Joe Fuller: As jobs change in response to technology, workers must continually gain new sets of skills and qualifications. But, the traditional institutions that provide those skills have business models and service offerings that have difficulty keeping up with that rate of change. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work Podcast. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor, and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. Today I’ll be speaking with Anant Agarwal, founder and CEO of the online learning platform edX, a joint venture between Harvard University and its neighbor in Boston, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anant and I will discuss critical gaps in the market for education and training, and the innovative approaches edX has taken to fill those gaps.

Anant, Harvard is a proud co-founder of edX and excited to see its growth. Maybe you could just introduce our listeners to a little bit to edX’s history and the original thinking behind it?

Anant Agarwal: edX is a nonprofit learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT. Thank you, MIT and Harvard. You know, they have contributed $80 million to edX. As a platform organization, we built a software platform to connect great institutions like MIT, Harvard, Oxford—and even companies like Microsoft, IBM, and others who have great content to create—to learners who want to learn from all over the world. Today, we have 20 million learners from every single country in the world that are learning from 140 institutional partners. So that’s who we are. We’ve also open-sourced the platform as “Open edX,” so that other institutions can adopt the platform should they want to build up and innovate themselves in education. And today, there are 2,400 other sites using Open edX, on which there are an additional 25 million learners learning.

Fuller: When you started, did you anticipate having corporate partners? How quickly did that emerge as a type of partner you wanted to have—corporate companies with rich, intellectual content like the ones you mentioned?

Agarwal: Today we are nothing like we envisioned ourselves eight years ago. In the beginning, we thought we would just have a few universities as partners, maybe six or seven, and certainly universities. But as more and more universities approached us wanting to partner, we grew to over 100 university partners. Similarly, learners were looking for content not just from universities, but were looking for absolutely bleeding-edge content that was very job-related, very skill-related. And for that, we had a lot of interest from corporation partners, like Linux Foundation or Microsoft or IBM and others that are offering content on edX. And the corporations bring a whole new perspective to learning. Where the university courses tend to be oftentimes theoretical and rich in one sense, the corporate courses tend to be much more applications-focused and bring a whole different kind of view on learning.

Fuller: Was enlisting the companies or accepting them, was that controversial with the universities? Do the two different populations of people providing content, do they have different requirements in terms of being able to deliver through your platform?

Agarwal: Over the past eight years, what has edX not done that has not been controversial? Everything that we’ve done has been controversial, where somebody or other has lobbed a call to me saying, “Anant, are you crazy? What are you doing?” But over time, people have gotten used to it. We clearly come from a community … as a professor, as a big part of a university, we’ve tended to do similar things for decades, if not centuries, new things happen very slowly. New things happen very slowly and go through a lot of discussion and debate. And even at edX, as a nonprofit consortium of universities, we have a lot of debate, and we, ourselves, don’t move as fast as I would like to see us move because of the need to communicate and get everybody’s buy-in. But even then, certainly bringing in corporate partners to offer content on edX was controversial, and we certainly hear from university partners about that. However, at the end of the day, we reflect the voice of the learner, and we believe we should be doing what is right for humankind. And, by and large, the partners come along once they realize that the motivation here is nonprofit. It’s for the good of the learner, and they’ve all bought into it.

Fuller: Well, we call this podcast Managing the Future of Work, and that’s the name of our project here at Harvard Business School as well. You’ve mentioned several times that there are corporations both posting content, you mentioned some technology companies, but also corporations as clients. Going beyond the core educational mandate of giving people access to the highest-quality pedagogy and scholarship through the platform, but thinking about it more through the lens of work, what’s edX’s role, and what have you learned about the role of the platform in advancing that agenda?

Agarwal: What is interesting is that education and the future to work are so closely tied together. I remember several months ago, there was a Governor’s Conference here in Massachusetts. And at that conference, I was in a panel with education leaders and people from the government, and we were brainstorming about the future of work. And we all know that the future of work is changing dramatically. The pace of technology is such that newer ways of working, newer literacies, newer competencies are showing up almost every day. AI is transforming everything, and so is robotics and automation and computation. The nature of the work, itself, is changing. And so, in this panel, what was a “future of work” panel within two minutes turned into a “future of education” panel, where there’s a clear understanding that, as the future of work changes because of advances in technology—which are going on at an incredible pace—how do we deal with this?

