MIT EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL




REPORT




William J. Mitchell and Michael L. Dertouzos (Editors)
July 1997

CONTENTS

1. SUMMARY

This report presents the recommendations of MIT's Council on Educational Technology. It considers the Institute's future educational activities in a world of new and emerging information technologies, and it proposes ways to support these activities.

1.1. Principal Recommendation: Initiate Project

MIT should undertake an ambitious five-year project - yet to be named - that will make the Institute the recognized leader in the creation and effective application of advanced educational technology and that will create an exportable model for higher education. 1

The proposed project, which is detailed in this report, strives to match MIT's unique strengths to new educational technology opportunities through the pursuit of a carefully chosen set of educational experiments and their associated educational objectives.

This project requires creating the necessary technological infrastructure, together with the human resources, partnerships, and organization needed to pursue these educational objectives and to sustain MIT's leadership in educational technology over the long term.

The council believes that MIT's ability to respond effectively to its changing environment, and to retain and enhance its leadership position in research and education, will depend directly and substantially on the success of this effort.

1.2 Educational Philosophy: A Time to Experiment

This is a time for bold experiments.

Questions of educational philosophy are contentious: MIT's numerous units encompass a wide variety of commitments, resources, and subcultures, and the technological future is filled with uncertainties. Thus it would be difficult at this moment to build a consensus behind a single, monolithic vision of the future—and it would probably be unwise to attempt this in any case. At the same time, many MIT faculty members have exciting ideas and proposals for combining the capabilities of new educational technology with the commitment and skill needed to achieve ambitious educational goals. We therefore believe that the project we recommend should be centered on a set of carefully chosen experiments designed to probe the possibilities of new educational technologies along several dimensions, resolve some of the most critical uncertainties, and provide a reliable basis for future investments.

This report suggests some categories of experiments that we currently consider most important and promising. It proposes mechanisms for modifying the experimental framework as our educational experiences and the rapidly changing technological terrain unfold.

Within each broad category of experimentation, the report discusses specific experiments and scenarios to illustrate some of the educational and technological possibilities. It also includes suggestions from faculty who are already contemplating such prospects. The report, however, does not recommend specific experiments. That task is left—as it should be—to our faculty and researchers, who we anticipate will make specific proposals within the designated categories.

1.3 The Experimental Framework

The council proposes that specific experiments be carried out in the following four broad categories:

Experiments within these categories should focus on applying advanced educational technology to enhance the quality and extend the range of the instructional and research experiences that MIT provides. They should aim to add value and excitement to what we do best; and, while they should give appropriate attention to efficiency and cost-effectiveness, they should carefully avoid any suggestion of substituting lower-cost but inferior electronic alternatives for the intense interactions that have traditionally been at the core of an MIT education.

Proposals for experimental projects should be selected and funded under this project based on their merit—which includes the clarity with which they identify important educational goals, a definition of the specific benefits that are sought, and the methods for monitoring and evaluating success in achieving these benefits and assessing the cost-benefit implications for higher education. (We elaborate these goals and associated educational questions in the body of this report.)

These experiments should have the potential to transform education, they should aim to produce generalizable results, and they should pay close attention to issues of sustainability and economic viability. We should recognize, however, that many of the benefits are likely to be unexpected and serendipitous, and we should therefore be alert to such opportunities when they emerge.

The selected projects should build on the established expertise and commitment of MIT faculty members—many of whom have already initiated some exciting efforts—and should cover a sufficiently broad range of questions to effectively open up the whole issue of advanced educational technology and its uses. They should involve significant efforts from all five schools at MIT, the libraries, the MIT Press, and Center for Advanced Educational Services.

1.4 Creating the Necessary Infrastructure

To carry out these educational experiments and to maximize our potential for success in our primary objective, MIT will need to put in place an infrastructure that is at the cutting edge of technological capability. This infrastructure must be able to integrate the new technologies with our physical spaces and our way of working and living within the MIT community. To this end the council recommends the following actions:

1.5 Building on MIT's Comparative Advantage

The council believes that this experimental strategy builds effectively on MIT's traditions of research leadership in science and technology, its commitment to close integration of cutting-edge research and classroom teaching, its capacity to work closely and effectively with industry, and its proven capability to design and implement innovative large-scale systems. These traditions and capabilities constitute MIT's comparative advantage in the field of advanced educational technology, and create the potential for leadership.

The council is well aware that other institutions have made major commitments to advanced educational technology and distance education, and in some cases have gained extensive experience. There would be little for us to gain from a "me-too" strategy. We must strike out in our own direction and build on what we do best.

The council considered—and dismissed—the strategy of making no sustained commitment to innovation in advanced educational technology, and simply picking up what others have produced as needed. Providing the best possible educational resources for the future is too urgent and central to MIT's mission for that. Furthermore, the council notes that MIT already makes large, regular investments in current educational technology—in classroom space and equipment, audiovisual equipment, library materials, computers, and telecommunications. The Council feels little confidence that we are actually getting the best value for our money in this, and there is a strong sense that we could begin to do much better by focusing critical attention and creativity on the task—at a scale large enough to make a real difference.

1.6 Building on Our Human Resources

To accomplish these goals we cannot and should not attempt to start from scratch. We must build as effectively as possible on existing human resources and on past investments in physical facilities and equipment.

The council therefore recommends a transition strategy that preserves the value of the current Athena environment as much as possible and for as long as possible, and allows us to retain the best features of Athena in the new environment. The council also recommends a strategy of integrating the libraries, the MIT Press, Center for Advanced Educational Services (CAES), and other relevant MIT units in the project.

Advanced infrastructure and software resources will not be used effectively unless the human resources are available to maintain that infrastructure and facilitate its application to substantive tasks. The council therefore recommends building on existing capabilities and human resources to create a strong, highly professional support organization with responsibility for both maintaining common infrastructure and ensuring that this infrastructure effectively supports the various experimental projects.

Students should be extensively involved in the proposed project, especially because they are expected to be among the more innovative contributors. The effects of the initiative on junior faculty career paths should be carefully monitored at the departmental, School Council, and Academic Council levels. Junior faculty members who devote significant amounts of time to the effort should be advised to do so in a way that yields original, publishable research contributions. In summary, all members of the MIT community should have opportunities for involvement in ways that enhance their development and their career paths.

1.7 Engaging Industry and Foundation Partners

The council believes that extending the MIT community with industrial and governmental partners is essential to the success of the project, especially in terms of capitalizing on new modes of learning for both young students and seasoned professionals. MIT is uniquely positioned to undertake a groundbreaking initiative in educational technology, and it can bring a great deal of commitment and expertise to the table. It does not, however, have all the technological capability and financial resources required for an effort of the proposed scale and sophistication. The council therefore recommends an immediate, vigorous effort to engage appropriate industry, government, and foundation partners to assist us with this effort.

1.8 Organization of the Project

Success in this enterprise will require broad involvement of the MIT community and a sustained, committed effort from a core group of project leaders. The Council therefore recommends the following:

These organizations will establish subgroups and subunits as necessary and will follow the judgment of their leaders to achieve their objectives and carry out their processes. The council does not wish to overspecify these important organizational activities but offers the following suggestions.

To ensure the right combination of responsiveness to the MIT community's needs with technical and design expertise, we should consider creating a broadly representative client subgroup with responsibility for articulating educational requirements, plus a small and highly skilled design group, headed by the executive director, with responsibility for proposing and eventually implementing specific solutions. The process envisioned here is similar to that of designing complex buildings and urban projects.

Each experimental area will require careful management. We should therefore consider establishing similar subgroups for each individual experimental area, linked to the overall project group, with objectives and processes for selecting experiments and for modifying the educational experiment areas.

2. VISION

Before proceeding to the details of our recommendations, we begin with some future scenarios that illustrate the main elements of the council's vision—the kinds of activities we have in mind within the suggested experimental framework supported by the infrastructure we propose. These scenarios are only intended to suggest possibilities. Their details should not be taken too literally, because they will depend on the opportunities that faculty and students decide to pursue.

