Open university

ASEE Prism, Nov 2001 by Shute, Nancy

MIT is known worldwide as an incubator of eggheads, an insular realm inhabited by pale men and women with pocket protectors who are so enchanted by transistors and algorithmsand the musings of their own big brains-that they're oblivious to the world beyond Massachusetts Avenue. Examples of that stereotype may still haunt the campus, but they won't for long. MIT is opening itself to the world, with a vengeance. The changes afoot promise to have a major impact on education not only at MIT, but on engineering education worldwide.

For years, MIT's introductory computer-science course was immutable: always at 10 a.m., always in the "10-250" lecture hall with up to 400 students. But students now "attend" 6.001 by clicking through PowerPoint lecture slides on the Web, at 4 a.m. or whenever they please. Students in 6.002, the introductory electrical engineering class, can watch video tutorials and take quizzes online. And in some classrooms, the questions are as likely to come from a student in Singapore, 12 time zones away, as they are from one in Cambridge. But these experiments pale compared with OpenCourseWare. Last April, MIT announced that starting in the fall of 2002, MIT will post all of its course material on the Internet free of charge. Offerings will include not only course syllabi, reading lists, and bibliographies but also professors' lecture notes. "We see MIT OpenCourseWare as opening a new door to the powerful, democratizing, and transforming power of education," president Charles Vest said.

OpenCourseWare may be MIT's most audacious educational effort, but it's hardly the first time the school has experimented with how it delivers education. "Most people in the world see us as a research entity," said provost Robert Brown, a chemical engineer and former dean of engineering. "They don't see all the people walking around with the brass rat on their finger," he added, referring to campus slang for MIT's beaver mascot. Education, Brown says, is "a major product line for us." And tailoring educational offerings to meet the needs of students, industry, and government is a mission that's been with MIT from the start. The institute was founded in 1861 "to respect the dignity of useful work," quite different from the philosophical abstractions pondered by the rich kids across the way at Harvard. "This is a place for men to work and not boys to play," said president Francis Amasa Walker.

Students came to MIT to acquire the practical skills needed to work in the new industries springing up: textiles, steel, paper, food processing. No such school had ever existed, and MIT professors created the curriculum on the fly. First came a new Manual of Inorganic Chemistry, written by Charles W Eliot and Francis H. Storer. That was followed by Edward C. Pickering's experimental physics teaching laboratory, which served as the launch pad for MIT's, and the nation's, first electrical engineering curriculum, introduced in 1882. In those days, much of the course work was devoted to mechanical engineering and liberal arts, since there were precious few practical applications for electricity in a world where most people had never seen a light bulb. Even so, E.E. quickly became popular; as early as 1892, 27 percent of MIT graduates were in electrical engineering. Still, other disciplines weren't slighted. By the turn of the century, MIT had pioneered curricula in sanitary, marine, and chemical engineering. That curriculum, said the institute's 1888 catalogue, was being created "to meet the needs of students who desire a general training in mechanical engineering, and at the same time to devote a portion of their time to the study of the applications of chemistry to the arts, especially to those engineering problems which relate to the use and manufacture of chemical products."

MIT's early experiments in education worked, with its newly minted engineers warmly welcomed in industry. But that success prompted demand for something that the lecture hall, and even the laboratory, couldn't give-hands-on experience before graduation. It wasn't surprising that MIT, which had been founded as an institution closely allied with industry, would make that relationship even tighter. Arthur D. Little was a product of MIT; he had been one of the school's first chemistry students, helped develop its chemical engineering curriculum, and went on to found his eponymous industrial research firm in 1886. In 1916, Little joined forces with William H. Walker, an MIT chemistry professor, to create an industrial internship program that farmed students out to New England firms. The program was widely imitated by other engineering departments, and continues at MIT today.

At the same time, MIT ventured into what would become a long and fruitful partnership with the federal government, a partnership that paid unexpected dividends in higher education. The first move came in 1913, on the verge of World War I, when the Navy dispatched Jerome C. Hunsaker to MIT to teach special classes on aeronautics to Navy officers, whose education lagged behind that of their counterparts in Europe. Hunsaker's laboratory and wind tunnel became the foundation of the institute's aeronautical engineering program, and its graduates played key roles in developing modern aviation. In the 1930s, the federal government began to invest more heavily in technology that could have military applications. The Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by former MIT dean of engineering Vannevar Bush, financed the development of sonar, radar, and other new technologies-many of which were born at MIT's Radiation Lab. At the height of World War II, the Rad Lab employed 4,000 people, including 20 percent of the physicists in the United States, and hundreds of electrical engineers. The Rad Lab forces overwhelmed MIT, occupying 15 acres of floor space on and around the campus. But the lab firmly established MIT as a world center for research and development in electrical engineering, and the 27-volume "Rad Lab" series of articles was used for engineering education around the world after the war.