Employees that are working—or looking for work—need new literacies, need new ways of building skills, need new skills to be able to get jobs in the new economy. There are various studies that show that, within the next 10 years, by 2030, half the people on this planet will need to upskill themselves, or they will risk losing their jobs. And so there’s clear understanding and a recognition that there is a really big problem out there. How do we upskill a whole planet? We also, as edX, we are creating an education system where we are helping employees and companies and people looking for jobs to upskill themselves to be able to keep pace with the changes in the workplace.

Fuller: Is there any material difference between teaching someone a college-level course for degree credit vs. teaching somebody a skill that’s relevant to employment? In fact, you could argue that the universities have been great sources of stability because the knowledge is timeless, and it is added to incrementally, and scholarship is capturing the accumulated wisdom of humankind, and that we all have visions of university professors with their yellowed lecture notes as they teach us Roman history, or Chaucer, or basic mathematics. That seems to be completely incompatible with the world you’re describing in terms of the velocity of technology and the requirements of staying current in terms of skills. What differences do you see, and how do you accommodate them on edX?

Agarwal: Yeah, they’re two completely different worlds. I have been a professor at MIT for most of my life. I’ve been teaching at MIT for 30 years. On the one hand, stability was key, and also the fact that the learner came in at the age of 18, grew up, and spent four years learning …

Fuller: … at the university …

Agarwal: … at the university, and spent four years doing it. But for the future to work, we have a whole different world out there. Skills are moving at an incredible pace. Your yellowed notes are not going to cut it; people need new skills. People don’t have the time to come back to university for two years or four years, particularly if they have a job and kids and so on. Sixty percent of learners that we surveyed tell us that they don’t have the time to spend learning in order to get a promotion or new skills. Another 60 percent of learners are telling us that cost is a big barrier to them. So these are some of the big challenges. The learning for the future to work will need to be modular, will need to be flexible, will need to be online—learning will have to go to them—will need to be cost effective, will need to be cutting-edge. And will also need to find a way of giving them some clear signaling value to what they’ve learned that is distinct from a two-year or four-year degree.

Fuller: When we talk to employers—and certainly our research indicates, despite what you’re saying, employers a lot of emphasis on traditional recognized credentials, degrees specifically—how do you balance the fact that employers want skills that go well beyond what someone gained when they studied in school, when they studied in college, but they still put great value on that BA or BS and the institution that granted it?

Agarwal: I think again, it’s two different worlds. In the past, employees would recruit students out of universities, and the degree would have a very strong signaling value. And then, they would grow at the company and continue working there. But today, however, you need to reskill and upskill as an employee on a regular basis. Your old degree may not have the same currency today for your employer that it did a decade or two decades ago. And so today, we will see the advent of micro-credentials. One of the micro-credentials that are available on edX is a MicroMasters program. And these are modular credentials that have strong signaling value, and employers would be paying more and more attention to these modular credentials because full degrees will not be able to solve the kind of needs that they have for the future of work.

Fuller: So say more about these micro-credentials, and particularly MicroMasters. Are they granted by edX? Or are they granted by one of your partner institutions? And what types of topics do they cover?

Agarwal: So the MicroMasters program is a radical new credential, and this was pioneered by MIT in collaboration with edX. A MicroMasters program is about 25 percent of a master’s degree. So it’s modular. A person who is working can complete it in six months to nine months, as opposed to spending four years or two years at a university getting it. Second, it’s fully online, so they can learn it flexibly. Third, it’s a credential with gravitas—it’s called a MicroMasters program, and it is offered and granted by edX university partners. So, for example, MIT offers MicroMasters credentials in supply chain management, in data science, in manufacturing. Columbia University has a MicroMasters program in artificial intelligence, Georgia Tech in cybersecurity, Rochester Institute of Technology in project management, Boston University in digital project management. And these are all cutting-edge fields in which people can get these new credentials. It’s low cost. It costs about $1,000 for them to get it. And so these are all the properties of a new modular credential, and more and more employers are paying attention to it. It is also credit-backed, in that, if you complete a MicroMasters and then you go and get admission at MIT or Columbia or the university you obtained it from, it will count toward your master’s degree at that university. So it’s a radical new credential with incredible gravitas. And more and more employers are paying very, very significant attention to it.

Fuller: It’s interesting. It’s almost as if, at the origin, edX was providing a new platform to grant a traditional old credential. But now, the platform is begetting a new type of credential that reflects what the platform can do.

