleagues and I from MIT and Harvard felt that we could apply to education and do something truly truly big for education. And that's when we launched edX in a partnership with Harvard and MIT to apply these technologies to learning and create a nonprofit platform edX that will enable anybody anywhere with a will to learn to come into edX and learn. And that's what we set out to do. And today we have 150 of the world's top institutions as partners like MIT and Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, IIT Bombay, IIM Bangalore and others from all over the world and learners taking these courses from every single country.
So you started edX nine years ago and I'm just curious how has the organization changed over those times? If you go to 2020, so ignore COVID because we'll be asking about COVID in a bit, but up until 2020, how the organization changed over those nine years.
So, you know, there was a lot of hype for online learning and MOOCs. We were one of the pioneers of MOOCs and as a founder of edX and a leader in the MOOC space and there's a lot of hype in those days and a lot of people coming to edX to learn and so on. The hype died down about five or six years ago, but we hunkered down and have been focused on innovation and rigor in learning. And so learners continue to come to edX. In fact, more learners have been coming to edX every single year. And so our growth has been phenomenal. Today we've grown to 30 million learners. From an evolution standpoint, we started with single courses in 2012. And from there we innovated and evolved to stackable programs where each program had multiple courses. So we launched number of radical new credentials like MicroMasters and MicroBachelors and professional certificates where learners can not only upskill themselves and advance their careers but also create credit pathways into universities.
So, for example, we have a MicroMasters program from Columbia University in AI. And if you complete that, you get a MicroMasters. It's about $1,000. It's free to learn, open admissions, and if you pass it and get the credential and you get admitted into Columbia University, it will count towards your master's degree at Columbia University in computer science. So, one big set of innovations within credentialing, stackability, modular programs. A second set of innovations and changes have been in the platform itself in terms of the rigor and the kinds of courses we've been able to offer. We built a credit-grade platform where we not only have courses today but we have full online degrees on our platform today. We have 15 fully online degrees including a very disruptively priced computer science degree from UT Austin for about $10,000, an MBA from Boston University for $24,000. So some very very radical programs on a credit-grade platform. So we've come a long way and learners and enrollments of edX have continued even though the hype went away somewhere along the way.
That's incredible. Congratulations on all of that success. I actually didn't realize that the master's was only $10,000 at UT Austin. So quite affordable. So now we're in a COVID world and there's been a lot of talk about obviously campuses are being closed left, right, and center. Millions of people, hundreds of millions of students are out of school. I'm curious how the last few months has affected demand for edX both from students as well as from universities.
You know, these are difficult times and certainly I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. In the past in the Boston area, we would have a snowstorm and maybe schools would close for a day. But today, we went from 3% of the people in the world learning online and very few working remotely. 100% of the world is now learning online at universities and colleges and schools and 100% of us are all working remotely as you can see I'm in my study in my house and so the whole world changed completely and these are crazy times. A lot of people are coming to edX at this time in huge numbers because they're looking to learn something new. Now many of them are furloughed or unemployed and they're coming to edX to upskill and improve the chances of employability after COVID-19. The traffic on edX has absolutely skyrocketed in the past six weeks. For example, comparing a week in the middle of April to a week in early March, just 6 weeks apart, the number of new registrations on edX has gone up 15 times. Enrollments in courses has gone up 10-fold.
And so, you know, popularity of courses, whether it's computer science or data science or public health, healthcare have all shot up. Healthcare has been the most popular. For healthcare you will see 600 courses or programs show up. So the healthcare category has completely skyrocketed and the enrollments have been the highest in that category. Other categories like computer science and data science have been ever popular and even those are seeing factors of six, seven, eight, nine and 10 in terms of growth in those categories. A course on happiness, the science of happiness from Berkeley. That course has seen an exponential rise during these times as people are looking for ways that they can be happy in these times and that course talks about there are techniques in terms of how you can be happy and you can train yourself to be happy and so you know it is pretty amazing to see how that course has skyrocketed during these times.
Wow, that's incredible. And so speaking of healthcare, that was actually what I wanted to talk about next was how edX quickly partnered with I think Massachusetts General Hospital and you all released a free ventilator course so that people who aren't necessarily knowledgeable about working in an intensive care unit could be in a position to support these critical care specialists. So can you talk a bit about that course, how it came together and the response you've had since you released it?
