Anant Agarwal - Why massive open online courses (still) matter

In his speech, Anant Agarwal, the head of edX, talks about MOOCs, massive open online courses, and the benefits these courses possess. He stresses the importance of change in the education system by saying: "We have to completely reimagine education. Even the infrastructure has to change. We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises, online videos. We have to go completely online grading and peer interaction and discussion boards. Everything really has to change."

Then Mr Agarwal proceeds to talk more about MOOCs and how they can help create a blended model of learning to reinvent education. He introduces five key ideas that will help make this new blended model of education work.

So, his first idea is active learning. He says that students learn much faster when they are interacting with the material. So it would be more beneficial for students to watch a 10-15 minute video and follow that with an interactive exercise than sit for an hour in a classroom.

The second idea is self-pacing. Agarwal says that this form of learning can be helpful for students as they would have the opportunity to rewind the video, pause it, or even mute it if they have to. Students will also have enough time to take detailed notes of the lecture.

The third idea is instant feedback. With instant feedback, students will be able to apply answers and immediately know whether or not they are right. It will also allow students to answer the same question as many times as they want until they get it right.

The next idea is gamification. According to Agarwal, it will encourage students and make learning more fun and interactive. And it can also be graded by the computer.

The last idea is peer learning. Agarwal says that discussion forums have proved themselves to be truly useful. This way students are learning from each other and learning by teaching others.

To sum up, Agarwal says that MOOCs can really help revolutionise education and become a proper tool in the teacher's arsenal.