Agarwal: You bring up a really good point, Joe, and it’s very exciting, in that this is clearly a direction that we completely did not anticipate. And this is the reason why, in the Clayton Christensen sense, great universities need to launch speedboats that can go and innovate. And the MicroMasters program is one example of an innovation that came out of this kind of experimentation, where, in addition to traditional degrees like the bachelor’s degree and master’s degree, we now have a radical new modular credential for 21st-century future-of-work skills. And this came out of the crucible—the digital-learning crucible—that was edX. And so today, one of the values that edX brings to university partners, is a way for universities—the traditional universities—to be able to couple into the future of work through the edX platform using these radical new credentials like MicroMasters programs.

Fuller: So when a student enrolls in a MicroMasters, are they trying to actually work to degree completion, or are they just trying to pick up a MicroMasters in a specific skill that’s going to advance their employability?

Agarwal: Seventy-five percent of the learners are telling us that they are just looking for a modular credential: the MicroMasters program certificate. And so they come to edX, and they might own a MicroMasters certificate from the University of British Columbia in software development or from Columbia in AI. And they put that MicroMasters certificate on their resume or on their LinkedIn profile. And in fact, 91 percent of them are telling us that they’ve already achieved a career advancement based on that certificate. The second kind of learner—about 25 to 30 percent of them—want to go on for a full master’s degree. MicroMasters programs are the property that, if they get admission into a university or they get admission into the corresponding online master’s degree on edX, this will count toward that credit.

Fuller: I see.

Agarwal: So that’s the beauty of modularity. These stack up, these credentials stack. In fact, some of the really radical aspects of stacking is you can stack up these credentials from multiple universities. We have launched an online master’s degree in supply chain management from Arizona State University, where the first MicroMasters comes from MIT in supply chain management. And then Arizona State University provides the latter half of the program.

Fuller: Stacks across institutions?

Agarwal: It can stack within an institution with multiple modular credentials, or you can stack across institutions.

Fuller: How are employers using this? Are you having to convince them this is a legitimate credential, or are they ever contributing to the material? How do they see it?

Agarwal: Many employers are demanding this, while many others still have HR departments that are focused on degrees. As employers come to us, tens of thousands of their employees are already taking our courses, and employees are telling HR departments, “Look, we want these modular credentials.” So about a year ago, based on a lot of demand from corporate partners, we launched edX for Business, where we work directly with corporates, and we integrate into their corporate LMS like, success factors or degreed or other systems …

Fuller: … their learning management systems, LMS …

Agarwal: … their learning management systems, so that their learners or their employees can come directly to us. And the business transactions can happen with big corporations. Many other corporations—for example, Tech Mahindra in India, which has 117,000 employees—are using edX programs to upskill their employees. In fact, in their case, not just upskill employees within the company, but also get employees with better skills. As an example, they announced about a year ago that they will interview anybody from India that had earned a MicroMasters certificate in one of 10 programs. And so employers are trying out radical new approaches to interviewing, based on people with these new credentials, or even upskilling their employees.

Fuller: So, are you seeing this extend beyond just technology industries?

Agarwal: We are seeing this extend beyond all industries.

Fuller: Really?

Agarwal: We have a corporate advisory board of about 25 companies. Certainly, tech companies, but also the companies in financial services, companies in the hospitality industry like Hilton Hotels. So it’s a wide swath of companies that all need to upskill their employees.

Fuller: And are the company’s saying to the employees, “Here’s a resource,” or are employers now urging employees to take … “We would really like you to do this specific degree or this specific course and study it.” And, of course, importantly, who’s paying?

Agarwal: Many companies are working with edX. Getting edX’s help to curate the courses for them. And then they display the courses that they would like their employees to take, and the programs.

Fuller: I see.

Agarwal: Employees take them and the companies pay for it. In many other situations, frankly, the employees know what they want. And the employees—and because the MicroMasters programs and some of our other programs are such low cost, about $1,000—many employees are telling us that they don’t even bother looking for reimbursement. They just come and learn directly and pay for it out of their pockets. And this is helping them as well.

Fuller: I want to shift our focus a little bit, because there’s a very large population, at least in the United States, that’s generally described as “some college, no degree.” They started in community college or a four-year institution, something happened to cause them not to finish—an academic reversal, they had a child, they ran out of funding, they couldn’t afford to stick with their program of study. That’s obviously not master’s-level studies. What kind of solution does edX have for them?

