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
Colette, a freshman from California is excited. She had read about haptic V.R. interfaces before coming to MIT but did not expect to see them, let alone use them in her freshman calculus class. Now she is in her dorm room, wearing the goggles, head-mounted display, and haptic gloves she checked out of the library for her homework. Turning on the unit, she finds herself inside a virtual space studying the roof that is the plot of a three-dimensional surface. She has to bend it here and stretch it there to meet certain constraints, as required by her homework assignment. She first tackles the problem experimentally by "pulling" on partial space derivatives, integrating functions, and watching the results, and then in closed form, by developing optimal solutions. Her head is spinning from the effort to reconcile the two approaches. She is not sure she has accomplished the task as well as she could. Never mind. The educational mission has been accomplished. She not only knows intimately about partial derivatives and integration, but she can also feel and practically touch these mathematical operations in her head. It's as if they were still there, right in front of her!
Freshman Electromagnetism
Colette now turns to freshman physics. She brings up a Web browser and goes to the home page of that day's physics lecture, which focused on why a compass needle points north. She first watches a video that shows one of the in-class demonstrations. It had gone past pretty fast in the lecture, and the video clip gives her a chance to go over it until she thoroughly understands the point. She then scans a brief discussion of torques on current loops in magnetic fields—the standard textbook approach to explaining why a compass points north. Although she understands this, she does not have much intuition for it. She then brings up a visualization of the earlier experiment—one that shows both a simulation of the experimental apparatus and computer-generated magnetic field lines superimposed on it. Watching the same experiment in virtual space, where the field lines can be shown explicitly, gives her some intuitive feel for the forces transmitted between the earth and the compass by their magnetic fields. It is like the forces transmitted by rubber bands and strings! It makes more sense now. Finally, she fires up a Java applet that allows her to construct her own magnetic field configurations in real time, based on her own placement of current loops. As part of her homework, she has to find out interactively how to construct the field of the compass and that of the earth by placing currents loops in various positions. In about an hour she has picked up a feel forthe dynamics of electromagnetic fields that would have eluded most students in an earlier era. All of these approaches to explaining the phenomena are embedded in a single hypertext Web page, available to Colette from any place in the world, whether she is in her dorm room, in the library in an Athena cluster, or at home for Thanksgiving break.
Virtual Telescope
Professor Gerry Sussman, who is in his office, and his graduate students, who are in various locations, are using their laptops in what seems to be a conference session. On their screens they all share the output of MIT's virtual telescope, a 2-Terraflops machine located in Tech Square and programmed to simulate the equations of motion of heavenly bodies. On this day the team is exploring the effects of galaxy-galaxy collisions that are difficult to orchestrate in real life.
The Computer Music Laboratory
Clem, a second-year Course 2 major, is completing his assignment for the music fundamentals course. Even though this is his first music class, he is moving confidently among the resources that the new computer music lab offers him. Working first with a CD-ROM, he listens to a Mozart symphony movement while viewing the score and following a structural analysis in real time. He finds the music rather banal. Moving on to his minicomposition project, he uses the new algorithmic composition software to design procedures that generate and play structures modeled after the Mozart symphony movement. Experimenting with different thematic material and listening carefully to the results, he uses the synthesizer keyboard as input to refine the details of his piece. He notices especially the interactions between the procedural sections and his hand-tooled details. Satisfied for the moment, he uses the music editing software to print out the score of his new piece. Returning to the Mozart, he is startled: through his own experiments, Clem now hears the magic of Mozart's details—details that had totally passed him by before. A banal stereotype ("one of those minuets") is becoming a unique, exciting work. Its complexity is amazing, a bit beyond him. He returns to his minicomposition to try again. When finished, Clem sends his completed piece as a sound file to his classmates and his professor. They will exchange comments, compose alternatives, and be prepared for class discussion the next day.
The first major element of our vision is the pursuit of educational experiments such as these. They are made possible by exciting new tools for simulation, visualization, speech understanding, virtual and augmented reality, haptics, and the integration of multiple sensory/effector modalities. For this vision to be realized, we must encourage, explore and ultimately adopt new modes of research and instruction, and we must provide the infrastructure, software tools and other resources needed to support these endeavors.
