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The d'Arbeloff Fund
Peggy Enders and Helen Samuels
This article was written on behalf
of the Committee on the Undergraduate Program
and the MIT Council on Educational
Technology.
Earlier this year, President Vest announced a $10 million gift from Alex and Brit d’Arbeloff to support educational innovation in the teaching of science and engineering at MIT. "Educational change is in the wind at MIT and throughout academia," he said. "This magnificent gift will enable our faculty to translate into action the wealth of new pedagogical ideas welling up through MIT."
The report of the Task Force on Student Life and Learning http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/c/committees/sll/index.html, paved the way for a number of discussions within the Committee on the Undergraduate Program (CUP) and elsewhere regarding ways to strengthen our undergraduate program. The recently-released report of the Educational Design Project (EDP), http://web.mit.edu/faculty/reports/edp.html, as well as the findings of an educational "charrette" held last spring, reached similar conclusions with respect to the need to improve the first-year experience. The Task Force recommended that a priority for MIT should be increasing the level of excitement in the first-year program, and the EDP found that "the current curriculum does not do enough to sustain student enthusiasm for learning, or to leverage upon their enthusiasm and sense of academic direction to achieve better educational results." More recently, the MIT Council on Educational Technology has joined this effort by endorsing this RFP and agreeing to serve as the grants review board.
In their recent review of these findings, the CUP identified a discrete set of goals for students during their first undergraduate year. Among these goals are several that will require the creative energies of faculty in new curriculum initiatives and are thus the target for this request for proposals:
The groups supporting this effort understand that two of the greatest impediments to change are the constraints on faculty time and the apparent intransigence of Institute requirements, rules, and regulations. Through this grants effort we are prepared to buy out faculty time, and in collaboration with CUP, waive rules and make change possible through other substantive actions.
Preliminary Proposals for Ambitious Projects
We are writing to solicit your preliminary proposals for ambitious projects that would enhance and potentially transform dramatically the experience of our first-year students.
We can imagine the following experiments:
The preliminary proposals can utilize one or more of the following:
1) Cooperative initiatives between Schools and departments, between first-year subjects, and/or between first- and second-year subjects. An example in this area would be a collaborative effort involving engineering curricula and first-year math or science subjects.
2) Subjects that introduce real-world situations, hands-on activities, or laboratory experiences in the freshman year. Proposals may include educational experiments as alternatives to the present Institute Laboratory Requirement. Also welcome would be proposals to develop UROP or UROP-like experiences appropriate for first-year students.
3) Ideas that promote one-on-one and small group interactions between faculty and first-year students, including ones that encourage mentoring, better advising, and greater interactions between faculty and students, especially in residence hall settings.
Criteria
In light of the goals and target areas outlined above, proposals are preferred that include one or more of the following elements:
Requirements and Restrictions:
Preliminary Proposal
The preliminary proposal must include:
Submission Details and Timeline
In order to make the submission process as simple as possible, the Grants Subcommittee wishes to emphasize the preliminary proposal and to give applicants considerable assistance at this stage. Assistance will include staff consultation and may include financial support in the form of seed money.
The Committee invites one- or two-page preliminary proposals submitted by e-mail to Helen Samuels, staff to the MIT Council on Educational Technology (hwsamuel@mit.edu, 8-0310, E32-335) by January 15, 2000.
Applicants will be contacted by a member of the Office of Academic Services, who will help in refining the preliminary proposal and in responding to more detailed questions about deliverables, evaluation, incentives, key participants, and the like. In this stage applicants may be asked to contact others to encourage collaborative development. Preliminary proposal discussions will also provide information about other sources of funding for educational innovation that might supplement the d’Arbeloff Fund, or that might be more appropriate (e.g., Class of 1951/55/72 Funds, or, for technology-intensive proposals, the Microsoft-MIT Alliance).
Preliminary proposals will be reviewed by the Grants Subcommittee by mid-February. Applicants who pass the initial screening process will be contacted and invited to submit more detailed proposals, again with help from the Office of Academic Services. Awards will be applied beginning with the 2000-2001 Academic Year. No decision has been made in advance regarding the overall pace and scale of the distribution of the d’Arbeloff funds: these decisions will be guided by the range and scale of proposals submitted to the Committee.
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