Salute to My Classmate Padma Shri Anant Agarwal- a Researcher, Professor & CEO of edX
Mangaluru: He was one of the SMART students in our PUC class, and now he is one of the SMARTEST person in the World. Remembering the Pre-University College days at St Aloysius College-Mangaluru, I fondly cherish the friendship of Prof Anant Agarwal, now that he is an IT Researcher, an intelligent and well-known Professor, and above all, holding the prestigious designation, being the CEO of edX, an online learning destination. Even though Prof Anant had come to Chicago, USA quite a few times while I was there- and also missed him few times recently when he had come down to his hometown, Mangaluru- but a few weeks ago when I heard from his younger brother Ruchir Agarwal (proprietor of Agarwal Agencies, Balmatta, Mangaluru), where he is also an ardent reader of Mangalorean.com, Ruchir informed me that Anat was coming to Mangaluru to grace the 5-day ‘Sahyadri Conclave’ which just concluded recently.
Making an appointment at his house near Shivabagh one afternoon, we both had “Close Encounters of the Classmates Kind” after decades- and it was history, that we finally met for a face to face interview. Anant Agarwal spoke about the need of reinventing education taking advantage of the new technologies and the demands of the new generations. “What 2020/2030 will look like? What jobs will exist?”, and many other points on “Reinventing education” were discussed during a long one-hour interaction. The CEO of edX, an online learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT, Anant highlighted that education must evolve. “The world has changed, people have changed, but education has not”, he said, and that one of the goals of edX is “to improve students’ motivation”. 13 million plus students worldwide, 2000 courses, 130 global partners were some of the figures he presented, and “After taking one of our courses, 43% of people make progress in their careers”, he shared.
Professor Anant Agarwal’s words showed enthusiasm about his job and about the potential of e-learning. “students can study in their own way and at their own rhythm”. “We are no longer obliged to attend classes at 8 a.m. After all, who enjoys attending classes so early?”, he joked. “It is awesome that that student from all over the world have the opportunity to learn with each other. We are reinventing education”, he added.
Born in Mangalore, he did his schooling and PUC in St. Aloysius High School/College-Mangaluru. After PUC, he got his bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and later a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, California-USA. At present Anant Agarwal is a computer architecture researcher, and also a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-USA, where he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coherent multiprocessor, and also has served as director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Anant is the founder and CTO of Tilera, a fabless semiconductor company focusing on scalable multicore embedded processor design. He also serves as the CEO of edX, a joint partnership between MIT and Harvard University that offers free online learning. He is a leader of the Carbon Project, which is developing new scalable multicore architectures, a new operating system for multicore and clouds called fos, and a distributed, parallel simulator for multicore and clouds called Graphite. He is a leader of the Angstrom Project, which is creating fundamental technologies for exascale computing. He contributes to WebSim, a web-based electronic circuits laboratory. He led the Raw Project at CSAIL, and is a founder of Tilera Corporation. Raw was an early tiled multicore processor with 16 cores. He also teaches the edX offering of MIT’s 6.002 Circuits and Electronics.
Prof Anant Agarwal’s previous projects include Sparcle, a coarse-grain multithreaded (CGMT or switch-on-event SOE) microprocessor, Alewife, a scalable distributed shared memory multiprocessor, Virtual Wires, a scalable FPGA-based logic emulation system, LOUD, a beamforming microphone array, Oxygen, a pervasive human-centered computing project, and Fugu, a protected, multiuser multiprocessor. Agarwal received the 2001 Maurice Wilkes Award for computer architecture. In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2011 he was appointed Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In March 2016, he was awarded the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education in higher education as an outstanding leader of the development of the Massive Open Online Course movement. In addition to that, he is also a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras. He received Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India in 2017.
