EdX officially crossed ten million learners earlier this month. It took edX almost five years to reach this milestone. These 10 million learners have 36 million enrollments between them, and they have watched 230 million videos and solved 119 million problem sets.

You can read more about edX in Class Central’s year-end review of edX in 2016.

Padma Shri

Earlier this year the Indian government awarded Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, the Padma Shri (in the education and literature category). It is India’s fourth highest civilian award.

Anant Agarwal was born in India and currently resides in Boston. Anant holds a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Anant has been one of the driving forces behind edX, and behind the MOOC revolution as a whole. His course on Circuits and Electronics was the first course launched on the edX platform (it was originally launched under MITx). You can see his talk at a press conference hosted by MIT and Harvard almost five years ago, during which he announced the launch of edX.

Since then he has been one of the primary forces in developing the MOOC world. He has given a TED talk (embedded below), and he’s appeared on the Colbert Report and on Katie Couric’s talk show to promote MOOCs and edX.