“I Want to Teach Engineering to a Billion”: Anant Agarwal, President of EdX (Part 6)

Sramana: That is absolutely awesome. The state of engineering education in India, outside of IIT, is awful. Anant Agarwal: I really care about creating courses that have the same quality and rigor of on-campus courses. There is a misconceived notion that online courses cannot have the same quality of education. I disagree. We have proven

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“I Want to Teach Engineering to a Billion”: Anant Agarwal, President of EdX (Part 5)

Sramana: Have you heard of a company called Pluralsight? Pluralsight has a similar model. The company is doing about $16 million in revenue. They are a bootstrapped company out of Utah, and they have a crowd source content development model. They do royalty sharing between content creators and Pluralsight when consumer or corporations pay for

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“I Want to Teach Engineering to a Billion”: Anant Agarwal, President of EdX (Part 4)

Sramana: Isn’t there a possibility that a student could convince someone else to take a course for them and essentially defraud the system? Anant Agarwal: Absolutely. The certificates at this point are issued after signing an honor code. The certificates we issue are noted as honor code certificates. We have recently partnered with Pearson, which

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“I Want to Teach Engineering to a Billion”: Anant Agarwal, President of EdX (Part 3)

Sramana: So there is no MIT stamp of any kind on that San Jose State degree? Anant Agarwal: No, not for a blended class like the example I gave with San Jose State. They get a San Jose State degree. Now, if the student took the public MIT course at the same time on edX,

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“I Want to Teach Engineering to a Billion”: Anant Agarwal, President of EdX (Part 2)

Sramana: How does the model support the on-campus vision? If your courses are built by universities all over the world with an open source methodology, how do localized campuses leverage that information? Anant Agarwal: The platform is open source. The software is open source. The content is owned by the universities. They are the ones

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“I Want to Teach Engineering to a Billion”: Anant Agarwal, President of EdX (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Professor Anant Agarwal was my graduate advisor at MIT in the mid-nineties. In Anant, I found a kindred entrepreneurial spirit, someone who encouraged me to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams, even if that meant quitting the PhD program at MIT. Over the past 20 years, both of

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Top 20 Serial Entrepreneur Interviews

In the recap mode, here’s a list of the top 20 serial entrepreneurs I have spoken with: * Philippe Courtot – a very young 63-year old CEO of Qualys.

Serial Entrepreneurs

I want to turn the spotlight on serial entrepreneurs, and open a discussion on what drives them, and if you want to become a serial entrepreneur, what can you learn from the lives, careers and choices of other successful serial entrepreneurs.