4.1 MIT's General Goals
We assume the following primary goals for MIT in the twenty-first century:
1. Preserve our emphasis on experimentation, exploration, and design. Focus on science and technology and embrace the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
2. Continue to select and sustain excellent faculty, staff, and students.
3. Involve these people in exciting forefront projects and activities that benefit worthy societal goals.
4. Continue and enhance MIT's position of global leadership in research and education.
5. Pursue unique relevance through new educational technologies that employ and enhance our core competence. We believe 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 depend on this.
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.)
1. Improve access to information. The recent extraordinary success of the Web has demonstrated vividly the value of capturing, storing, distributing, searching, transforming, and recombining information. Through these and forthcoming uses of information technology, we now have opportunities to remove many traditional limitations on access to the information that students, faculty, and staff need to support their work; to make entirely new kinds of information available to them; and to reduce some of the costs of information access.
"Information," as used here, is not limited just to text, images, sounds, videos—in other words to information as "noun"—but includes significantly the active information work carried out by programs and people—in other words, information as "verb." Taking full advantage of these opportunities will be vital for our future competitiveness.
2. Explore promising new modes of instruction and research. Creative initiatives by MIT faculty have already shown that information technology can provide experiences and ways of understanding that go well beyond the capabilities of traditional means. Consider, for example, the use of sophisticated, interactive visual simulations to teach the fundamentals of electromagnetism; the use of a hypermedia library of texts, images, and film and audio clips of performances to teach Shakespeare; and the use of interactive "walk-throughs" of three-dimensional digital models of important works of architecture (which may no longer exist, or may never have been executed, or may be physically inaccessible) to teach architectural history.
3. Enhance opportunities for collaborative work, both within the on-campus community and with distant collaborators. Effective learning is often accomplished through collaborative projects, which traditionally have required colocation of project team members. The work of geographically distributed teams can now be supported through teleconferencing, asynchronous communication through electronic mail, the Web, and various kinds of new groupware to coordinate activities. The Department of Architecture has already made effective use of video connections to the offices of visiting design critics, who cannot be at MIT all the time.
4. Enrich educational experiences by providing access to distant resources. Numerous new opportunities are available to link off-campus resources effectively into teaching and research. Telescopes, for example, can now be operated remotely via the Internet—and thus can be used without travel to distant mountain tops. Satellite images, toxic-waste data, digitized archives, and much more information are already available from specialized distant sites.
5. Capture and preserve MIT's intellectual capital and create and distribute educational products from it. Traditionally, faculty members have done this by writing books and articles, and by creating less formal products such as lecture notes and problem sets. Now, the opportunity exists to capture and distribute this intellectual capital in multiple forms: CD-ROM with text, images, and video, perhaps combined with live, frequently updated, databases and meetings with instructors and with other students. To accomplish this, faculty members need indexing, searching, filtering, organizing, authoring, and other tools. The resulting products are potentially a significant source of revenue for MIT, although other institutions can be expected to provide a great deal of competition.
6. Reach a wider community. Technologies of electronically supported distance education can be used to reach a community that extends far beyond the physical boundaries of the campus. This opens up the potentially attractive possibilities to imagine MIT's relationships with individuals as a continuum, beginning with the most talented, potentially MIT-bound high school students and extending to ongoing educational opportunities for alumni. It might also allow MIT to have strategically located "satellites" at various locations around the world. And it might allow us, if we chose, to develop some enterprises that can compete in the continuing and mass education markets. (See also discussion on MIT uniqueness.).
If we pursue this opportunity, we would be stepping up to the call of industry "not for a four-year but a forty-year degree" in a world where technology-based knowledge has a half-life of five years, where professionals no longer have de facto lifelong job security, and where many engineers make transitions into other areas, most notably management. Today, pursuing this need occupies some one-thousand "corporate universities" and involves spending some $200 billion per year on corporate education and training.
7. Form mutually beneficial alliances with other institutions. We have already discussed the fact that no university has the resources to be a leader in every field and subfield. Thus we should focus on our core strengths, and achieve breadth by employing advanced educational technology to share resources with other premier institutions. For example, several institutions might agree to build image collections on different specialized topics as appropriate to their strengths, and electronically share these collections with each other. Similarly, they might provide each other with videoconference access to unique graduate seminars on highly specialized topics.
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:
1. Possible reduction of face-to-face contact. Some institutions will probably employ electronic technology to cut costs, and to compete on price, by reducing faculty/student ratios and opportunities for face-to-face contact—for example, by televising lectures to multiple locations.