2.1 Educational Uses of New Analytical and Synthetic Tools

Freshman Calculus

Freshman Electromagnetism

Virtual Telescope

The Computer Music Laboratory

2.2 Educational Uses of New Information Linkage Tools

In Class While on the Road

Virtual Cross-Registration

A New "Virtual Green Series" for EECS

Historicopter

As these scenarios and experiments suggest, information linkage tools will help learners explore the richly webbed world of information that is provided by many independent agents, with links that can easily be established and pursued. As everyone is now realizing, however, effective use of these tools depends on solving difficult problems of finding, trusting, organizing, and disseminating information. We expect to learn a great deal about learning by experimenting vigorously and imaginatively with these powerful but not yet fully understood capabilities.

2.3 Learning through Collaboration

MIT Europe and MIT Japan

Industrial Partners Advise MIT Students

Students Rub Shoulders with Key Government Officials

Co-Op Student Teams

Learning International Negotiation

Robot Olympics

The electronic proximity created by interconnected computers increases our ability to reach other human beings by an enormous factor—perhaps a thousandfold over that which the automobile helped us achieve. But this increased capacity comes with many associated costs; we should not widen the radius of our MIT community simply because it is now electronically feasible to do so. We should consider extending it, however, where this can be shown to result in rich and effective ways of augmenting our learning processes—as many of these examples suggest. We should identify and focus on the truly important educational benefits of these potential new endeavors.

2.4 Lifelong Learning

Young People's MIT Science Club

MIT Early Admissions

MIT Alumni College

Graduate Students in Lifelong Learning

Creation and exploration of opportunities for lifelong learning is another major element of our vision. We believe that proper blending of our existing resources with new technologies may help us extend the reach of our institution on both sides of our current age group to include MIT-bound young students, MIT alumni, and the professionals of our corporate partners. Though it is a difficult task, it should be possible to arrive at a size, mix, and orientation of these new members that will enhance their learning prospects and the goals of our institution.

The objectives of developing new educational approaches and exploring opportunities for lifelong learning are connected and complementary. Electronically mediated distance education is unlikely to be very exciting if it is just televised chalk-and-talk. At the same time, investments in the development of innovative educational tools will be difficult to justify and sustain if the benefits are available only to a relatively small on-campus population. A good deal of experimentation will be needed to help us discern the effective from the merely possible.

2.5 The Reinvented Campus

The Electronic Seminar Room

Anytime, Anyplace, Ad-Hoc Access to Resources

The Collaborative Laboratory

The Virtual Design Studio

Books On Demand

The Virtual Shakespeare Library

Information Everywhere

These examples and scenarios suggest a new "architecture" for tomorrow's MIT: a reinvented campus that includes virtual places as well as physical rooms and laboratories, electronic library collections as well as rare books and unique manuscripts, updated classrooms and dormitory rooms that support seamless integration of new electronic tools and resources into the educational process, electronic links as well as corridors, and software tools as well as furniture and equipment—all reinforcing one another and creating a new whole that current and future community members will be eager to inhabit and utilize.

2.6 A New Sense of Place

This reinvented, extended, and transformed campus should be as immediately identifiable and symbolically evocative of MIT as the existing one has become. The "Virtual Infinite Corridor" for network surfers should be a powerful complement to the famous physical passageway for pedestrians. Its interface should be unique and memorable, like the great dome that looms over Killian Court. It should enhance the quality of our on-campus experiences, facilitate the distribution of our educational "materials" worldwide, provide access to information through our new libraries that will manage pointers to shared knowledge wherever and in whatever form it may reside, and support the convening of people in coffee-klatch discussions, collaborative research projects and alliances with our partners, instructional activities, and much more.

The reinvented campus—symbolized by the Virtual Dome—is our vision of a new MIT for the twenty-first century, where physical facilities, information tools and infrastructure, and social organization are in balance and support each other, as the following scenario optimistically anticipates.

It All Hangs Together

This partly electronic, partly architectural infrastructure is not an end in itself. It is, however, an essential means for realizing the substantive educational vision that we have put forward, and it represents the major part of the investment that we must make.

2.7 The Vision's Guiding Assumptions

In putting forward this vision, we assume that in the twenty-first century MIT will preserve and enhance its emphasis on experimentation, exploration, and design. It will focus on science and technology, and embrace management, the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It will also continue to select and sustain excellent faculty, staff, and students who become involved in exciting forefront projects and activities that benefit worthy societal goals.

We also assume that MIT will want to remain a unique community with a very particular character. Its ability to attract and retain the very best faculty, staff, and student talent, its capacity for research innovation, and its ability to provide outstanding educational experiences will all depend on this.

We expect that the MIT of the twenty-first century will operate in a highly competitive environment, and that a "business as usual" strategy will not suffice if it is to maintain its leading position or even perhaps its continued viability. The new technologies present opportunities for change that are reflected in our vision. They also carry pitfalls we should avoid: possible reduction of face-to-face contact, dilution of community, marginalization of the Institute's rich history and contributions to society, devaluation of teaching skills, loss of faculty control, superficiality and diversion of resources.

We recognize that the cost of education is a critical issue, but we emphatically reject the idea that educational technology should be used for inexpensive delivery of a lower-quality product. Instead, we believe that MIT should focus on the new ways in which educational technology can add value to its human resources, physical facilities and equipment, and intellectual property. In addition, MIT should seek necessary efficiencies by looking for optimal mixes of traditional and electronically mediated means.

2.8 Summary of Project Goals

In responding to these conditions and challenges, MIT's goal should be a continued and enhanced position of global leadership in research and education. Specifically, MIT should seek to become, within five years, the recognized leader in effective, practical applications of advanced educational technology; it should also strive to create an exportable model for higher education. It should accomplish this by building effectively on Athena and other existing resources, and by forming mutually beneficial alliances with other academic, industrial, and government organizations.

We need to operate on a sufficiently large scale to make a real difference. We estimate the cost of the project to be $100 to $150 million over a five-year period—comparable to Project Athena in expenditures and time duration. This is a project with the potential to involve a wide cross-section of the MIT community in an exciting, visionary effort that will create a positive momentum as we move into the twenty-first century.

3. CONTEXT

3.1 Charge from the President

President Vest charged the Council on Educational Technology to consider the potential benefits that MIT's educational mission might derive over the next decade from effective application of emerging computer and telecommunication technologies, to explore alternative strategies for achieving the most important of these benefits, to describe a vision for the future, and to make a concise, concrete set of recommendations for action.

The council was asked to take a comprehensive view that encompasses on-campus and distance learning activities, the educational implications of global networking, the role of shared information technology resources (in particular, Athena), and the roles of departmental and individual resources (including student-owned machines). It was asked to explore proven, promising, and speculative approaches to technologically supported education, and to consider possible alliances with other organizations.

3.2 Relation to Other Councils and Task Forces

Three additional MIT Presidential Councils—on the environment, international relationships, and industrial relationships—are preparing our institution to enter the twenty-first century. In addition, there is a Task Force on Student Life and Learning charged with developing a comprehensive vision. We believe that all these domains are tightly linked and that the recommendations should be dovetailed together. Ideally the four councils can meet and coordinate their drafts before finally releasing them.

The work of this council builds on the work of the earlier Penfield Committee, the report of which is available online.

3.3 A Context of Global Change

Our work coincides with several worldwide transitions that may profoundly affect the manner in which MIT operates in the twenty-first century. These are well known and much discussed, but worth mentioning briefly to set the scene for our task. The Cold War is over and many countries are joining the world economy. Increasingly, corporations operate on a global rather than national basis. New developments in telecommunications have diminished the importance of distance as a limitation on human interactions. Technology is fueling much of the growth in both mature and emerging economies.

Education is increasingly important in this new world, where a shortage of well-educated people is the key barrier to growth and prosperity. Today, economic prosperity requires professionals who can function creatively in a world of increasing technological complexity, professionals who are literate in science and engineering and who later in their careers can manage and work within complex organizations.