Team Mangalorean caught up with Prof Anant Agarwal at his residence- and also at the Endowment Lecture on ‘Digital Education Transformation’ that he delivered at St Aloysius College- Mangaluru on 8 January 2108, and also interacted with him during the “Sahyadri Conclave” which took place from 6-10 January 2018, where he was one of the speakers. During his address to the students at St Aloysius College, Prof Anant talked about future developments to meet the needs of life-long learners and about emerging approaches such as ‘omnichannel education’ (i.e. a combination of digital and in-person) that are becoming mainstream. He discussed the relationship between online learning and campus education. Students were very interested in hearing about the development of new learning formats and on their implications for the future of learning and for our campus education.
Following are the excerpts from the exclusive interview with Prof Anant Agarwal
Q: How did you get into Electronics/Electrical Engineering and Computer Science?
My uncle gave me an electrical motor kit when I was 11 years old. It sparked a life-long interest in electronics, electrical engineering, and computer science.
Q: What do you like best about being a Professor at MIT?
MIT is one of the most exciting institutions of higher education in the world, with a culture in which being crazy is the new normal. MIT has state-of-the-art labs, the best and brightest students, and a faculty and administration that is encouraged to continually innovate and keep pushing boundaries to invent the future. I enjoy the support they’ve provided and I am proud to be able to give back to MIT and learners around the world via my work at edX.
Q: You are the CEO of edX; what is edX?
EdX is a non-profit, open-source learning destination that offers free online courses to anyone in the world with Internet access. Since our inception in the spring of 2012, edX has 14 million global learners; 2000 courses; 130 global partners; 50 million course enrollments; and 25,000 number of credit eligible. Our cloud-based open-source learning platform is being adopted widely by governmental and private entities, nations including China and France, universities like Stanford, and other non-profits such as the Queen Rania Foundation.
edX was founded with three goals in mind: to increase access to quality education, to improve teaching and learning on campus, and to conduct research into how students learn. We believe we can provide truly world-class online courses to everyone, everywhere, regardless of social status or income, while also improving on-campus education. edX is the only major MOOC provider that is a non-profit and open source— two characteristics that are reflective of our larger mission. The edX platform and technology is available as open-source so that anyone around the world can use it for their own course or learning experiences. We believe the collaborative philosophy of MOOCs naturally lends itself to an open-source approach and because we fundamentally believe that education is a basic human right, we are literally giving away our platform for free. We should know that Education is the basic human right- everyone should have access to it. I can fix education, but politicians/govt can’t.
Q: EdX is all about MOOCs, massive open online courses – how do they work?
All MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are not made equal, but in general, I compare them to a campus course, where you sit in lectures for an hour – or heaven forbid, an hour and a half – a couple of times a week. You have textbooks, homework and exams. You might also have a lab. We do all of that stuff online. We replace lectures with what I like to call learning sequences – short videos interleaved with interactive exercises. So students might watch a five or ten-minute video of a professor writing on a tablet, explaining things, followed by some questions the student has to answer.
We have discussion forums where students can ask questions and the professors can answer them. And in terms of labs, we have virtual simulation-based online laboratories, in biology, chemistry, circuits and so on – it’s the gamification of technology, like playing with virtual building blocks. We also have online textbooks, which are free, and everything is graded online
Q: Equally, there must be drawbacks – what are the challenges presented by MOOC learning?
If it’s purely online learning, it doesn’t give the student a campus experience, or what my colleague calls the ‘magic of campus’ – where there’s a social aspect and you work together in groups and collaborate; where you’re inspired by the professor. Online there are non-verbal cues, you’re able to interrupt and able to answer questions followed by questions. The conversation can also lead to unusual places. It’s adaptive.
In-person, learning can be a lot more engaging. With an online discussion forum, I can do that, but it’s not the same as being able to ask the question right there. In-person has many aspects that are simply better than online, which is why I suggest that a blended model – bringing the best of online and in person – is the way campuses can transform themselves.
Q: To what extent would Online learning benefit a learner, and its results?
With online learning, we are capturing amazing amounts of data about students and how they learn. Now, we have the opportunity to mine the information to help us improve learning both online and on campus. These insights into how people learn are one of the great aspects of online learning as they will help us improve the future of education for all. Currently, edX have millions of students from every country around the world. This reveals the huge appetite for high quality, rigorous online courses and our learners’ response helps drive our commitment to provide online education for anyone, anywhere with a desire to learn. We will always remain committed to our three-part mission: to increase access to quality education, to improve teaching and learning on campus, and to conduct research into how students learn.