2.2 Educational Uses of New Information Linkage Tools
In Class While on the Road
John's archeology class meets in Greece for two weeks in October. Keeping up with his other classes via the network is not a serious problem for him, because a large fraction of MIT classes supply network-based support for students who are away from campus for short periods. He can access notes, videos, and online experiments as he needs them. And he can consult with professors and teaching assistants through electronic mail and other facilities.
Virtual Cross-Registration
Jane and Alice and ten of their friends want to take a software engineering course in the spring, but 6.170 is taught only in the fall. So they enroll in a software engineering course at Stanford. They "attend" the Stanford lectures via the network. MIT provides a teaching assistant, who meets with them weekly at an on-campus location. The TA's salary is paid for under a "virtual cross-registration" tuition agreement between MIT and Stanford. Librarian Manages Shared Pointers
The reading room at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science still holds the physical artifacts of yesterday—books, reports, and even tapes with key early programs. But its librarian is now managing far more than these locally accessible resources. She is the manager of the laboratory's shared-knowledge resources. She must constantly ask herself which remote sites on the Web are of sufficient shared interest to the laboratory and of sufficiently high quality to merit being placed on the shared list of pointers. She does not mind if she misses much of what's out there; after all, the laboratory members have their own pointers to remote knowledge they think is interesting. Her job is to find and manage the most widely useful and reliable knowledge from among all the Web's infojunk—not an easy task.
A New "Virtual Green Series" for EECS
The EECS department has unveiled a new core curriculum, named affectionately the "virtual green series" after its pioneering core curriculum innovations that had been published in a series of green-colored books four decades earlier. Live lectures by key people, hyperlinked instructional and visualization information, and simulation tools and links to actual physical experiments in progress all dovetail into a well-integrated whole with the objective of providing an effective learning environment for the department's core curriculum. Some of the materials—such as a few classic video lectures—date well back into the 1980s, but much of the series is updated annually by the professors in charge, in the MIT tradition.
Historicopter
MIT's humanities faculty members have linked forces with faculty at other institutions in a joint project structured around the World Heritage Interface—which provides a way to link the historical artifacts of 120 participating nations. The MIT faculty have developed a novel software interface—the historicopter. It can be flown by individual students using a joystick. Forward, back, right, and left commands fly the machine across the earth, moving rapidly from China to Greece, or in finer-grain mode within each country over key sites like Xian and Knossos. Using the joystick to dive and rise, students move the historicopter back and forth in time all the way from the present to 6000 b.c. The sites the students visit while wearing the flyer's goggles and earphones are presented as three-diquot; strategy will not suffice ifmensional computer reconstructions linked to accounts of political events, texts, images of paintings and other artworks, recordings of music, and much more. Even seasoned historians are surprised as they hop from Greece to China in 300 b.c. and move from discussions of whether political virtue is learned or inherited to suggestions that the best leader is never seen or heard.
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
On the left bank of Lac Lemans, north of Geneva, Switzerland, on the campus of MIT Europe, seventy Swiss students are sitting in a classroom as they do every week for four hours. On the large window-wall screen they are watching and listening to a lecturer who is addressing his class on MIT's Cambridge campus. A group of eighty Japanese students will have a similar experience on the MIT Kyoto campus in a few hours. MIT instructors at the two remote sites are handling questions as they arise. Occasionally, they steer some of the questions to the lecturer in Cambridge for everyone to share. After class the professionals abroad confer with the U.S. students—either synchronously or in delayed mode—via high-performance equipment provided at all three sites, to help each other and to work on projects. The vast resources of the MIT libraries are available equally to all campuses as the students research their projects. The professionals abroad enjoy these interactions. They also enjoy MIT campuses overseas, which have a lot of the color and atmosphere of the Cambridge campus. And they look forward to the term they must spend in Cambridge for every two terms of remote instruction they receive.
Industrial Partners Advise MIT Students
Willy is a senior department manager at Boeing in Seattle. He is also an adjunct instructor at MIT, where he is project advisor to a team of five students in Woody Flowers's 2.70 design course. Willy advises the team through regular email and teleconference contact. His group meets in person twice during the semester.
