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When Anant Agarwal taught circuits and electronics in the hallowed halls of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the complicated and intricate nature of lectures often gave students headaches or sent them to sleep.

That doesn't happen now. The solution was to put the lectures online first, which freed up the live classes and allowed students to become more involved in activities, discussion and exploration.

Agarwal, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, was not the first to put course videos online and make them available to the public - Yale University has been doing it for years - but he took it a step further.