Anant Agarwal is an Indian American pioneer in non-traditional education and the co-founder and former president of edX, a massive open online course (MOOC) provider. Born in Mangalore, India, he earned his degrees from IIT Madras and Stanford before becoming a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the director of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2011, he helped create MITx, which evolved into edX in 2012. Agarwal personally taught the platform’s first course on circuits and electronics, attracting 155,000 students globally. For his immense contributions to higher education, he received the Padma Shri (2017) and the Yidan Prize for Education Research (2018), which is recognized as the world’s largest education award.