Agarwal: So the basic concept of modular education will be able to address that population, where today, if I go to college, if I’m a 17-, 18-year-old, go to college, spend six months or a year in college, and then I leave to take a job, what do we call them? We call them a dropout today, but they learn something. They don’t have a modular credential for it. Modularity can fix that problem, where, if they’ve learned something, they should get a credential for it that can help them at least get some kind of a job. And so, at the master’s level, the MicroMasters is that modular credential. And edX is interested in addressing that market in the future, as well at the undergraduate level.

Fuller: And is there a similar ability to stack those credentials—both the ones earned on edX and those previously earned—to add up to getting an online degree?

Agarwal: Absolutely. A solution in that space will involve a modular credential, like the MicroMasters, on the graduate level. There’ll be a similar modular credential at the undergraduate level, where a learner with some credit will be able to accumulate these modular credentials at the undergraduate level. And ultimately, when they have accumulated enough of them over time—flexibly—they will even be able to earn a bachelor’s degree from one of our university partners.

Fuller: When I think across the two populations we’ve talked about—both the MicroMasters candidates probably employed now trying to stay relevant or get new skills and credentials that might lead them to move to a better position, get advanced in their current employer and this “some college, no degree” population—it just invokes the image of a lifelong learner. This is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot by civic and political leaders. We all have to be lifelong learners. Based on your history at edX, how do you think about that, and where does a platform like edX fit into meeting that demand for lifelong learning?

Agarwal: The future of learning will be lifelong. In the past, people learned for four years in college and then got a job. But given the future of work, how technology is rapidly changing work in amazing ways, the future of learning will be lifelong. People will be learning throughout life. Modular credentials at the undergraduate level, MicroMasters programs at the graduate level, will enable learners to continue learning throughout life and accumulating these credentials as and when they need it. In other words, they will be learning “just in time,” so to speak. Platforms like edX enable this to happen. For lifelong learning to happen, I don’t believe there is any other way to do it than online. What are the odds that you’re going to be able to go to a campus for a year once you’re 35 years old? You need modular credentials, you need online learning, and it has to be open enrollment. We can’t have admissions processes. Can you imagine for a ... Let’s say over my life, I’m going to earn seven modular credentials. Do you really want me to apply for admissions seven different times? It’s a nightmare. We have to make it friction-free. We need modular credentials, it needs to be open admissions, it needs to be low cost, it needs to be flexible, and it needs to be online. edX is a good place to start, because we are working with top universities and corporations—like Microsoft and IBM and Linux and others—that offer these credentials on our platform, and we built the platform that enables learners to accumulate these and to coalesce them into bigger credentials.

Fuller: Anant, what you’ve described about edX is very compelling, but why don’t universities just do this for themselves or even large corporations, like the Microsofts of the world, create their own basis here? Why does it have to be a collective utility function like edX, given how compelling these offers are?

Agarwal: Clearly, each organization could try to optimize for themselves. What edX brings to the table is a platform. If you look at various marketplaces today, it’s all about platforms and it’s all about networking and aggregation across platforms. What edX has done is, by applying a platform approach to education, it is aggregating learners from all over the world—20 million of them, and 140 institutional partners—to be part of the platform. The content comes from many places, and learners come from many places that coordinate on the platform. edX also has a market focus, where, as a small nonprofit startup company, we’re able to be very nimble, we’re able to follow the market as to where the needs are. And by having a large partner base, we’re able to have—at least some of our partners—create the right kind of content. It would have been very difficult if we had just one partner. We would have to rely on that one partner to create all our programs. We have 100 professional certificate programs and 50 MicroMasters programs on topics like blockchain and fintech and Python programming and Azure Cloud and cloud computing, and all kinds of topics. It would be near impossible to have done all of this in the space of two or three years if all you had was one partner. By aggregating the resources from a number of them, by being market focused and using a platform approach, I think it’s just better for everybody and (sic) leverage a partnership with another university.

Fuller: Well, Anant, thanks for crossing the Charles River, coming over here from your offices at edX and for joining us here on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Agarwal: As the child of Harvard and MIT, I’m really excited to be here. Thank you for the great conversation.

Fuller: From Harvard Business School, I’m Professor Joe Fuller. Thanks for joining us for the Managing the Future of Work podcast.