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.
Pursue educational experiments in a few carefully chosen areas, which are initially as follows:
2.1. Educational uses of new analytical and synthetic tools
These include advanced simulation, visualization, and rendering software,
together with the integration of text, sound, and images—to help us pursue
new and effective ways for teaching our basic science, engineering, management,
design, literature, language, music, and humanities courses.
2.2. Educational uses of new information linkage tools
These include tools for organizing, finding, sharing, leveraging, and distributing
information in a "webbed" world.
2.3. Learning through collaboration
For example, make use of remote conferencing, electronic mail, the World
Wide Web, and various kinds of new groupwork tools that coordinate synchronous
and asynchronous learning activities.
2.4. Pursuit of lifelong learning approaches that extend the reach
of our institution
Extend both sides of our current age group—to include MIT-bound young students,
MIT alumni, and the professionals of our corporate partners.
As a starting point, we suggest the following educational objectives and questions as the focus of the experiments:
1. Direct educational impact of new tools. Identify the direct benefits and costs of new analytic and synthetic tools—for example, of simulation and visualization, of pursuing the rich information linkages of a webbed world, and of learning through space-time collaboration, especially with our partners—in comparison with traditional classroom chalk-and-talk approaches.
2. Educational benefits of lifelong learning. Establish the true educational benefits and costs of lifelong learning to incoming MIT students, to our alumni, and to professionals who will form the extended MIT community.
3. Physical-virtual balance. What is the proper balance among physical and virtual educational interactions? What are the educational consequences of increased (reduced) face-to-face (virtual) interactions in acquiring knowledge, achieving depth of understanding, building intuition, role modeling, establishing and maintaining trust, achieving self-reliance, striving for greatness, and the many other factors that comprise an educated person?
4. Extended community. Assess the kinds of distant collaborators and collaborations that will be most beneficial to MIT's educational mission. Conversely, assess the kinds of remote collaborations that may weaken the MIT community.
5. Intellectual complementarity. Establish how augmenting local knowledge resources with distant ones—especially ones that complement local capabilities—can benefit the learning process. Assess the kinds of alliances that we should seek.
6. Combined tools. Assess the various ways in which learning can be improved, especially through the combination of lectures, lab sessions, simulations, and other new capabilities.
7. Learner-driven education. Assess the cost effectiveness of learner-driven versus teacher-driven education. Is it more fun? Is it as good? Is it as lasting?
8. Educational leverage. What new approaches seem to offer the best educational leverage in the sense of achieving better learning at less effort and cost?
9. Exportable invariants. Assess which combinations of approaches are best suited to different kinds of learning and to different learners, so that we may achieve our goal of exporting approaches that will be effective in higher education.
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:
1. Reorganizing our core curricula, centrally and within departments. This strategy would revamp the undergraduate curriculum, with advanced simulation, visualization, groupwork, and other such tools; and it might remove the requirement that students be on campus for continuous intervals to meet requirements.
2. Establishing major alliances. MIT would establish major alliances with academic, industrial and governmental institutions throughout the world for instructional and research purposes. 3. Lifelong learning for MIT alumni. MIT would provide continuing education at the workplace, at home, or on campus for our alumni, who would now be considered MIT learners for life.
4. Continuing education for professionals of our corporate partners. MIT would provide continuing education for professionals of its key corporate clients. Current MIT offerings include the CAES on-campus Advanced Study Program (fifty resident students), the Summer Session Professional Program (about sixty one-week offerings per year), summer programs offered independently by other MIT departments and laboratories, and the recent Sloan School/Engineering School Systems Design and Management (SDM) program.
5. Distributing MIT special programs worldwide. MIT offers a wealth of seminars, colloquia and other publicly available programs that are attended by 20 to 40 people. Yet these events are potentially of far wider interest to working professionals, both within the United States and overseas. We should experiment with offering such events to satellite television, videoconferencing, the World Wide Web, video servers on fiber backbones, and so on.