Concurrently, we are experiencing an explosion in computer and communications technologies. They affect us through the World Wide Web, digital satellite television, fiber-optic networks, various forms of communications, and desktop computers that have capabilities unimagined two decades ago. Acknowledging the roles of these technologies, The Economist recently ran a cover story entitled "Distance Is Dead."

The new technologies are affecting how organizations operate. An increasingly large fraction of corporations deal with Internet addresses, fax and phone numbers, and physical street addresses. Telecommuting, teleconferencing, and virtual professional meetings are also increasing in popularity.

Governments are redefining themselves. In the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, federal governments are reducing their roles, dismantling bureaucracies and reducing tax levies while focusing on balancing budgets. As a result of these moves, U.S. federal support for university-based research is expected to decline 20 percent in real dollars by the end of the century. To sustain their research support, research universities like MIT will have to look to the private sector for research funding. At the same time, in this era of increased international competition, corporations are demanding true and measurable value from university partnerships: they are no longer content with philanthropic and expectation-based relationships. Protecting and leveraging an organization's intellectual capital in this global, information-technology-intensive environment is a growing challenge, as is maintaining a well-trained, up-to-date workforce.

3.4 Particular Challenges to Universities

Historically, universities have grown up around great libraries and other centralized stores of recorded knowledge, creating scholarly communities and attracting students and new generations of mature scholars to them. The following trends are now challenging the viability of this venerable model.

As a result of these trends, we expect that the MIT of the twenty-first century will operate in a highly competitive environment, where "business as usual" strategies will not suffice for maintaining its leading position. Pervasive use of advanced information technology may reduce some of the advantages of being at a leading institution, and institutions with particularly attractive locations and climates may become increasingly competitive as other considerations become less important. Nontraditional institutions, such as the projected Western Governors University, are likely to use distance education technology to deliver forms of vocational and professional education to large numbers of students at very low cost. Groups of colleges and universities (particularly smaller ones), and state university systems, may expand their capabilities by forming electronically supported alliances and sharing resources—much as the Claremont colleges have done by colocating their campuses—and thus may become more attractive to the best undergraduates. In addition, various combinations of residential and distance learning experiences will emerge to compete with traditionally structured, on-campus, academic-year residence programs.

3.5 New Opportunities for Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

We observe that some of the most interesting and exciting research and teaching at MIT is crossing traditional disciplinary barriers, and we expect this trend to continue.

In the future, for example, pharmaceuticals will likely be developed by interdisciplinary teams of synthetic organic chemists, X-ray crystallographers, NMR spectroscopists, medicinal chemists, molecular modelers, and biochemists. Today, such collaborations are often difficult, because not all team members communicate and describe their field using the same symbol systems; and frequently mathematics introduces additional barriers. But by employing advanced visualization and simulation technology to provide a fundamental grounding in the physical principles needed for understanding and design in molecular systems, and by doing so in a manner accessible to all students in the molecular sciences, we anticipate that MIT will produce students who can function effectively in these research teams.

Similar approaches and benefits can be identified in many domains. By using visualization and simulation to provide a common language for cross-disciplinary collaborative efforts, and by using the power of fast and inexpensive computation to remove the drudgery from exploration of ideas, we can open up exciting new educational vistas.

3.6 Relating Technological Innovation to Educational Goals

Some take the view that technological innovation will drive educational change—perhaps forgetting that, in practice new technologies often have unintended adverse consequences. Others suggest that strategies for implementing new educational technology should be guided by educational first principles—perhaps equally guilty of forgetting that these are not as well known as we would like and that the required technological means do not necessarily appear conveniently on demand.

Maybe this is just a version of the old argument between technological determinists and social constructionists (which will not be settled by the deliberations of this council). We raise it here because it is often the focus of discussions about changes such as the ones we propose. In developing our recommendations, we have not succumbed to either extreme, believing that both forces should be considered together.

After all, MIT encompasses many different motivations for pursuing advanced educational technology, and many different styles for doing so. Some faculty members have immediate, pressing instructional problems that they need to solve. Some feel a responsibility to be sure that we are getting the best possible payoffs from the large ongoing investments that we make in hardware, software, and telecommunications. Some see opportunities to pursue new educational markets and generate revenue by doing so. Some have promising new technologies that they want to apply. And some have broad educational visions that they believe can be advanced by the appropriate application of new technology. We will be best served by respecting this diversity and harnessing the energies that emerge in these different ways.

4. PURPOSE

4.1 MIT's General Goals

We assume the following primary goals for MIT in the twenty-first century:

In setting these goals we are not asserting that our community as currently constituted is perfect—just that we should not automatically expand it because technology allows it. Such extensions should be undertaken only if they enhance our uniqueness.

Our preoccupation with uniqueness is neither a declaration of arrogance nor a lament for preserving the status quo. It is a call for creative change while sticking to our knitting. As the authors of Made in America discovered, the world has seen many organizations that did not and suffered or perished as a result.

We should realize that this is a very challenging goal; our uniqueness is by no means guaranteed. If we do not take appropriate action, the developing pressures could drive MIT into a position of no longer having the uniqueness it once could boast—with many of its best features having been matched elsewhere.

To translate these broad goals into specific objectives, we need to consider the opportunities and pitfalls ahead. Our approach is based on pursuing the former while avoiding the latter.

4.2 The Promise of Educational Technology

The following are among the more obvious opportunities the development of advanced educational technology will continue to create. (We do not present this as an exhaustive list, but as a sketch of the promise this technology offers.)

4.3 The Pitfalls

There are some potential pitfalls we must avoid. The existence of these pitfalls should not deter us from taking the necessary bold initiatives, but obviously we should not be naive about the possible dangers that they present if we approach the task in the wrong way. And we should take specific steps to minimize the dangers, where necessary, as noted below.

Among the most obvious pitfalls identified and considered by the council are the following:

4.4 Specific Objectives

To achieve the stated goals in light of these opportunities and pitfalls, we suggest setting the following specific objectives:

4.5 The Risk/Reward Balance

We are excited by a vision of MIT entering the twenty-first century as an educational leader in its established areas of expertise and with proven approaches, augmented by pioneering uses of new educational technologies and methods. These new ways of carrying out instruction and research appear to be so revolutionary that they may lead us to change both our established approaches and our educational clientele. The promising technologies include: formation of educational communities that span space and time; access to unlimited vistas of information; extensive use of simulation, helpful aids, and related tools; and automation of routine "brain work." Translated into educational objectives, they may spell out higher-quality, faster and less costly learning made possible by new educational aids that combine stored and continuously updated knowledge along with new opportunities for apprenticeship and instruction.

As exciting as the terrain ahead seems, much remains unproven, which suggests that we should be cautious. But the conservative alternative, which is to wait for the proof, is tantamount to surrendering our aspiration for leadership in this area. Instead, our objective should be to experiment on a scale substantial enough to help us discover the new and effective approaches that we believe lie ahead.

The risk/reward balance that we propose toward that end is reflected in our recommendations.

4.6 Implementation Philosophy and Strategy

Discussing of the diverse and sometimes contentious issues surrounding our charge led us to conclude that these objectives can best be accomplished, in the MIT tradition, by pursuing experiments within certain predefined categories and by investing in the minimal shared infrastructure and tools needed to support a variety of creative, entrepreneurial efforts—not by attempting to impose a top-down, detailed master plan. We want the diversity, complexity, and creativity of London or Paris, not the bureaucratic sterility of Brasilia or Canberra.

At the same time, we want to ensure that we have enough of a framework and sufficient shared conventions and approaches in place to propel us beyond the laissez-faire level to an environment where progress and leadership are catalyzed with speed and resolve. The extraordinary recent success of the Internet and the World Wide Web as shared standards demonstrates that such an approach is feasible, and can allow a large number of individual efforts to create an integrated larger whole.

To pursue this approach, we should do the following:

In the following four sections we make detailed recommendations within the framework of this general implementation strategy.