Students Rub Shoulders with Key Government Officials
Shari is an MIT senior on a six-week "mini co-op" assignment in Senator John Kerry's Washington office, where she is helping prepare legislation on the Internet and health care. Shari and twenty other MIT undergraduates on similar assignments in Washington fulfill their other course requirements through the MIT Washington Extension Program. The MIT Washington Extension Program is directed by Sheila, an MIT full professor of aeronautical engineering on leave from MIT in a high-level Defense Department position. Technically, Sheila is on "80 percent leave"; she spends one day a week directing the MIT Washington Extension Program, keeping track of Shari and the other students. (Shari's parents are thrilled at the thought that their daughter meets regularly with a Washington personage like Sheila.) The opportunity for MIT students to do things like this has become one of the major attractions of MIT. Helping Sheila is Rob, an MIT assistant professor of biology on 80 percent sabbatical at the Center for Disease Control; Connie, an MIT associate professor of environmental science on 80 percent sabbatical at SAIC's office in Reston, Virginia; Gary, an MIT assistant professor of political science on 80 percent sabbatical at the Brookings Institution; and five MIT graduate students on co-op assignments in the Washington area. The Washington Extension Program is one of several similar MIT Extension Programs throughout the world, each under the direction of faculty members on part-time sabbatical.
Co-Op Student Teams
Carl is awakened in his Baker House dormitory room by a beeper. Groggy, he thinks at first it is a signal from his machine having difficulty in downloading the video lecture of 6.003 that he missed yesterday. But this is more serious: the weather balloon that his team launched from Bangkok last Friday has veered off course and is headed into a typhoon. Via the Motorola worldwide satellite network, the GPS receiver had been programmed to alert him and his junior year teammates—Nancy and Paul at MIT in Cambridge, Bish in Bangkok, and Alicia in Johannesburg—of any sharp course deviation. Both Bish and Alicia are away on their overseas co-op assignments. (Like most of the MIT undergraduates, they are five-year M.Eng. candidates participating in international co-ops.) The downloaded data are used by the team to build and test a revised world weather model on the SUN 330000 located on Carl's desktop. Carl, after clearing his eyes from sleep, activates the video monitor on the balloon so that he can witness live, via compressed video, the last hour of the balloon's lofty existence. He will share that video with his four colleagues and their UROP faculty advisor before reporting the event to class later in the day in E90-350, which will tie into six other sites on three continents. (The weather modeling project is being sponsored jointly by the U.S. Meteorological Association and American Airlines.)
Learning International Negotiation
Nancy, awakened by Carl's email, is disappointed to learn of the balloon's demise. But she must prepare for an exercise later in the day in her international negotiation class. This "class" will pit skilled student negotiators from MIT in Cambridge, Stanford in California, and the U.K. Open University at random points on the global net. Each team is representing a side in a three-way business-government-university negotiation to establish a more accurate and profitable satellite monitoring system to anticipate the weather's effects on crops in South America and Africa—and ultimately use the results to make commodity price forecasts. Nancy has to bone up on her statistical forecasting methodology, because she is estimating values of alternative satellite data sets for one side of the negotiation.
Robot Olympics
Tonight, Turner Channel 1865 will broadcast the "Sweet 16" contest, which features the sixteen country finalists in the worldwide robot competition that was pioneered by MIT subject 6.270. Excitement builds as the best students worldwide compete for the Super Bowl of robot competition. This year's contest, in which teams from seventy-two countries participated, is being sponsored by a consortium of twelve companies, each of which has donated components for the micro-robot creation contest. This year, the micro-robots are so small that the video will have to be shot through a microscope.
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.
Young People's MIT Science Club
Nicholas is a seventh grader in a medium-sized Alabama town. On this Tuesday he is spending his study-hall hour—as he does every Tuesday—with his teammates around the country, discussing science-club questions. The idea is for each team member to pose a scientific question without an obvious answer—one that will interest the others and will elicit various responses, perhaps even an experiment, a good deal of discussion, and the instructor's praise. The instructor, a graduate student in computer science, steers the team discussion from her MIT Cambridge office and consults her colleagues when the questions become unwieldy. Today's question is "how much data is there in the world?" Besides helping out young children, which she likes to do, she is on the lookout for promising young students like Nicholas who, she thinks, will fare well at MIT and go on to become graduate students—exactly as she did!
