As with so many areas of our lives technology was disrupting education for the better before
the covid19 pandemic. But lockdowns, furloughs and job losses saw online learning attract widespread
adoption, not only for homeschooling but also to upskill and reskill, as employees and employers
adapt to a new normal. To discuss the role of technology in providing greater access to
education, we speak with Professor Anand Agarwal, founder of the online learning platform edX,
which is a grant partner of the Macquarie Group Foundation through our COVID 19 donation fund.
Education is a human right. Everybody should have access to education like the air we
breathe. edX is using digital technology, to make education accessible to everyone everywhere.
No matter where they are, no matter if they can afford it or not. We launched edX in 2012 and
over the past nine years we have transformed many aspects of education. Digital technology
is key to it, because it scales. The same course taught by some of the top professors
in some of the best universities in the world, or some of the top companies in the world
are able to teach and teach to a class not just of 30 students limited to a classroom,
but to a classroom where the entire planet is a class. Where some of our courses have a million
students taking that course. These are very engaging lectures and because they can scale,
people don't have to pay high prices as they would if they were on a university
campus. The past 18 months have been completely transformative for education.
When the whole world hunkered down from the COVID pandemic and began to work and learn remotely,
pretty much everybody whether you were a faculty member or you were a student,
you began to learn remotely. In the past people were uncomfortable with online
learning in many cases but after the whole world went to work and learned remotely,
people have tried it and they're much more comfortable with it. At edX for example, in
the month of April of last year, we saw a tenfold increase in the number of learners coming to edX
than from the previous month. And in fact in the month of April we enrolled five million new people
who came to learn on edX, which equalled the whole 2019 year, where we saw five million people,
new people come to edX in the whole year. I'm really proud of our partnership with the Macquarie
Foundation where together we are reimagining how education works using programs like
micro bachelors and micro masters where learners can complete skills focused, shorter programs
that they can then use as stackable components towards degrees or other forms of learning.
There is no one-size-fits-all for education. Education must provide flexible on-ramps
and off-ramps for learners as they go through their educational journey.
Digital learning makes it much easier to do that although one can imagine doing so
on campus training as well. With these flexible on-ramps and off-ramps the idea is to create
short modular programs, like the micro masters that we have at edX, and enable students to just
complete a piece of a masters or a bachelors if they so desire, which they can complete
in four to six months rather than having to go to a campus for a full four-year degree.
With these short programs they could use it as an on-ramp and go on to complete a full degree
if they choose. A digital technology makes it easier because people can do these shorter
programs even while they are working or while they are at home or wherever they are in their lives.
And the beauty of these on-ramps is that if they like something they can then go to
a campus and take on a whole much longer program as well. So, digital technology is a key enabler
of these modular flexible programs. But i think the future, where we apply digital learning in
much, much bigger ways and much more futuristic ways, have the potential to open up learning in
ways we've never imagined. Imagine if you could create personalised learning by using AI. Imagine
if you could apply the latest in cognitive science approaches to enable learners to be able to grasp
the material much sooner. Imagine if you could use AR and VR, augmented reality and virtual reality,
to create online labs that have the fidelity of physical labs at very low cost and very engaging
anywhere in the world. To me the future is extremely bright and I can only imagine
the heights to which digital technology will take us for learning in the future.