5. RECOMMENDATIONS

Following from the foregoing discussion, and in accordance with the proposed goals and objectives, the council's principal recommendations are as follows:

RECOMMENDATION 1:

MIT should undertake an ambitious five-year project that will make the Institute the recognized leader in the creation and effective application of advanced educational technology and that will create an exportable model for higher education.

To accomplish this ambitious goal, we will need to take some specific actions. These are specified in the following pages.

RECOMMENDATION 2:

Pursue educational experiments in a few carefully chosen areas, which are initially as follows:

As a starting point, we suggest the following educational objectives and questions as the focus of the experiments:

We recognize that these questions are difficult to answer and they are not the only ones. A significant part of the proposed project should be an ongoing effort to continuously assess the questions to be asked and the areas to be probed. The recommended project differs from Athena in this regard—that is, in its pursuit of carefully chosen areas of experimentation and in its consideration of associated educational objectives and questions. Indeed, our experience with Project Athena has been a key motivation in our recommendation of this approach.

Answering these questions even partially will help us assess how extensively we should proceed along certain strategic directions, in particular:

RECOMMENDATION 3:

Create an upgraded and extended campus in which physical spaces, electronic tools, and infrastructure are closely integrated and mutually supportive.

The MIT campus currently provides architectural settings for a wide variety of large group, small group, one-to-one, and individual scholarly activities. Among these are lecture halls, classrooms and seminar rooms, laboratories, design studios, project spaces, faculty offices, library reading rooms and carrels, dormitory rooms, study lounges, and informal settings such as cafes. Some of these will have virtual equivalents in a more electronic MIT. Some may see their roles diminish, grow, or transform. All of them could potentially become interface points—places where information is captured and converted to digital form, and where it is received and displayed to support educational activities.

This means that the configurations and equipment of MIT's physical facilities must change to accommodate the new demands. This cannot be accomplished immediately, but the stock of facilities can be transformed over time as existing facilities are renovated, and as new facilities are constructed. Some of the key considerations that should guide this transformation process are outlined below.

3.1. Provide universal on-campus access.

If educational technology is to play the central role that we envision, it must be ubiquitously available on campus. In other words, we should make a clear commitment that within three years every workspace at MIT has—using whatever combination of wired and wireless technology turns out to be most appropriate—a high-speed network connection.

This requires action at several levels. First, we must plan to have the network backbone reach to every zone and building on campus—including ones that require difficult links beneath roads, and so on. Second, we must assure adequate distribution within buildings. Third, at the level of office layout and furniture selection, we need to get connections to every desktop and workbench.

Retrofitting existing buildings is the most difficult and expensive way to accomplish this. When buildings are renovated, however, it is usually relatively easy to incorporate cabling and drops. And it is straightforward to accomplish this in the design of new buildings. It is therefore absolutely crucial to require proper provision for network access in all renovation and construction projects from now on.

It is very likely that network technologies and media will change over time, so designs to accommodate cabling and drops must provide for easy access and for easy removal and replacement of cables.

We should not assume that all (or even most) network drops will have workstations or personal computers permanently attached to them. We expect that faculty, staff, and students will make increasing use of laptop computers and other portable, personal devices, and that they will want to be able to make network connections anywhere, anytime, to carry out their work. (This has implications of course not only for the design of the physical space but also for the design and management of the network itself.)

We are aware that a commitment to universal on-campus access within a short time frame is a major one, and not to be undertaken lightly. We believe, however, that this commitment is essential. If there are pockets of space that are not connected, we will divide the MIT community into "haves" and "have-nots."

3.2. Create people-centered spaces.

In the early days of electronic computing, computers were large, delicate, expensive devices. They required precisely controlled environments, raised floors, and, frequently, elaborate physical security. Thus spaces were designed around the needs of computers, and the people who occupied these spaces just had to accommodate to the conditions as best they could. Although this still may be the case for "backroom" devices such as servers and switches, it is certainly not true for most user machines. These are now small, robust, designed to fit into everyday working environments, able to operate over relatively wide ranges of climatic and lighting conditions, and capable of being made acceptably secure in much less obtrusive ways. We no longer have to design workspaces around the needs of computers, and we should not. We should aim to create people-centered workspaces, with natural light and air where possible, and fit the computers in to those.

In the past, as well, there were good reasons to cluster computers in specialized areas where the necessary environmental conditions could readily be provided, where security could easily be maintained, where hardware maintenance could most efficiently be performed, and where supervision was easiest. Now, there are far fewer reasons, and we should rely much less on the strategy (an important one for Athena) of creating clusters. Instead, we should make sure that places where students naturally want to come together to learn from each other and to socialize are well provided with network access points and machines.

This represents a real cultural shift. It may not be immediately popular with those who have grown up with the old ways, or (naturally enough) with those whose management and maintenance tasks are made more complex by greater decentralization. But it is a shift in the right direction, and it sends the right message. We need an environment in which people and their educational activities clearly come first, and in which network access and sophisticated computational capabilities are unobtrusively available anywhere.

3.3. Update audiovisual systems.

If the proposed new infrastructure is to have the desired effect on instruction, it must be integrated fully with audiovisual capabilities in lecture halls, classrooms, and other presentation spaces. Increasingly, presentations will be made directly from Web pages, Powerpoint, and the like, rather than from overheads and 35mm slides.

Consider, for example, the use of color images in teaching architecture and the history of art. Typically, instructors use a hundred or so images in a class session. They must find them (usually discovering that some of those that they need are missing) and check them out of the slide library, sort them into the desired sequence, then return them after the class is finished. There is no opportunity to vary the sequence or introduce new images if the class takes an unexpected turn, and it is logistically difficult for students to review the set of images after the class. If high-quality digital images can be served to a classroom over a sufficiently fast link, however, most of these difficulties are overcome. No image is ever unavailable, sequences can be stored for future reuse, random access to the entire image database becomes possible, and students can conveniently review the material anywhere, at any later time. The effect is not just greater convenience (although that is very welcome in itself) but of allowing a mode of teaching and learning that is fundamentally more flexible, responsive, and effective.

Provision for network-integrated, audiovisual capabilities should therefore be a fundamental requirement in teaching space renovations and new construction. The basic requirements are as follows:

In large, frequently used teaching spaces, it makes sense to build in permanently most of these capabilities. In smaller, less frequently used spaces, portable devices may suffice. Large image servers, available twenty-four hours a day, will support this new approach.

3.4. Develop electronic interaction spaces.

Increasingly, teaching spaces will be used not only for electronic presentation but also for electronically mediated interaction through videoconferencing and shared software environments of various kinds. There are several different cases of this, with different architectural requirements, as follows:

The electronic technology for such interaction changes rapidly, so there is a danger that lecture and seminar rooms built around it could quickly become expensive dinosaurs. This danger can be minimized by employing removable "plug-in" rather than "built-in" wiring and equipment as much as possible.

3.5. Rethink dormitory rooms.

Dormitory rooms of the future (and associated social spaces) will not only have to provide network connections, they will also need to be designed to accommodate new styles of work. Desks, chairs, and lighting must be designed to the requirements of extensive computer work. For desktop video interaction, there will be a need for appropriate acoustic conditions, face lighting, clear backgrounds, and provision for maintaining privacy. And spaces and equipment must be designed to minimize disturbance when roommates are working in close proximity to each other.

3.6. Integrate electronic displays and interaction points in public places.

Traditionally, public places have provided opportunities to display notices, posters, informational exhibits, art works, and so on. No doubt this will continue, but we should also pursue exciting new opportunities to perform many of these functions more effectively by integrating electronic displays and interaction points in public spaces. The opportunities presented by high-traffic areas such as the Building 7 Lobby, library lobbies, and the Infinite Corridor are particularly attractive.

3.7. Emphasize high design quality.

The success of the proposed new electronic/architectural environment will depend not only on its technical capabilities but also on the sensitivity with which the design responds to the needs of the MIT community, and the extent to which design decisions create a sense of a unique and exciting place. It will be imperative to involve the best available architectural, graphic, and software design talent.