MIT Early Admissions
Cathy, like 35 percent of the students in the MIT freshman class, has been accepted via early action, so she knows that she is admitted in January of her high school senior year. With her MIT admission comes full access to the MIT libraries and networks, and a special introduction to engineering courses that she can take over the network after school or on weekends.
MIT Alumni College
John, MIT class of '90, works at Intel Corporation in Chandler, Arizona, on SMP server architectures. He is enrolled in the MIT Alumni College, where he is taking Professor Arvind's course in multiprocessor architectures—one of many MIT graduate subjects that have been modified to be accessible to alumni participating via the Internet. Most of John's participation is through telecommunications, but twice during the semester he will travel to MIT for a two-day intensive workshop led by Professor Chapin and his graduate students. John has the option of counting this course work toward an MIT master's degree, although the full degree will require at least one semester (perhaps a summer) of on-campus residence.
Graduate Students in Lifelong Learning
Professor Paul is preparing for a videophone conversation with his prize student, Ingrid, an MIT Ph.D. EECS student now in Beijing. He establishes contact with her at 7:30 over coffee in Cambridge and noodles in Beijing. Ingrid reports on her ongoing EECS TA experience, in which she provides learning and mentoring support to eighteen of the practicing engineers charged with expanding and upgrading the electrical power grid over China. Via satellite and fiber networks, the engineers take graduate courses from the MIT Cambridge campus two days per week, six hours per day. Only two of the twelve hours per week are live with the Cambridge-based course. The rest are provided through asynchronous downloads over the Pictel Global Digital Pipeline. Ingrid explains that power-grid expansion has become especially critical now that the power from the Three Gorges Project has come online and cities that are growing in the interior of the country are desperate for more electrical power. Her advisor tells her that he is quite satisfied with her thesis progress on optimal distribution network redesign in the presence of geographic and political constraints. Ingrid hopes that the thesis will be of direct use in China and perhaps also in Nigeria, where the newly elected democratic government is using oil revenues to build a cross-country world-class highway system.
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.
The Electronic Seminar Room
Barbara, a young assistant professor of art history walks into a newly renovated classroom to begin a graduate seminar on the work of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. The room is designed to be congenial and comfortable for the participants, and it really does not look very different from the ancient rooms that she knew as a graduate student in Cambridge. She notices two high-intensity video projectors where the old slide projectors used to be. She also notes the unobtrusive sockets for connecting laptops to the network. Before the class arrives, she quickly runs through on her laptop the digital images and computer-animated walk-throughs that she has prepared to illustrate her opening presentation. Some of these were stored on the Rotch Visual Collection's server, and some she had found at distant sites by surfing the Web the night before. (It certainly beats checking out and sorting 35mm slides.) To begin the discussion, she video-projects images and animations, using dual screens so she can make comparisons and comments as she goes along. The students get copies on their laptops and make their notes by typing in comments associated with each image, or just by recording parts of the conversation.
Anytime, Anyplace, Ad-Hoc Access to Resources
As the discussion of Palladio evolves in unexpected and exciting directions—as all good seminars do—Barbara and the students pursue lines of investigation by accessing online databases of images, drawings, maps, digital models, biographical information on clients and other architects, facsimile tax records from the archives in Vicenza, and texts of Palladio's books. When someone finds information relevant to the current point, it is projected for all to see and discuss. A particularly exciting moment comes when they develop a challenging new interpretation of a drawing that has been much studied by Professor Howard Burns at the University of Venice; they make a video link, find him still hard at work in his office (despite the lateness of the hour), lay their idea out to him, and have a few minutes of inspiring discussion.
