Open university

ASEE Prism, Nov 2001 by Shute, Nancy

The online experiment grew out of discussions with Grimson and Tomas Lozano-Perez, associate head of the computer science department. They were all too aware that lecture attendance dropped precipitously toward the end of the term, with students overwhelmed by multiple projects. "It was important to see if there's a better way of educating students," Grimson says. At first, he missed the rush of giving a good lecture "performance." "But the bottom line is that's not why we're there. We're there to teach." Responding to students like Yue who said they missed seeing a live lecture, Grimson offered six. Four hundred students showed up for the first; 90 showed up for the fifth. They vote with their feet," Grimson says. He loves the feedback he gets from the online quizzes, which he says make it easier to know what students get and what needs more attention. "I'm fairly convinced this is working better than it did before."

Paul Gray, a former MIT president and professor of electrical engineering, is experimenting with an online segment for the school's second core engineering subject, circuits and electronics. Although he still gives traditional lectures, students can also watch filmed tutorials online starring a nattily-attired Gray, and take online quizzes. "I like the interaction of the lecture," Gray says. "but I think there will be a version of this that continues." He's also eager to experiment with instant feedback, in which students would use handheld devices to respond to questions in class.

THE LAUNCH

OpenCourseWare is MIT's latest and without a doubt wildest, experiment in education. MIT officials are quick to point out that it's not distance learning; people can't take courses or get MIT degrees online. But it will make the resources of a world leaders in technology education available to students and teachers in Accra and Chiang Mai and Shanghai simultaneously. The idea grew out of the Coucil on Educational Technology, founded by MIT two years ago to explore whether there should be an e-MIT. The group quickly decided that was a bad idea. "Our core competency is interacting very intensely with very bright and ambitious students who share our same mission," says provost Brown. "That mission did not match well with distance education."

But it did get the committee talking about how information technology could be used to enhance what MIT was good at. None of the committee members imagined in their wildest dreams that the end result would be throwing millions of pages of precious professorial output onto a Web site. In the end, they realized that MIT's greatest product was the way it educated its students. Putting course materials online, they decided, would give teachers and students around the world a view into the educational process at MIT, and one that wouldn't take years or decades to filter out to remote corners of the globe. "The publication of scholarly material used in teaching doesn't have to wait to get to the world at the same rate as when you had to own a printing press to get it out," says Brown. "It's 13th-century education in a 21 st-century hose."