RECOMMENDATION 4:

Create the MII—a high-performance MIT Information Infrastructure that is compatible with the Internet and the Web, that builds on MIT's strengthened on-campus and off-campus networks, that supports an extended MIT community, that provides useful shared services, and that encourages diverse initiatives by MIT's various units.

It is urgent that we move forward, as quickly as possible, with an MIT Information Infrastructure—the MII—that supports the objectives we have outlined. We might be tempted to wait for the Internet and the World Wide Web to evolve to a state where they could satisfy most of our needs; in practice, however, this will be far too slow and would rob us of the opportunity to jump out ahead and take a leading role. This is why we need to make a significant investment in building our own infrastructure.

Eventually, the world that we shall be building now will be commonplace. At that point, our MII and the world's information infrastructures will merge in technological capability, but not in the nature and content of the accumulated services that will be uniquely ours.

We recommend the following steps toward implementing the MII as expeditiously as possible:

4.1. Adopt and enhance a Web-centric MII.

We recommend a speedy and aggressive effort to create a shared information infrastructure that will underlie the many MIT unit and individual educational efforts that we envision. The Web/Internet infrastructure with its 40 million users is already useful toward that end, and it seems well poised to evolve over the long term toward an information infrastructure with the requisite shared tools for our future needs. Several problems, however, stand between this infrastructure as it is today and our aspirations: slow speed and inability to handle images and video so essential to collaboration and design; absence of shared tools (e.g., for groupwork, telework, authoring, finding and organizing information); incompatibility with many digital library resources, and absence of MIT educational resources such as Web-ready classroom and laboratory equipment and shared services for our community.

The infrastructure we propose, the MII, bridges these shortcomings and makes available to the MIT educational community capabilities that two decades hence will be available to everyone. We firmly believe that having tomorrow's tools available today is essential to MIT's leadership in the important area of educational technology.

A Web-Internet-based infrastructure does not mean that we are restricted to use only these particular protocols. In some videoconferencing situations, for example, other protocols will be necessary, or no protocols at all—just a phone line. The intent of this recommendation is to ensure that we do not reinvent the wheel, by establishing yet a new protocol; we want to focus the bulk of our activities on existing popular protocols that can be maximally shared across the world. As technologies evolve, it is possible that other standards become widespread, even replacing the Web-Internet approach. The flexibility that we call for in the steering committee, below, is aimed at handling such eventualities.

4.2. Strengthen the MII campus network.

Greater performance, more access points in classrooms, offices, libraries, student residences, and campus buildings, and support for teleconferencing are examples of the changes that are needed in this part of the MII.

In addition, before these new additions are introduced, we recommend that all Athena resources undergo a transition from their current state to where they shall be viewed as being fully on the MII. This means that upgrades and changes will be needed in the underlying network hardware and software to augment performance to "first-class" MII level. Athena workstations should be show-windows of the MII's latest and best capabilities.

Furthermore we wish to ensure that people with portable machines (PCs, PDAs, lap-tops and their successors) will be able to "plug" their units into an adequate number of wired and wireless sockets throughout campus, for classes and meetings. The goal behind this recommendation is that members of our community should be able to use their own machines on the MII and should come up as close to first-class MII status as their machines permit.

4.3. Strengthen the off-campus MII network.

Provide high-performance services to faculty and student residences and to partners and collaborators in greater Boston. This would require individual arrangements with nearby towns, NYNEX, and others—not an easy task, but an essential one if we want to live today in tomorrow's world. In addition, we should provide high-bandwidth connectivity to partners, collaborators, alumni, students at a distance, future students, and MIT locations off campus both nationally and outside the United States. This will require additional arrangements with long-distance carriers, local phone companies, and foreign PTTs.

These first steps may well require the use of a firm under subcontract to or in a partnership relation with MIT, whose sole purpose will be to build the MII. There are several technologies that can be used to provide the underlying communications for the MII, for example, telephony (via ADSL or ISDN) or with video cable modems. The changing nature of the communications environment will determine the best approach or mixture of approaches to be pursued when this effort is launched. Some will be engineered by us while others will be carried out by carriers.

4.4. Establish and integrate shared MII tools and services.

The Athena computers should become integral resources of the MII. New hardware should be provided in classrooms and common areas. Facilities should be available wherever students and faculty may wish to plug in their personal machines. The MII should also make available to community members a basic set of shared services, tools and means for accessing common knowledge resources, the resources of MIT department/center initiatives, and the offerings of key MIT publication and distribution arms. Indeed, it is this overall collection of new "services" together with a substantially higher performance that will render the MII powerful and useful to our community, beyond today's public Web-Internet baseline.

To summarize, the MII will be part of the current Web-Internet world, except that it will (1) exhibit a substantially higher performance, and (2) possess a new set of hardware and software tools and services. The power of the MII will be felt through its use by MIT community members and designated affiliates for specific educational experiments and uses.

4.5. Provide common MII services.

Whether on campus using Athena computers or their own machines, or whether from home or other distant sites using the remote tentacles of the MII, members of our community should be able to access certain shared services.

On top of the list is the human help that will be provided to people who are trying to use certain systems for the first time, are trying to develop educational materials, or are having any kind of difficulty. This kind of help, as Athena has taught us, is essential to widespread educational experimentation and hence to our future success.

The MII should provide:

These capabilities, even though distributed and "on the Web," should be bound together within a high-utility and "high-image" MIT environment that has a distinctive, attractive look and feel and that provides a sense of belonging to our community—much as distinctive campus buildings have traditionally performed this role. We need the virtual equivalent of Killian Court and the Dome.

4.6. Ensure that the MII encourages diverse initiatives.

Departments, centers, and laboratories, and individual students, faculty, and staff members should feel completely free to pursue educational technology, whether for teaching or research, in whatever ways best suit specific cultures and goals. Of course, if the MII and knowledge resources are as sound and useful as we envision them, we may expect that these will be used as a common denominator for a huge number of individual and MIT unit activities. But such use of shared facilities should be based entirely on supply and demand rather than be legislated. Accordingly, the MII steering and executive groups will need to pay close attention to our community needs as they evolve.

If this is to be more than a pious hope, we must take explicit note of the World Wide Web's successful strategies for encouraging bottom-up creativity, including its grassroots standard setting approaches, and the integration of many independent efforts into a useful whole. And we must provide the tools for individuals and small groups to pursue their own efforts without relying on centralized expertise.

Many of these efforts can and should be technologically straightforward within the common framework that is provided. But to catalyze exciting activity, initial funding should be provided for some cutting-edge, experimental projects.

In view of this free-market approach, our plan takes no further explicit position on what individuals and units should do. We expect that a properly designed MII should allow a huge number of additional machines, resources, services, and links to grow on a completely distributed basis as initiatives take hold and grow concurrently. This distributed activity should dominate MIT's educational technology activities.

4.7. Build the MII to support an extended MIT community.

The MII should be designed and implemented to support not only the on-campus MIT community but also the community that extends beyond the physical boundaries of the campus.

We envision an MIT community of the year 2007 that is defined more by our shared goals and interests than by the geographic boundaries of our campus. This vision includes students of all ages, faculty and staff, and academic, government, and industrial partners. Some may be grouped in regional clusters (MIT Europe and MIT Asia), while others may be located in distributed organizational, home, and mobile sites. Regardless of their location or affiliation, the members of this extended MIT community will engage in a broad range of educational activities that span collaborative analysis, design, and construction projects; exchanges of scholarly communications; consulting and problem solving; knowledge updates; lectures; tutorials; team efforts; certification; and much more.

The MII should be staged to reach the following people in roughly the following priorities:

A key to successfully creating this extended community is intracommunity equity—meaning that the educational activities pursued remotely should be as similar as possible to the same activities pursued locally. This goal is grounded on the desire to make equal educational and technical resources available to all members of the MIT community regardless of their physical location. There should be no second-class citizens. Thus, if we have a 10-megabits per second network for doing design on campus, we should ensure that this same capability extends to our distant partners who will be reviewing our designs. We realize that this goal cannot be met in its entirety, easily or soon. But we believe it to be a worthy compass heading that we should follow if we are to build a worthwhile extended MIT community—one that is truly a community.