The Collaborative Laboratory
How do you design something that you cannot see? In an electronically equipped laboratory, a dozen students from various fields work collaboratively to design specific molecules to interfere with the life cycle of the AIDS virus. They use principles from biology to learn where to attack the virus, physics to delineate the general characteristics of potent interactors, and chemistry to construct a molecule suited to the task. Superbly trained in their own disciplines, the students bring the necessary knowledge and tools to the task, but they need a common "language" through which to interact. This is provided by a sophisticated three-dimensional visualization facility. Beautifully shaded and colored structural models of molecules rotate on a large projection screen, while software running in the background maintains constraints and reports on the functional consequences of the design moves that the students try.
The Virtual Design Studio
Six graduate students in architecture are working on an ambitious visionary project—a building that "breathes" through thousands of button-sized turbines distributed over its surfaces, instead of through conventional HVAC machinery and ductwork. Seasoned architects have pointed out the difficulties with the idea, but they admit that it just might work. Three of them are now collaborating from their New York, Milan, and Tokyo offices with the MIT students. (Because these architects all have active and successful international practices, they cannot spend all their time at MIT; however, each can readily find an hour or so to guide and critique the evolving student projects.) From time to time, researchers in Aero and Astro—who have developed the tiny turbines for quite another purpose—join in to offer their suggestions. Through high-speed electronic connections the participants in the process share access to three-dimensional models and physical simulations of proposals. Through video links they can discuss and criticize the work—much as they might discuss a physical model on the table between them. The students, full of enthusiasm and free of the baggage of prior experience, are intent on developing their concept, but at every turn they have to face the practical advice, reactions, and wisdom of their senior colleagues, who are also enjoying the process.
Books On Demand
Alex, a graduate student in philosophy, needs to work through an extensive list of readings to prepare for his examinations. Some of the readings are hard to track down. Once, he would have spent many hours in the library stacks plus frustrating weeks waiting for interlibrary loan requests to arrive. Now, he finds that many of the relevant journals (including the most obscure ones) are available online. He selects the papers that he needs, and the next morning picks up a neatly printed and bound personalized reader from the networked, on-demand printshop at the MIT Press Bookstore. For the older books, he consults the online catalogue of a huge book storage facility that is cooperatively maintained in Memphis by a dozen major university libraries. Within a day, the volumes he has ordered arrive by FedEx.
The Virtual Shakespeare Library
Professor Peter Donaldson's students at MIT and students at Stanford are collaborating on a term project on Shakespeare; they are exploring the interpretation of Hamlet in several media. They have available online electronic texts of several editions of Hamlet, high-resolution digital photographs of three early editions of the play including every variant reading, a collection of two-thousand works of art related to the play, and complete digital copies of five major film interpretations. All materials are linked to specific lines of text and can be reconfigured to create multimedia commentaries on student Web pages. The "Shakespeare information space" in which they work is linked to the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New Globe Theater in London. It also has a video link to the rehearsal space in which an all-woman company is preparing a new avant-garde production of Hamlet that explores the gender implications of the play. The director of the company, along with several scholars in England and Japan are serving as online consultants for the course and as respondents for the final projects the students create.
Information Everywhere
Shun, a senior, remembers when he had to go to an Athena cluster to pick up his email or surf the Web. In those days, too, he could work at the PC in his dormitory room, but it was a drag when his roommate wanted to practice his guitar. Now, Shun just carries his lightweight, wireless-equipped laptop everywhere. He can always get his email, updates on the day's activities, and access to MIT's online resources. He can work effectively wherever he wants—in quiet, comfortable new study spaces, in a lively cafe when he wants some companionship, or outside on a sunny day.
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.
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
While giving a hard time to the architecture students designing the "breathing" building, the seasoned architect/critics have found something closer to home to admire. Two of them, both MIT alumni, have already discussed it; seen through its distant digital portals, MIT possesses an "architectural" presence—a recognizable and unique style. Electronic classrooms and studios, the online services that are offered, discussion groups, lifelong educational activities, and more seem well organized and tightly dovetailed with one another. One of the architects remarks that the Infinite Corridor has become a truly infinite Virtual Corridor, linking places (both physical and virtual) and people worldwide into a geographically extended but still coherent community. Because the new experience reminds them of that old feeling they had as young people on campus, they have dubbed it the Virtual Killian court!
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.
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.