The most important education technology in 200 years November 3,
2012 Education is about to change dramatically, says Anant
Agarwal, who heads edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to
stream a college education over the Web, free, with plans to
teach a billion students, Technology Review reports. “Massive
open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education
ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most
prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”) will affect
markets so large that their value is difficult to quantify. A
quarter of the American population, 80 million people, is
enrolled in K–12 education, college, or graduate school. Direct
expenditures by government exceed $800 billion. Add to that
figure private education and corporate training. At edX, Agarwal
says, the same three-person team of a professor plus assistants
that used to teach analog circuit design to 400 students at MIT
now handles 10,000 online and could take a hundred times more.
Coursera, an alliance between Stanford a