Another important consideration involves security. Some of our activities will be wide open, reachable by anyone. Others will have to be restricted for contractual and other reasons. In delivering services, we will therefore need a flexible approach to security.

RECOMMENDATION 5:

Adopt a transition strategy that preserves as much as possible of the best features of Athena in the new environment to support a high-performance, media-rich, distributed educational technology.

5.1. MIT should assess whether the current number, mix and configuration of public workstations best serves the MIT community.

In particular, the declining cost and expanding population of privately owned, non-Athena workstations, the expanded capabilities and software available for personal computers, and the potential for high speed networking to all members of the MIT community (whether off or on campus) may lead to alternative configurations of hardware and software that better serves MIT's educational mission. The growing interest in using applications that are computationally intensive may require the availability of more specialized equipment in public clusters. Parts of the continuously evolving environment will be "publicly" owned, parts will be "departmentally" owned, and parts will be "privately" owned. We must also recognize the heterogeneity and decentralization of the MIT academic-computing environment. In all cases the strategies employed for transition must include incentives and education to encourage the use of adequate and appropriately configured machines to take maximum advantage of the MII.

We will need to appropriately reconfigure the environment to support specialized computing, base-line productivity applications and personal computing by including some combination of the following elements:

5.2. MIT must make available the resources to transition to a new educational computing environment while keeping the current system fully functional.

We should dedicate resources to effect the rapid transition of the Athena environment to extend the advantages of the current architecture (serial reusability, suite of tools and services, security, scalability and efficient centralized management) to support different platforms (in particular Windows and Macintoshes) and to provide distributed control (islands of control) to allow customization and modifications in particular environments without affecting the larger environment. Moving toward this end will include major development work—modifications to the centralized configuration management database (Moira) and network management. It will also involve examining key areas of reliance on technologies such as AFS (the software and protocols that are used by Athena to provide a secure, ubiquitous file store that can be accessed throughout the Athena system) with a view to reducing our reliance on systems that are not widely supported in the computer industry while moving toward a client-server technology.

Now that computing has become integrated into the fabric of the MIT community, any transition to a different environment cannot be allowed to disrupt the ongoing, stable operational system. For a period, there may be a need to sustain two distinct computing environments: the stable, Athena environment now relied upon and whatever new system is brought on line. In the beginning it is inevitable that the newer technologies will be less reliable than our existing ones.

5.3. We should develop strategic alliances with technology providers and other educational institutions.

These partnerships should focus our resources on new problems of importance to MIT that are not already being dealt with in commercial products but are necessary for the performance characteristics, reliability and robustness sought in the environment. In short, we need to avoid "reinventing the wheel".

5.4 Put in place the organizational alignments and mechanisms needed to ensure the best use of advanced technology for faculty and students.

Taking full educational advantage of the new media rich, technologically intensive environment will require the synergy of expertise and effort available across several groups at MIT.

5.5. A working group comprised of a subset of the Council on Educational Technology, other faculty and key IS representatives should be established to frame the specifications for the renewed Athena environment in terms of technical requirements (servers, clients, protocols) as well as the administrative, financial and organizational arrangements (nature of support, conditions and responsibilities for decentralized control, funding model for sustaining growth) required to implement desired transitions.

We view the report of the Council as the starting point for a major redesign of what we now call the Athena Computing Environment. The process of that redesign must be informed by diverse views of the MIT community. Most importantly, it should be driven by MIT's educational goals, not any particular technological imperative. It must provide a carefully crafted transition from our current computing environment that does not disrupt the educational services we now provide, be economically viable in the long run, and consonant with MIT's goals in the next century.

RECOMMENDATION 6:

Involve the libraries, the MIT Press, and CAES in an integrated strategy to gain the maximum value from MIT's intellectual property through use of the new infrastructure and associated tools and facilities.

Each of these units has its own ongoing efforts to engage advanced educational technology. These should simply be coordinated, as appropriate, with the larger MIT effort.

RECOMMENDATION 7:

Vigorously seek industry and foundation partners.

Many large firms in the platform (hardware and software), pipe (telecommunications, cable, satellite), and content (entertainment, news, advertising) categories are anxious to find new ways of converting emerging information technologies into useful business applications. Education is potentially a large market in itself, and exploration of it is likely to generate ideas for other markets. So these firms are likely to have a real interest in becoming sponsors of the proposed initiative.

We believe that either a small partnership of three to five key players or a larger consortium of one hundred companies, or a combination of both, could be formed to sponsor the total cost of the plan. Using Project Athena as a guide, our new plan may cost in the vicinity of $100 to $150 million over a three to five-year period.

Opportunities to gain the necessary sponsorship and effectively pursue an initiative of this magnitude will not be repeated. The time to move is now. We should aim, at the end of three to five years, for MIT to be the leader in educational uses of new technologies—to the benefit of our sponsors and ourselves.

RECOMMENDATION 8:

Establish an organization for the project consisting of a steering group, an executive project implementation unit, and an external advisory committee.

The subrecommendations for the three groups are as follows:

The above organizations will establish subgroups and subunits as necessary and will follow the judgment of their leaders to achieve their objectives and to carry out their processes. The council does not wish to overspecify these important organizational activities but offers the following suggestions.

To ensure the right combination of responsiveness to the MIT community's needs with technical and design expertise, we should consider creating a broadly representative client subgroup with responsibility for articulating educational requirements, plus a small and highly skilled design group, headed by the executive director, with responsibility for proposing and eventually implementing specific solutions. The process envisioned here is similar to that of designing very complex buildings and urban projects.

Each of the experimental areas will require careful management. We should consider establishing similar subgroups for each of the individual experimental areas, linked to the overall project group, with objectives and processes for selecting experiments and for modifying the educational experiment areas.

APPENDIX 1: COUNCIL MEMBERSHIP

Co-Chair: William J. Mitchell, wjm@mit.edu
Co-Chair: Michael L. Dertouzos, mld@mit.edu

Harold Abelson, hal@mit.edu
John W. Belcher, jwb@space.mit.edu
Timothy J. Berners-Lee, timbl@w3.org
Peter Child, child@mit.edu
Peter S. Donaldson, psdlit@mit.edu
Julie Dorsey, dorsey@mit.edu
Anne L. Drazen, adrazen@sloan.mit.edu
M. S. Vijay Kumar, vkumar@mit.edu
Richard Larson, rclarson@mit.edu
Steven R. Lerman, lerman@mit.edu
Nicholas Negroponte, nicholas@media.mit.edu
Alex Pentland, sandy@media.mit.edu
Bruce Tidor, tidor@mit.edu
Rosalind H. Williams, rhwill@mit.edu
John S. Wilson, jswilson@mit.edu
Ann J. Wolpert, awolpert@mit.edu

APPENDIX 2: OVERVIEW OF ATHENA

The product of eight years of research and development, the Athena Computing Environment provides computing resources to over 16,000 users across the MIT campus through a vast system of 1300 computers in more than 40 clusters, private offices, and machine rooms, all connected to MIT's campus-wide network.

Athena users have access to software to help them write papers, create graphs, analyze data, communicate with their colleagues, play games, register for courses, and perform countless other tasks, as well as access to software designed specifically for classwork.

Athena has pervaded campus life. At last count, all of MIT undergraduates and 90% of MIT graduate students had Athena accounts. On a typical day, over 6,000 different users access their personal files and various software packages on the system.

The Athena Computing Environment provides widely distributed, client-server computing for education at MIT, with a focus on undergraduate education. Access to central Athena facilities is available to MIT students, faculty, and on-campus staff at no cost to the user. Access to departmental Athena facilities is generally more limited, but consistent with the principles and ends described below.

