President of edX Appears on The Colbert Report, Explains MOOCs

Watch: Anant Agarwal on The Colbert Report.

Anant Agarwal told Slice of MIT last January that edX had "attracted more than half a million unique users from around the world"; at present, edX.org has registered “over a million students from every single country in the world," as Agarwal told Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night.

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) may seem an unusual topic for The Colbert Report, a comedy show about politics, but the White House recently commended an upcoming MITx course called 3.086x Innovation and Commercialization, which begins this September 16.

Although the White House hopes MOOCs will inspire future innovators, other educators have begun to question the efficacy of online classes. USA Today reported that several Harvard faculty members had "called for an immediate faculty discussion about edX and more involvement in monitoring the ethical implications of it"; HarvardX courses will recommence this fall after improvements have been made. Meanwhile, a piece at Inside Higher Ed surveyed the Hype Cycle graph, speculating that MOOCs might be sliding off the "Peak of Inflated Expectations". (Multiple speakers cited this graph at the LINC 2013 conference at MIT last June.)

Agarwal acknowledged common concerns about online classes in his brief interview with Colbert, admitting that "campus education is different from online education. On campus, students … have late-night discussions with their professors, and get inspired by their professors. We can't replicate that online."

Although Agarwal does not see MOOCs as a replacement for "campus magic," he does see free online courses as a way to encourage more people to discover and enroll in higher education in the future: "universities are doing [edX] so that we can bring the learning back on our campuses."

MITx and edX have almost completed their Summer of Learning partnership with Chicago, during which high school students are learning how to code via an online course called A Taste of Python Programming. The edX website currently offers dozens more options for anyone from high school students to alumni seeking a refresher course.