Higher-ed leaders meet to discuss future of online education
On Monday at the MIT Media Lab, MIT and Harvard University, the founders of the online-learning initiative edX, convened a group of academic leaders and other online-learning experts for a daylong summit meeting titled “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education.” On hand were, among others, the presidents and provosts of MIT and Harvard; the provosts of the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University and McGill University; Anant Agarwal, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and president of edX; Daphne Koller, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and a co-founder of the online-learning company Coursera; and, videoconferenced in on a huge screen above the stage, MIT alumnus Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, a popular online-learning site.The conversation was broken into three keynote addresses and three panel discussions. But while the panels were organized around different topics, several themes...