With the present type of education where many of us depend on college education, that could be changed. Learning has to come to you, and not you going to college to learn. But through online learning, you can learn at ease and as per your convenience-you can work and simultaneously learn too, that’s the good thing about online learning- and it’s absolutely free. You pay only a reasonable fee if you need to be certified. Trust me, online education will be huge and popular in a few years from now. Never know, 20 years from now many colleges in Mangaluru may opt for online education.
Q: At present how far has edX been helpful to learners globally? What are the main benefits of this kind of learning?
As we increase our partnerships and wireless access becomes more widespread, we will be able to continue to reach more and more learners and provide them with high-quality online education. We hope to democratize and re-imagine education so that anyone, anywhere, regardless of his or her social status or income, can access education. We envision a culture of continuous lifelong learning with improved teaching methods on campus and online to help students learn in effective and exciting ways. We can do strange things through education. But sadly by the year 2030, nearly 50% of our jobs will be gone, and many of us won’t have jobs since they will be all automated or taken over by Robots.
Access is one of them, but much more than that, we aspire to improve the quality of education, both on campus and beyond. We don’t want to just throw some videos and exams at students.Take, for example, the experience of going to class, and missing something or losing the professor after the first five minutes. You would be scrambling to keep up. A lecture is one-size-fits-all, but with online learning, students can pause and rewind videos, multiple times until they can do an exercise. This leads them what’s known as mastery-based learning, where you keep watching the video until you master the material.
Q: Do you think online learning is a threat to teachers and bricks-and-mortar institutions?
I think online learning will augment teachers, by giving them a new tool. What tools have we given teachers since the textbook? I think the only example is in 1862 – a piece of chalk. I really view online courses as a new-age textbook, as a tool we can give teachers. Instead of taking away jobs, I think it’s going to make education much better for students and more exciting. And as a teacher, I don’t have to give the same old lectures every year, telling the same old jokes; instead, I can use online videos, and students can pause me and if they really want to, mute me. I can be more flexible, spending my time interacting with students. If you look at the money being made in digital media, it’s much more than three years ago. Education needs to transform. Those who don’t and stick to the same old ways, without adapting to new technologies, will be in trouble.
Q: You have received many awards and recognition. What’s your secret formula?
I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to work in new fields that I’m passionate about, with students and colleagues who are the best in the world.
Q: What is the trickiest bug you have fixed?
I’ve fixed many bugs in lines of code, but the bug I’m currently focused on is the necessary shift toward life-long learning for everyone, everywhere. While we offer access to education to anyone with Internet access, there’s much research to be done regarding best practices, best teaching and learning methods, and the most practical approach to analyzing learning’s big data as we collect it.
What is on your bookshelf? You’re quite a busy man Professor, what things do you usually do in your past time?
I don’t have a bookshelf at work. It’s all digital! At home, I have books on electronics and computing, old textbooks, photos of my family, paperbacks, and yes, encyclopedias and atlases.
In my free time, I try to be with my family as much as possible, gardening, and I enjoy scuba diving.
Q: As a professor, what words of encouragement do you give to your students?
Students today have so many tools at their disposal: take advantage of them. Be vigilant and proactive about what you are learning, find leaders and educators you respect whose work you can follow on-campus or online, find fellow students who are working hard and who will inspire and challenge you. Don’t be scared of working insanely hard and always shoot for the impossible.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to say to young people to encourage them to pursue Engineering?
If science is the study of what is, engineering is the creation of what will be. Engineering allows you invent the future. It offers creativity in an industry often thought of in terms of rules. I encourage young people to pursue engineering so that they can start to engage with the world and collaborate with peers on technology that will shape our future.
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Padma Shri Awardee Prof Anant Agarwal Lectures on ‘ Digital Education Transformation’
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