About Educational Innovation

• The Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program

• Engineering Council for Undergraduate Education

• iCampus

• OpenCourseWare

• The d'Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education

The School of Engineering currently seeks to improve our educational programs through four representative projects that it has created and administers or in which it participates.

The Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program

The Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) facilitates the development of students' engineering and business skills by introducing them to the realities and demands of engineering practices in the real world. It does this first by training them in the basics of working in industry (e.g., networking and entrepreneurial skills, resume writing, and interview skills), and then by enabling them to apply their skills in a summer internship. In order to ensure effective internships, UPOP works with companies to help them create internships in which students can apply their knowledge and education in a real-world setting.

The UPOP program features:

1. An intensive week of pre-employment "boot camp" during January's Independent Activities Period
2. Spring Career Guidance Workshops
3. Ten to 12 weeks of summer employment
4. A written report and oral presentation in the fall

UPOP encourages involvement from alumni in areas of career guidance, as well as inquiries from companies about internships.

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Engineering Council for Undergraduate Education (E-CUE)

In 2002, the School of Engineering formed an Engineering Council for Undergraduate Education (E-CUE) with representation from all departments and divisions, as well as from the office of the Dean for Undergraduate Education (DUE). Part of the School's Office of Education, Innovation, and Assessment (EIA), E-CUE's mission is to identify, develop, implement, and disseminate best practices in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in engineering education, and to serve as a forum for addressing and sharing common issues and concerns in undergraduate engineering education among the School's units.

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iCampus

iCampus is a research alliance between MIT and Microsoft Research to enhance university education through information technology. Their goal is to demonstrate leadership in higher education by sponsoring innovative projects with significant, sustainable impact at MIT and elsewhere. iCampus is to:

• Enhance university education through information technology
• Build tools to define the cutting-edge of excellence in learning
• Publish content for widespread distribution
• Develop educational utilities, such as Web services, that assist in assessment, administration, and content management

A number of iCampus research projects have enhanced subjects within the School of Engineering. For example:

• iCampus has contributed to a fundamental conceptual overhaul of MIT's program in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering that integrates design throughout the entire curriculum.
• It has supported a major transformation of MIT's introduction to Computer Science that incorporates on-line lectures and automatic homework checking.
• It has enabled faculty across MIT — and throughout the world — to create an infrastructure for web-based access to (real) laboratories, where "if you can't come to the lab, the lab will come to you."
• Technologically Enhanced Education in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science seeks to boost comprehension of material in introductory computer science by enabling students to learn at their own pace and schedule and obtain immediate feedback on their progress; and by allowing instructors to spend more time developing new content and interacting with students.
• Engineering School Modular Program for Fluid Mechanics is an ongoing project working to replace redundant courses on fluid mechanics in multiple departments with a modular, interdisciplinary, interactive, individualized program.
• The Robot World Project systematized the deployment and running of courses that use design projects as a vehicle for teaching engineering. Project-Based Learning courses pose teaching and logistic challenges in that they typically use hardware and software laboratories and involve student teams that operate with a high degree of autonomy. The initial focus of Robot World was on four MIT courses that use the building of robots and robot software to motivate students to learn various aspects of engineering.

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OpenCourseWare

MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT's mission to advance knowledge and education and to serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and leadership. OCW now offers open access to the course materials from over 1,550 MIT courses, spanning 34 academic disciplines and all five of MIT's schools.

There are currently over 445 School of Engineering subjects on OCW, representing all nine of the School's departments and divisions.

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The d'Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education

Over the past few years, the practice of integrating community service projects into classes has been growing at MIT; the d'Arbeloff Fund, in addition to other resources, helps support that process. Grants are awarded to help faculty develop and improve service learning classes and projects. In service learning classes, students gain applied learning experiences that benefit individuals or communities. For example, a core engineering class on design fundamentals could engage students in creating an electro-mechanical device to aid a person with a particular disability. Or, in a communication-intensive class, students might hone their communication skills by writing a feasibility study for a community agency. Communities served may be local, national, or international.

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