MIT reveals leading edutech projects

Sunday, 12 February 2012

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Education IT

By Kelly Ng | 19 March 2010

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a dedicated team which drives the innovative use of technology in teaching and learning. Speaking exclusively to FutureGov, Vijay Kumar, who heads the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT), revealed its key IT projects for 2010.

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Electromagnetic phenomena may be a boring topic for most. But for freshman students at MIT, electricity and magnetism is visualised in the classroom ‘to make the unseen seen’. “Instead of listening to a lecture, students in groups of three use networked laptops to access over 100 multimedia visualisations on subjects such as Vector Fields, Electrostatics, Magnetostatics, Faraday’s Law, and Light,” described Kumar. This award-winning pedagogy, termed Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL), showed learning improvements of a factor of two higher than traditional instruction.

According to Kumar, it is about empowering students to think and act like researchers early on. “Visualisation and simulation bring excitement and the rigour of research into learning. Freshman students can look at a protein molecule, make comparisons with other molecules, and understand the structure,” he said.

One of OEIT’s roles is to ensure that lessons from such successful projects are scaled across the university. This simulation technology, which had been built for Physics courses, was then modified for Biology. “If you see an educational institute as an enterprise, this transferability and scaleability is critical. We want to make sure that learning and technology which have had a deep impact on specific disciplines are shared to achieve a wider outcome,” he stressed.

The sharing of best practices reaches beyond MIT. Kumar had just returned from The Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where TEAL-like classrooms are being set up. The University of Tokyo has also fashioned its active learning pedagogy on MIT’s.

In the next twelve months, the Spoken Lecture Browser (SLB) is one key project OEIT will be focusing on. Leveraging automatic speech recognition technology, it makes video recordings of lectures and seminars searchable so users can find a particular segment within a video, start watching at the relevant point and see corresponding transcript at the same time.

OEIT believes in pedagogy- rather than technology-led innovation per se. “It is important not to start by selecting the technology. We first go to our faculty to understand what they would like to achieve educationally and identify what is getting in the way. Only then do we look at exploring what sort of technology could be brought in to address the issue,” said Kumar. OEIT, in its third year now, has impacted 200 to 300 faculty and 200 courses.

Kumar observed the need to explore educational technology in a strategic and systematic way. While it is common for US universities to do that, it is somewhat lacking in Asia. He suggested that Asia should pay closer attention to having such a role, both at the institutional and national level.