6. MIT Europe, MIT Japan, MIT Washington. We use these "code words" to describe our vision of regional campuses in areas of great need for MIT educational services. We envision that if we had such facilities, perhaps 5 percent to 10 percent of the MIT faculty and staff would occupy them, by being either on sabbaticals or on rotational appointments. These regional facilities would be tightly linked to MIT's Cambridge campus, and would be able to provide lectures, collaborative activities, new library services and resources, and a real MIT presence to our distant students.
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:
1. Network drops and power supply.
2. Conveniently located workstation or personal computer to control the presentation.
3. Lectern designed to accommodate this style of presentation.
4. Video projector or large video monitor connected to the computer.
5. If video projection is employed, an appropriate screen.
6. Appropriately controllable lighting.
7. Sound system for audio.
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:
1. One-to-one interaction. This is the case of individual student/faculty discussions, design studio desk crits, and so on. It can be accomplished reasonably effectively with inexpensive desktop videoconferencing capabilities on personal computers, and is likely to become widespread if we can provide fast enough connections. There are no particular architectural implications beyond the need for reasonably good lighting and acoustic conditions.
2. One-to-many with limited feedback. This is the case of a lecture broadcast to a distant location, with limited provision for questions from the audience. It can be accomplished with higher-end videoconferencing equipment employing mobile cameras and microphones. The operation of the equipment is more complex and requires more attention, and may require the attendance of an operator/director. At the lecturer end, the space must provide a camera location (or locations), good lighting, a monitor for the lecturer to observe the distant audience, and perhaps a director's booth—mostly fairly easy to retrofit to existing teaching space. At the audience end, the converse need is for a camera and lighting directed at the audience, and a large monitor or video projection screen. Questions can be handled with a roving microphone or (better) with individual switched microphones at audience seats.
3. Multi-way interaction. This is the case of a geographically distributed seminar in which all participants have more-or-less equal roles, or of case-based teaching to a remote group—the members of which are expected to participate actively. Here, the architectural requirements are most demanding: every seat needs a network connection with audio and video input and video display capabilities. Switching and direction become complex issues.
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.
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:
1. Tools and human resources for support of course development, consultation, troubleshooting, and so on.
2. Electronic mail and its future elaborations.
3. Browsing, finding, and information filtering tools for locating people and information.
4. Advanced synchronous communication tools, including videoconferencing, whiteboards, and the like.
5. Groupwork coordination tools that can support educational groupwork activities across time and space.
6. Authoring tools useful in creating multiple-media works.
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:
1. Students, faculty, and staff at off-campus locations—their homes in the Boston area, when they are traveling, and when they are working at distant locations—by 1998.
2. Academic and industrial partners, both nationally and outside the United States, by 1998.
3. Out-of-residence students, alumni, MIT-bound high school seniors, and others whom we want to keep in closer touch with the community by 1999.
4. Potential recipients of distance education offerings by 1999.
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.
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:
1. General purpose workstations that serve the day to day computing and communications needs of the majority of students and teaching staff.
2. Workstations for specialized functions - These may be configured especially for specific needs such as public stations for checking electronic mail and other information or be "high end" systems that serve particular educational needs that the general purpose workstations cannot.
3. Software and hardware facilities for specialized applications - These may include facilities for advanced visualization, media production centers, or facilities that support the exploration of new technologies.
4. Docking stations for portable computers.
5. Wireless and hand-held devices.
6. A layer of network services that run on those computer platforms that are in widespread use.
7. Software and tools that can be customized for use in different contexts and for different educational ends.
8. Availability of software tools for collaborative work (groupware).
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.
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.
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.
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:
8.1. Establish a project steering group with overall responsibility for formulating specific strategies and guiding the implementation of the project. The chairperson of this group should be a senior MIT official and member of MIT's academic council, at the level of dean or above, whose responsibility would be similar to that of a board chair.
8.2. Establish an executive project unit with overall responsibility for implementing the project on a day-to-day basis. The executive director of the unit should be a faculty member whose full time responsibility and career should be this effort. Personnel from Project Athena, Information Systems and other parts of MIT should be consolidated in this new unit at the discretion of the MIT administration.
8.3. Establish an external advisory committee (similar to a departmental visiting committee) to provide an ongoing external perspective on the effort.
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.