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"As I stood in the foyer of the Kaufman/Ford suite, I looked in on the control room operating at max capacity. The cameras capturing the student’s faces, the screen projecting intricate, animated slides. Here was technology at it’s finest. MIT students receiving a state-of-the-art educational experience in a virtual classroom, sharing it with future colleagues who live on the other side of the world! Incredible!"
- a CAES staff member on the first day of the Singapore-MIT Alliance program
Tuesday, September 7, was MIT’s Registration Day, a type of New Year’s Day for academia. But that day was even more significant than just marking the commencement of another year for the Center for Advanced Educational Services (CAES). Not only was it the fourth anniversary of the Center, it also marked the start of the most intense four days in our brief history.
In less than a 24-hour period, we kicked off two new major educational initiatives and expanded another, using the latest in Java, Enterprise data-base server integration, high-quality video conferencing, streaming video formats and Internet 2; as well as satellite broadcast and live Web-casts with synchronized graphics. We brought technologies together in ways their manufacturers had never envisioned. As one Center staff member put it, we "not only pushed the envelope, we pushed THE envelope!"
Internet Commerce II, part of MIT’s strategic alliance with PBS/The Business Channel was the first out of the CAES gate. On Tuesday afternoon we broadcast live to over 90 life-long learning students from such companies as Ford, IBM, and Polaroid. Courses developed for the Business Channel are now delivered simultaneously in three formats (satellite broadcast, video tapes, and video streaming over the Internet) all with active Websites, created and maintained by the Hypermedia Teaching Facility within CAES.
The influence of these courses has made a dramatic impact on the way professionals continue to learn their craft. A student attending the broadcast of Internet Commerce sent this e-mail to the producer, "This course is great! I manage a large IT group at Ford. It really changed our thinking and strategic approach. The session with John Williams and Abel Sanchez was outstanding!"
The week was now moving at warp speed. On Wednesday afternoon, Walter Lewin kicked off the Physics Interactive Video Tutor (PIVOT) by recording his first lecture that would later be digitized and put on the Web for student viewing.
One year in preparation, the PIVOT team has created a video-rich, interactive learning Web-based environment that can be used to support the teaching of 8.01 Physics I (Introductory Newtonian Physics). Click on the gyroscope on the PIVOT Website and you’ll receive this greeting: "Hello. Welcome to the Physics interactive video tutor. I’m Walter Lewin, your virtual tutor. I will try to answer all your questions and teach you Physics as we go along. If you’re ready, I’m ready."
Our goals for the PIVOT project are high. We plan to use several of the newest technologies: streaming digital video, the Web, and search engine technologies to simulate an office hour’s conversation between a student and his/her physics professor. This on-line tutor model is one we hope to replicate for other MIT courses.
Courses such as 18.06, Linear Algebra with Gil Strang, were also taped on Wednesday. All 18.06 lectures will be recorded and digitized this semester. A Web-based platform will be created to house these lectures along with the same FAQ’s, textbook resources, and simulated tutoring sessions for students taking 18.06.
To prepare to meet the needs of these technology-enhanced courses and projects, staff from CAES and Academic Computing met on Wednesday afternoon with Bob Brown and Vijay Kumar to officially launch the new Educational Media Creation Center (EMC2). This has been 12 months in the planning stages. It is an exciting virtual center merging the educational media production parts of CAES and Academic Computing. It will be a one-stop-shop for MIT faculty, staff, and students needing important services in this domain. Stay tuned for more news about this Center.
The Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) kicked off its five-year program at 8:30 am (Boston time), 8:30 pm (Singapore time) with 16.920, Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations, team-taught by Dimitris Bertsimas, Tony Patera, and Jacob White. This new graduate educational initiative in engineering with MIT, the National University of Singapore, and the Nanyang Technological University, brings graduate students together in one virtual classroom, live, crossing twelve timezones using an Internet2 connection. This particular morning found 50 MIT graduate students in attendance.
Many of these highly interdisciplinary classes developed for the SMA program are offered to MIT graduate students as electives. This first morning, we hoped to comfortably fill the classroom with MIT students. To our great surprise and delight, we not only filled the classroom to overflow capacity, but then proceeded to fill an additional distance classroom in Building 9.
The evening was even more dramatic. For 6.336J/16.910J, Introduction to Simulation and Optimization, students began to arrive at 7:00 pm for a class that began at 8:00. By 7:30, the classroom was filled to capacity. By 7:45, our second classroom was standing-room-only and by 8:00, when the class began, our third classroom was filled to capacity. By the end of the evening, we had 30 students attending the class in Singapore and 90 students attending from MIT!
By Friday evening (96 short hours), we had launched a new educational support organization, brought into one virtual classroom dozens of students from the world community and recorded, digitized, and delivered 14 lectures, via the Internet and the Web, to approximately 700 undergraduates and 300 graduate students across MIT, the country, and the globe. What an incredible week of firsts it was!
Distance Education and "Webified-courses" have taken a lot of hard knocks from the learned community. Nay-sayers claim that it weakens the educational experience of our on-campus students and offers inferior education to distant learners. Projects such as PIVOT, Internet Commerce, and SMA are examples that counter that argument. Distance education is not about taking away valuable resources from our students; it is about expanding their global perspective. It is about leveling the economic playing field around our planet, pushing the envelope and pushing ourselves to ask how can we do this better. (I am grateful to Melinda Cerny for collecting the exciting vignettes depicting one week in the life of CAES and committing them to a first draft rendering of this article.)
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