Athena therefore is designed and operated to maximize the availability of computing for education at reasonable cost to the Institute. MIT-wide optimization requires considerable standardization of systems, and a distributed client-server environment configured to minimize support requirements and downtime. The MIT Information Systems organization (IS) follows one overarching principle in allocating Athena resources: the Athena Computing Environment should contribute to the continuing improvement of education at MIT. Among opportunities for educational improvement, IS attempts to support those that achieve as many of the following four ends as possible:


The Athena Computing Environment includes about 700 workstations for general and departmental use, about 300 private workstations on faculty, teaching-assistant, and staff desks, and about 100 servers. It is supported at an approximate annual cost of $6 million in MIT general funds. These funds are used for staff, software, hardware maintenance and hardware renewal.

Athena uses the distributed client/server model extensively. Only a few essential pieces of system software are actually kept on the Athena workstations—everything else is delivered and maintained remotely. This greatly reduces the burden on the local workstation, and the local machine is consequently freed up to apply almost all of its computing power to the specific applications being run. More significantly, the client/server model allows centrally-managed services to be concentrated so that a relatively small staff can support the system. Client and server workstations are widely distributed geographically, and extensive security of software on workstations in Athena clusters is not needed. For example, none of the Athena clusters has assigned attendants, but when a machine gets totally disabled, it is typically restored and rebooted almost instantaneously. There are fewer than 20 people who operate and watch over the entire Athena environment of 1,000 client workstations. Athena's design also features the elements that contribute to its robustness and usefulness as an educational computing environment. In particular, the uniform use of the TCP/IP protocols, the X Window system, and systems security through Kerberos allow an extensive installation of networked Athena workstations to have a common interface regardless of architecture, enabling them to share programs, data, and a variety of network services.

The Athena Computing Environment has seven key components:


A subset of Athena-like services, especially the network Commons and selected commercial software, is available to personal computers and workstations connected to MITnet, which extends to all undergraduate dormitories and independent living groups, to all graduate housing on campus, and to most offices and other workspaces at the Institute.

Hardware Renewal Strategy

As is to be expected with rapidly advancing technology, Athena workstations, like other computers, start falling behind the current performance/price ratio very soon. Current software often works poorly or becomes unavailable for older equipment, even when that equipment continues to function perfectly well with its original software. Moreover, annual maintenance costs rise sharply as workstations age, often approaching half the cost of new workstations. For these reasons, the goal is to have no Athena workstations more than four years old. As Athena workstations are retired, new workstations replace them. Each spring IS surveys the market, consults with faculty, evaluates hardware and software costs, explores support requirements, and identifies workstations suitable for the Athena Computing Environment.

Software Available on Athena

The Athena system presents its users with a large library of ready-to-use tools and application packages, including specialized software for courses, Internet access, and programming, as well as general software for typical user tasks such as document preparation and electronic communication. All of the software is available to any user logged in at a workstation in an Athena cluster. An increasing number of Athena applications are becoming accessible to users accessing Athena indirectly (e.g., from a dorm room or living group, or from a campus office).

In general, IS attempts to provide centrally on Athena any commercial tool software that is educationally useful for education in more than one department. The current suite of commercial tools includes document preparation, symbolic and numerical mathematics, statistics and graphing, design and graphics, and reference. IS makes a more limited suite of commercial software available for students' personal computers connected to MITnet. IS provides limited help with licensing, installation, and sometimes central storage for curriculum materials and commercial software used only within a single department.

Athena capabilities (in the form of network enabled Athena workstations) have been installed in several classrooms so that educational software may be incorporated directly into the teaching of a subject. Athena's effectiveness as a comprehensive environment to support education is enhanced by resources beyond the physical installations and the set of core services. This includes software and services such as:

Major Limitations of Athena

The current Athena system has served the community well for more than a decade and has clearly demonstrated the tremendous value and even greater potential of using high-end technologies for education and for research. The following shifts in technology and the expectations of our faculty and staff need to be accounted for in planning any transition:

MIT's plan for its information infrastructure should retain the strengths of the current Athena system: relatively low cost of operations per user, widespread availability, an orientation towards supporting MIT's educational mission and a cadre of talented staff to help select tools and develop educationally valuable materials. However, it should, also add new capabilities and functionality.

Among the most crucial limitations of Athena, as we look towards the future, are:

APPENDIX 3: MIT'S PRODUCTION AND PUBLICATION CAPABILITIES

MIT currently produces publications in a wide variety of modes and formats. It has established and continues to develop mechanisms—both formal and informal—for collecting, evaluating, and distributing intellectual property. And its libraries, archives, and museums play the role of preserving, indexing, managing, and consulting on the use of it.

Informal Products

MIT faculty members and students produce a huge amount of intellectual property in quick, informal ways—in the form of course outlines, spoken performances, chalk-and-talk, demonstrations, lecture notes, reading lists, compilations of readings, laboratory notebooks, problem sets, examinations, student papers and designs, theses, and, so on. Much of this is of great value, but it may go unrecorded; if it is recorded, it is often done so in rough and impermanent ways, and it is rarely systematically compiled and indexed for wider, longer-term use.

The World Wide Web has very quickly done much to change this by providing a fast and inexpensive way to mount materials online. Furthermore, the associated search engines and indexing services provide a remarkably effective, low-cost way of sifting through vast amounts of this material to find exactly what you need at a particular moment. So it is now commonplace to find course materials, drafts of papers, and the like on the Web, and informal Web publication is likely to play an increasingly vital role.

As consumers of this sort of information, members of the MIT community will need access to the most powerful available browsers, search engines, selection and filtering software, and so on. Even more important, as producers, they will need convenient server access and authoring tools that make it very easy to capture material, format it, apply any desired access controls, and mount it online, under security if appropriate.

So far, educational material informally mounted on the Web has mainly consisted of text and scanned images. In the future, however, the growing sophistication of the Web environment, increased server capacity, and increased bandwidth should allow a much wider range of materials to be captured, preserved, and distributed in this way—in particular, videos of lectures, laboratory demonstrations, and industrial processes, simulations and animations, and interactive games and virtual experiments. This will create a demand for widely distributed and easy-to-use videorecording capabilities, for convenient editing and authoring tools, for server capacity on a much larger scale (plus the ability to backup the servers), and for enough bandwidth to move this material around without diminishing its quality or generating unacceptable delays. If this demand can be satisfied, the payoff will be a growing informal archive that allows students to resolve schedule clashes by downloading videos of lectures and other events that they cannot attend live, that allows revisiting important experiences, that functions as an ongoing history of MIT's day-to-day intellectual activity, and that provides a source to mine for information and inspiration.

Primary Sources

A key purpose of the Web, as it was originally conceived, was to provide convenient online access to primary scientific data. This remains important to researchers, and as Web access becomes ubiquitous, it can play an increasingly prominent educational role. Instead of relying on limited textbook examples, instructors can—where appropriate—illustrate concepts by operating on archives of primary data, and set students to work on problems and projects based on these data. This is a potentially effective way of bringing the excitement of the research lab into the classroom.

These primary sources can take different forms in different disciplines—experimental data in the physical and life sciences, statistical data in the social sciences, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Dataset, satellite images and GIS databases in urban planning and civil engineering, comprehensive text and document libraries such as the TLG in the humanities, online slide libraries in art and architectural history, film libraries for theater and film studies, libraries of CAD models in architectural and mechanical engineering design, and so on.

Where these primary databases are relatively small, where they do not require a lot of ongoing maintenance, and where the intellectual property issues can be resolved, they can be maintained on servers at MIT. Where these conditions are not met, these databases are more likely to be maintained at remote sites—typically those of the original producers or of specialist maintenance organizations. To make use of them, we will need to have effective ways of identifying members of our community, managing our pointers (something better than hotlists of URLs) and having connections fast enough to make convenient remote access possible—a particular problem in the case of huge, graphics-intensive databases such as the Visible Human.