There is a strong sense within our council that MIT must not go down this path. The core educational experience at MIT should remain one of face-to-face contact, and educational technology should be used to enrich personal relationships and mentoring rather than to replace this basic and proven strength.
2. Possible dilution of community. The on-campus, residential experience—particularly for undergraduates—is crucial to the educational experience of our students. MIT's rich history of educational innovation and social contributions is an enormous asset.
We must take care to retain the centrality of the undergraduate residential experience and the sense of community that it creates. We should not dilute it by electronic extensions of the community, merely because they are possible, or allow it to become fragmented into scattered and relatively independent satellites.
3. Possible devaluation of traditional teaching skills. New, electronic environments for teaching may demand new skills such as the production of multimedia, and may devalue more traditional ones such as chalk-and-talk.
Any strategy for introducing new educational technology on a large scale should avoid creating too great a burden of acquiring new teaching skills, and should also preserve as much as possible the value of skills that have been acquired in more traditional classroom settings.
4. Possible loss of faculty control. The established traditions of faculty control of the educational process may be challenged when settings and means of delivery change. In particular, we repeatedly heard concern expressed that use of distance learning technologies might diminish, rather than enhance, the role of faculty in setting and enforcing standards and in making decisions about credits and degrees.
The strategy we pursue must be particularly sensitive to this issue, and put appropriate safeguards in place.
5. Possible superficiality. Some widely publicized "virtual universities" place heavy emphasis on low-cost delivery of information and development of testable competencies; however, they seem to promise little in the way of effective advising and mentoring, role modeling, critical discussion, and learning from one's peer group. Thus the Council detected a widespread concern that relying too heavily on technology—particularly in support of distance learning—could yield shallow and superficial education.
We must be sure to keep the focus on MIT's fundamental values and goals—particularly its emphasis on extended, in-depth interaction among faculty and students.
6. Possible diversion of resources. Any major initiative in educational technology will require significant investment. At a time of scarce resources and cutbacks in many areas, there is concern about whether such investment is the best use of our resources.
Expected benefits of educational technology need to be clearly and convincingly identified; there must also be consensus that they are worth pursuing.
To achieve the stated goals in light of these opportunities and pitfalls, we suggest setting the following specific objectives:
1. Put the effort on a project basis. Seek to become within five years the recognized leader in advanced educational technology, and to create an exportable model for higher education.
In the past we achieved this leadership objective with our development of Project Athena and with the curriculum development in electrical engineering following World War II. We should now strive to do the same in the challenging arena of new educational technologies.
2. Strive for the substance and image of an integrated whole—the virtual Killian Court—in which physical facilities, information infrastructure, and social organization are in balance and support one other.
MIT's campus has a strong, vivid image and a powerful sense of place. This is created by its Charles River setting and by the architecture—particularly by the "infinite" corridors and the highly iconic, older buildings of the Main Campus. It is tremendously important in creating and maintaining a strong sense of belonging to a unique community, and in presenting MIT to the outside world. The electronic infrastructure and facilities that we create—the virtual campus that complements and extends our physical one—must have the same qualities. Its interfaces, in particular, must be vividly and beautifully designed, and they must clearly differentiate MIT from everyone else.
3. Preserve and enhance the quality of the on-campus, residential, face-to-face educational experiences MIT has traditionally provided—especially for undergraduates, graduate students engaged in research, and professional degree students doing project and design studio work.
The quality and intensity of these experiences is part of what defines MIT's unique character, and they provide an important competitive edge. We should therefore strive to take full advantage of them. Failure to preserve and build on MIT's rich and important traditions would probably destroy its soul.
In the digital electronic era, however, we cannot expect to remain competitive by trying to do it all with buildings, corridors, and physical contiguity. These are still important and effective means, but no longer sufficient ones. To support a vital on-campus educational community in the future, we will also need pervasive electronic infrastructure that provides high-quality intra-community communications through Athena-like facilities, enhanced email, Intranets, and the like.
In addition, such infrastructure should be designed to enrich educational experiences in new ways by delivering remote resources—such as access to consultants, design critics, remote databases (increasingly an alternative to traditional libraries), telescopes, and other remote scientific instruments—to classrooms, laboratories, design studios, and other on-campus settings. This requires close coordination of the design of new physical facilities (classrooms, dormitory rooms, libraries, etc.) with the design of electronic infrastructure and tools. Increasingly, the Cambridge campus will become a node in a worldwide network of educational resources; we must ensure that it is a richly connected and internally vital one.
4. Vigorously pursue new approaches in research, instruction, and collaboration with new tools and resources—particularly simulation, graphics, speech understanding, virtual and augmented reality, haptics, the integration of multiple sensory/effector modalities, new software tools, and immediate access to information and information processes at distant sites.
