Undergraduate Educational Commons

To fulfill its mission to advance knowledge and educate students, MIT has undertaken a review of the educational commons — those experiences of learning and discovery that all MIT undergraduates share in common. The Undergraduate Educational Commons (UEC) is a Presidential Task Force charged with reviewing the goals, content, and structure of an MIT undergraduate education and reflecting on how best MIT can fulfill the mission to serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.

Client Need

The task force needed to directly engage the community in a discussion about ideas and issues it had identified to complete its work. They needed a way to share ideas and gather feedback without having frequent meetings. They approached AMPS to talk about a web-based strategy.

Strategy

After listening closely to UEC’s needs, AMPS advised using a weblog — a website on which one person or group posts information and maintains editorial control while inviting comment from others. This solution offered maximum flexibility and interactivity by allowing UEC to easily publish a series of issues to its widely distributed members and reach consensus through comments.

AMPS integrated commercial weblog software into the UEC website and customized it for their purposes. The task force started with a members-only blog and decided to open a second channel to receive comments on specific issue from undergraduate students.

Results

"The students love it!" says Annie McLeod of the Office of the Dean for Undergraduate Education. For a minimal investment, UEC was able to directly engage with its members and community on its existing website, gather a broad range of well-structured feedback and produce first report with recommendations that accurately represented the community’s concerns.