Dive Brief:
- In an interview, edX leader Anant Agarwal talks about how the MOOC has affected professors, singling out automatic online grading as a big win for instructors as well as students because of the instant feedback it provides.
- Agarwal says edX courses routinely use artificial intelligence to grade essay and free-form answers and the technology is already at a point that he would have thought would take years to develop.
- When asked about the evolution of data gathering in MOOCs, Agarwal looks at the evolution from primitive search engines such as Alta Vista to today's Google within 20 years and says that there's no telling the kinds of data-gathering leaps that could be made in the next 20 years.
Dive Insight:
EdX is a little different by nature from its MOOC peers — unlike Coursera and Udacity, edX is a nonprofit. But it would be a mistake to regard it as more staid. Its executives include a dose of startup talent such as the former head of marketing at Zipcar and a former Carbonite employee.