There is a strong and urgent sense among many experienced and committed teachers that traditional modes of instruction have some fundamental limits; that these traditional modes are just not working well enough; and that we can be much more effective by supplementing them with, or in some cases replacing them by, new, computer-mediated modes. For example, there is great potential for using simulation and visualization techniques to help students understand the principles of electromagnetism, to explore relationships among Shakespeare texts and filmed performances, and to "visit" remote or unbuilt works of architecture.
We should encourage the development of new or auxiliary educational approaches that are:
•more participatory •more goal oriented •more tailored to a learner's learning style •more collaborative •more interactive with faculty •more compatible with lifestyle constraints •more timely •more relevant •more fun •more memorable
To support lively, imaginative exploration of these new possibilities, we must provide sufficient computational power at points of use, sufficient server capacity to maintain large quantities of multimedia material, and sufficient telecommunications bandwidth to deliver multimedia resources wherever they are needed. Furthermore, we must ensure that faculty members and students have access to effective authoring tools, and—when necessary—to expert support and consultation. Also, we must offer appropriate motivations for faculty members to invest their time and attention in educational technology.
5. Provide the most effective ways of capturing, preserving, distributing, and profiting from the intellectual property generated by the MIT community.
Traditionally, paper has been the primary, though not the sole, medium for this; and responsibility for it lay with the libraries, archives, and museums, and with production and publishing arms such as the MIT Press and CAES. Now, electronic media are playing a rapidly growing role. For example, informal publication on the Web now provides an alternative to preprints and formal journal publication for many purposes. Even within the world of formal, refereed journal publication, we are seeing the emergence of online journals that compliment and may soon compete effectively with paper ones. At the very least, it is clear that MIT cannot continue to be competitive unless it takes effective advantage of the possibilities opened up by electronic handling of intellectual property. And, many argue, there may be attractive opportunities to create new revenue through production and distribution of intellectual property in digital, electronic form.
To take effective advantage of these new opportunities, we will need to position the libraries effectively to handle electronic media, create outstanding electronic production and publication arms—building on the resources we already have at the MIT Press and CAES—perhaps form alliances with outside media organizations, and certainly continue to work hard at resolving the complex institutional and legal questions raised by the shift to electronic handling of intellectual property.
6. Carefully expand the MIT community.
Traditionally, the size of the MIT community has depended on the physical capacity of the campus, and membership has depended on being able to live in the Boston area. New technologies of distance education—particularly asynchronous delivery of materials through the Web, time-shifted communication through audio and video on-demand, and sophisticated synchronous communication through videoconferencing and shared virtual environments—now enable us to question these traditional assumptions, and to raise the question of what really is the best size and geographic distribution for the MIT community in the future.
We cannot successfully move into the twenty-first century either by blindly clinging to the status quo or through indiscriminate expansion and decentralization simply because it is now possible. We must imaginatively and critically explore the new possibilities, develop an informed position, and move to position ourselves most appropriately and competitively for the future. Following our traditions for renewal, we should pursue experiments and, if they are successful, full-fledged programs to create lifelong learning relationships with alumni, to connect to MIT-bound students, to provide extended professional education in various forms, and to create electronically linked satellite campuses in other parts of the world.
To foster such vital experimentation, we need to encourage those at MIT who want to pursue innovative experiments in distance education, and to provide them with the infrastructure and tools to accomplish this; also if we are not to create second-class members of the community, we must assure that the experiences delivered by this extended infrastructure are as close to the quality of those delivered locally as possible. This of course is a challenge, because it is still much easier to create high-performance links locally than over large distances.
7. Move forward by building effectively on existing resources and the investments of the past, and by forming mutually beneficial alliances with industry.
Innovation on the scale that we believe will be necessary to make a real difference will be expensive. We need to make an infrastructure investment, over three to five years, in the $100 to $150 million range. This in turn will create significant ongoing operating costs.
The only realistic way to accomplish this is to build on existing infrastructure as effectively as possible—particularly on investments in Athena, CAES, MIT Press, and the MIT libraries—and to form alliances with industry for the design and implementation of the new capabilities that we will need—much as was done in the creation of Athena. These alliances cannot be created by taking an incremental, "me-too" approach. We will have to put forth our vision in its boldest realistic form, making our future partners want to participate in this exciting and innovative exploration of the future of educational technology.
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:
1. Clearly identify the resources that need to be put in place to create the conditions for a surge in individual creative efforts.
2. Make the necessary investments as quickly as possible.
3. Experiment, evaluate, and adjust as we move ahead.
In the following four sections we make detailed recommendations within the framework of this general implementation strategy.