Formally Published Teaching Materials

Universities consume prodigious quantities of teaching materials. In the past, they have often taken the form of printed textbooks, monographs, compilations, handbooks, and reference works. In recent years, so-called course packs—customized readers compiled from multiple published sources—have become increasingly popular with faculty. Students have purchased their own copies, consulted copies in the library, and/or borrowed copies from the library. To a lesser extent, there have been instructional films, videos, interactive CD-ROM and audio recordings; these have had particularly important niches in professional and extended education, in teaching foreign languages, and in music and theater. There is growing interest in publishing teaching materials in the form of CD and online multimedia productions. It is too soon to say how rapidly, and to what extent, digital multimedia instructional materials will supplant print-on-paper, but there is little doubt that they will ultimately play an extremely important role.

Universities also participate extensively in the production of teaching materials; faculty members write and consult on textbooks, contribute to reference works, write monographs, and sometimes participate in film, video, and multimedia educational productions. Over time, fairly standard arrangements have been worked out for doing this. Typically, faculty members write the material and publishers provide editorial and design services, manage production, and handle distribution and sales. The publishers create brand names, take most of the risk, and get most of the profit. Authors get royalties. In most (although not all) cases, universities do not directly profit at all.

With the shift to digital media, we must consider the question of whether the traditional arrangements still make sense. Should we attempt to take a direct role in financing, producing, and distributing digital multimedia productions? Should we create the multimedia equivalent of a university press? Should we form strategic alliances with major media corporations to produce and distribute ambitious digital multimedia productions? If we were to form such alliances, who would control the resulting intellectual property, and how would faculty members be rewarded for their participation? Should we become a national and international educational materials brand name? Can we reduce costs to students and to libraries by taking a production and distribution role?

It is unlikely that we will find easy or quick answers to these questions. But it does seem clear that an increasing number of faculty members will want to be involved in producing digital multimedia educational materials. They will need more than desks and word processors for this. They will require facilities, tools, and support staff to shoot video, record audio, produce sophisticated graphics—both still and motion—create storyboards, and edit multimedia material. If we do not want all of this activity to shift to off-campus studio and postproduction locations, we will need to provide some level of professional-level facilities on campus or nearby, and we will need to generate income to pay for these facilities.

Refereed Scholarly and Research Journals

Refereed scholarly and research journals have traditionally performed the tasks of disseminating original work produced by faculty members and graduate students and of creating permanent archives of this work. Editors, editorial boards, and publishers take responsibility for the quality of content—thus providing some level of guarantee that this content is reliable and useful. Because contents are refereed, and space is usually scarce, publication records in respected refereed journals play a crucial role in promotion and tenure processes.

Journals are essential, but the problems of traditional print journals are notorious and increasingly troublesome. The process of getting a journal paper into print is usually a slow one, which creates a tremendous problem in fast-moving fields—so much so that these fields tend to find alternative distribution channels. Subscriptions are increasingly expensive, which is creating a crisis for libraries as, simultaneously, journals proliferate and budgets diminish. And from a research university's viewpoint, the business model seems wrong; we pay faculty members, who write papers and provide them at no cost to journal publishers, who then sell them back to our libraries at very high cost!

Online journals potentially provide an extremely attractive way of overcoming many of these problems. Although they may do little to speed the refereeing process, they eliminate many steps in the production process, allow paper-by-paper rather than issue-by-issue production, make distribution much quicker and easier, and reduce the need for shelf space. Thus, in principle, they can provide a quicker and cheaper means of distribution than print. Furthermore, they lend themselves to efficient, automatic indexing and searching, they allow cross-linkage of content, and they can potentially be accessed from any workstation anywhere—they are never checked out.

Given that libraries are highly motivated to find ways to overcome their problems with journals, and given that journal publishers are highly motivated to find ways to survive in the digital electronic era, it seems likely that we will eventually see a massive shift away from paper and toward the online distribution of articles. But some difficult issues will have to be settled first. Libraries with major journal collections will have to attend to new sets of issues: to ensure that electronic archives of back issues are secure, stable, and affordable; to raise the alarm if the rights of educational fair use in the classroom and for nonprofit research are threatened in the digital environment; to manage pointers and finding aids rather than bulky inventories of physical objects. The functions of editing, designing, refereeing, and marketing will still have to be performed, and publishers will have to find ways of paying for these functions out of reduced gross revenues. Servers will have to be managed—either by publishers or libraries—and this will require skills not traditionally possessed by these organizations.

Whatever the difficulties, online journals are already appearing. They will be an important part of our future research and teaching activities, and we must have effective ways to contribute material to them, manage them, and access their contents.

Role of the MIT Press

The MIT Press is MIT's principal (although by no means only) publishing arm. Traditionally, it has published monographs, reference works, journals, and trade books on subjects related to the core concerns of MIT. It has particularly strong lists in architecture and visual arts, economics, linguistics, cognitive science, and computer science. It has wide distribution and a well-known, highly respected, international brand name.

Among the leading university presses, MIT has probably been the most aggressive and innovative in pursuing the possibilities of online electronic publishing. It has pioneered the publication of online books with City of Bits, Moths to the Flame, and Hal's Legacy. It has a growing list of online journals, including The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science and Journal of Contemporary Neurology. And it is embarking on a very ambitious project to develop CogNet—a comprehensive Web site to serve the cognitive science community.

The MIT Press has growing experience and expertise in electronic publishing, a developed marketing capability, and a valuable brand name under which to market electronic as well as traditional products. Its management has expressed eagerness to participate actively in Institute-wide initiatives to take the lead in applying advanced educational technology, and the press is very well positioned to do so.

Role of the Center for Advanced Educational Services

The Center for Advanced Educational Services has its roots in video and multimedia, and in extended education, rather than print publication for the research and scholarly communities. As such, it brings a different and complementary set of capabilities to the task of capturing, managing, and distributing MIT's intellectual property.

CAES defines its role as one of creating and distributing educational products and services worldwide. It focuses its production and distribution efforts on interactive multimedia, the Internet, the Web, videoconferencing, satellite TV, and MIT Cable, as well as more mature delivery mechanisms such as videotapes and books. It has studio and editing facilities and associated staff. It incorporates an applied research arm, the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) that investigates the uses of new technologies in education. And it regularly offers nondegree short courses to industry audiences.

CAES has MIT's largest concentration of video and multimedia production facilities and staff, it is modernizing these facilities, and it has an entrepreneurial mission to provide these facilities to the MIT community and to promote distance learning.

APPENDIX 4: MIT'S LIBRARIES

The MIT libraries envision a future world of scholarship and research that provides seamless access to the world's relevant literature and data from any individual's desktop. While faculty at MIT are deeply knowledgeable about the sources and forms of scholarly information of their own disciplines, and indeed will usually have built personal libraries and human networks of unique and awesome strength, interdisciplinary interests often require that faculty delve into areas of information with which they may not be so familiar. Students and junior faculty will lack the in-depth personal libraries and contacts of senior faculty, and will inevitably rely on the judgment and expertise of others as they gather and evaluate needed information. It is important to remember that any individual's need for and use of information will be a function of the dominant literature of the discipline, the nature of the research specialty, career stage and research training, access to "local" resources (this once meant physically local, but it now means accessible locally—as in full-text databases), and availability of human helpers and agents. The personal productivity of individual faculty and enhanced productivity of research teams remains the driving force behind the demand for locally accessible information resources.

The availability of a world-class networked environment, especially one that readily supports a wide variety of formats, platforms, and media types, is essential to the fulfillment of a vision of enhanced local access to resources in many media. The successful execution of the vision will require MIT to address a number of difficult issues. These issues are common to all large, complex organizations that face the prospect of integrating the digital world into their traditional ways of managing and organizing information. Obviously, any activity in the areas discussed below is as useful in a distance learning or remote campus environment as it is here in Cambridge.

The libraries will focus on four critical issues in this new world:

Each of these four issues has broad interest outside MIT. In addition, industry and higher education alike are intensely interested in understanding how the economics of information change in these new environments, and how the learning experience itself benefits from new technologies.

Endnotes

1. Members of the Council are listed in Appendix 1.
The work of the Council was carried out during the 1995-96 academic calendar.