The Academic Computing Practice seeks to promote and enable educational improvement at MIT through the appropriate use of computers and other information technologies. Working closely with I/T process teams and collaborating with academic departments, the Academic Computing Practice seeks to develop, deploy, and maintain public and departmental computing facilities. These facilities provide widely distributed, client-server computing for educational use at MIT, focusing especially on undergraduate education. The primary mechanism for doing this is the Athena Computing Environment.
The Athena Computing Environment has about 700 workstations for general and departmental use; about 300 private workstations on faculty, teaching-assistant, and staff desks; and about 100 servers. In total, approximately 16,000 users and 1,300 machines are supported by about 50 people at an approximate annual cost of $6.3 million in general funds. Thousands of users logon to Athena each day, and over 10,000 different people are authenticated on peak days.
In addition to being responsible for the renewal of the equipment and facilities that make up MIT's academic computing environment, the Academic Computing Practice provides advocacy, training, documentation, and consulting services to support instruction and academic work. The Practice also hosts a variety of visitors from organizations worldwide who are interested in MIT's academic computing services.
Strategic Objectives
* Encourage the application of information technology to teaching and learning.
* Explore technology developments and options, such as virtuality, multimedia, emerging network and operating environments, and the World Wide Web; all represent radical opportunities for rethinking the content, clientele, methods, and management of educational services.
* Harvest the synergism and efficiencies inherent in integrated operations between IS practices and processes, as well as partnerships with entities external to IS, such as the MIT Libraries and technology vendors.
* Involve MIT in setting directions for the use of information technology in education. Work to influence industry standards.
Program Priorities for the remainder of FY 1997 and for FY 1998
* Engage with groups - such as the Educational Technology Council, departmental committees, and "communities of practice" like Crosstalk - to identify strategic applications that promote the uniqueness of MIT education. Explore technology applications to assess their educational worth in terms of supportability and scalability.
* Lead institutional efforts to develop and deliver the infrastructure to support the next generation of academic computing needs. Support specialized initiatives for advanced visualization and multimedia applications, in addition to the on-going modernization of Athena's facilities and services. Tailor academic support and services to demand.
* Balance the need for innovation with the necessity of providing the efficient and reliable operations that MIT students and faculty have come to expect. Aggressively promote the development of and adherence to standards to minimize support requirements and downtime. Limit diversity in hardware platforms and encourage a greater reliance on commercially available third-party software, as appropriate.
* Continue integrating support activities across historical boundaries without sacrificing the unique needs of academic computing. Dissolve unnecessary and counterproductive boundaries between academic computing work and other I/T work.
* Continue to extend communities of I/T practice outside IS, with the goal of facilitating the meaningful exploration of new instructional computing needs like distance learning and distributed systems. Advocate Information Systems as a partner, not merely a provider.
In the coming year, MIT will strive to maintain its leadership in the area of academic computing. This will necessitate new initiatives, risks, and explorations - new businesses and new ways of doing business. At the same time, IS must ensure that MIT's resource allocations are guided by the overarching goal of supporting the continued improvement of education at MIT, and that these development initiatives are consistent, as much as possible, with these central principles:
- Serve many students, rather than few;
- Serve the core of the MIT curriculum, including General Institute Requirements and large introductory subjects, rather than its periphery;
- Seek innovation and creativity, rather than simple automation of traditional approaches to education;
- Increase technological equity among departments, rather than decrease it.