Anant Agarwal won the annual Harold W. McGraw Prize in Education, for pioneering the MOOCs movement.
A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Agarwal is one of the founders and current CEO of edX. The partnership between MIT and Harvard University now includes 70 universities and institutions around the world and serves more than 5 million learners. Agarwal is currently focused on bringing edX course materials to high school classrooms.
Other people news:
- Kevin McDonald will become the University of Missouri System’s first chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer on June 1. Formerly vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion at Rochester Institute of Technology, McDonald was hired to fulfill a key initiative established by the University of Missouri Board of Curators to better address inequality and diversity issues.
- Kirk Schulz has been selected as the 11th president of Washington State University. For the past seven years, Schulz was president of Kansas State University, where he also served as a professor of chemical engineering. He is chairman of the NCAA board of governors as well. The previous president, Elson S. Floyd, died of cancer last June.
- Cynthia Azari is the new president of Oxnard College in California, effective June 1. She most recently served as interim president of Fresno City College. Azari, who grew up in California picking cotton and grapes and whose parents never graduated high school, takes over an institution where nearly three-quarters of students are Latino and more than half are women.
