Jack of all trades: edX CEO Agrawal on his journey from Mangalore to MIT

In terms of users on both edX.org and all its open source offerings, edX is by far the largest player in the field

For the 18-year-old student at IIT, it was a moment of epiphany. After going through “a relatively low standard of education” at his school in Mangalore, Anant Agrawal made it to IIT-Chennai in 1977 to stu­dy electrical engineering, but the quality of work expected of him was way above what he was accustomed to. In the first physics mid-term exam taken by 300 students, he was one of the two boys who failed, a shock for a student who’d been largely above average in class, cle­aring his IIT entrance exam at first shot.

A second fact also rankled him. During