MIT
MIT Faculty Newsletter  
Vol. XVIII No. 1
September / October 2005
contents
So, Just What Does an MIT Provost Do?
Taking Responsibility
An Agenda for the Year Ahead
Teaching this fall? You should know . . .
Impact of Homeland Security Restrictions
on U.S. Academic Institutions
Expedition to "Mars on Earth"
An Update from the Task Force on the Undergraduate Educational Commons
Computation for Design and Optimization:
A New SM Program in the School of Engineering
Why Didn't They Hear the Sea Calling?
The Fund for the Graduate Community
Newsletter to Unrestrict Website
A reputation for integrity
A Letter to President Hockfield
President Hockfield's Response
Classroom Scheduling 101
MIT Professors Make Top 100 (Worst) List
Academic Computing: An Equilibrium
of Services for Education
Distribution of Faculty by Age
[October 2004]
2005 Graduate Admissions
and Yield by School
Printable Version

Academic Computing:
An Equilibrium of Services for Education

M. S. Vijay Kumar

Click here for quick links to services, projects, and initiatives.

MIT faculty, with their dedication to teaching, their desire to excel, and their willingness to be pioneers, have inspired, and often led educational technology innovation at the Institute. Academic Computing, and others involved in supporting the vibrant ed tech ecology at MIT, are working to attain a balance between providing a stable base of services to serve broad needs, and catalyzing and supporting the exploration of new technology applications for education. We will briefly review the projects that have grown into new services over the past year and look ahead to what will be coming.

Looking Back

Last year we witnessed significant advances in educational technology at MIT. Projects that were once exciting experiments are maturing into regular use. TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) has become the mainstream instructional path for freshman physics. The stabilization of technology services such as Stellar, spatial data (GIS), and digital media has led to their increased adoption.

Other examples include:

  • Increased use of iLab, which allows students to control physical experiments through a browser from anywhere on the Internet
  • OCW's remarkable growth
  • Xtutor, a toolkit for creating online courses, which is being used in 6.001 and 6.034

There have also been advances in the production and delivery of educational video content. Academic Media Production Services (AMPS) has captured high-resolution video of classroom interaction for posting on the class Website within hours of the session. They have used rapid deployment systems to produce a series of videos of two popular undergraduate classes, Introduction to Biology (7.012) and Introduction to Solid State Chemistry (3.091) for the OCW Website: ocw.mit.edu.

Looking Ahead

Some key technologies and services that we will be working on with faculty in the next academic year are:

Evolving Course Management Platforms - New Stellar Tools

Stellar's toolkit will be expanded with pilots of modules created through MIT's collaboration with the Sakai Project (www.sakaiproject.org/), an effort among major universities to produce "community source" course management software. This fall we will reap the benefits of this work by offering trials of an online gradebook tool and a quizzing and testing tool.

Virtual Office Hours – An Integrated Communications Strategy

Assembling existing tools to enable virtual office hours for academic staff is just one example of how communications technologies such as voice over IP (VoIP), audio, video, document sharing, and instant messaging (IM) are converging to create more comprehensive and novel solutions.

Virtual Office Hours could make it easier for students and faculty to make the personal mentoring and tutoring connections that are often hard to arrange.

Working closely with an advisory group of faculty and researchers, the goal of the Integrated Communications Project (ICP, http://web.mit.edu/icp) is to explore and inform the integration of the next generation of converged digital communications services for educational, research, and community activities of the Institute.

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Bringing Technology into the Residence Halls – The ResTech Initiatives

Following last year's alteration of three existing computing clusters to better support collaborative work and accommodate the influx of students with laptops, Academic Computing will be exploring technologies that can be integrated into student residential living spaces to enhance the study and living experience. ResTech includes a variety of projects that range from straightforward applications of technology to more creative experiments such as:

  • Helping Random Hall students manage and self-support a pool of loaner laptops for residents to use for class work
  • Delivering student-captured cable programming of MIT sporting events into the dorms in High Definition TV (HDTV) format
  • Providing wikis (Web-based collaborative work environments) to residential governance groups and housemasters to encourage participative involvement in residential life activities.
  • Creating virtual residence halls to help convey to incoming freshmen the diverse values and cultures of individual dorms and living groups. In this Virtual MIT space, incoming students would have the ability to create their own rooms in a particular residence hall and interact with the current residents through their avatars.

Image Collections and Image Management Tools

Tools and repositories to manage and use image collections are generating considerable interest on the MIT campus and elsewhere, as illustrated by projects such as Metamedia from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and StudioMIT, a system developed by the School of Architecture and Planning. These applications provide faculty with Web-based tools to integrate and present images in their teaching. In an effort to coordinate and bring these efforts to a more sustainable state, Academic Computing is gathering requirements and   developing tools to search, manage, and present image collections. One example is software called Narravision, which was built for Professors Shigeru Miyagawa and John Dower to support the graphical materials they compiled for their Visualizing Cultures class. These tools use software provided by the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) that allows access to several repositories simultaneously. In addition, AMPS developers have begun work to integrate a federated search tool into Stellar,   to allow simultaneous searching through many repositories, such as DSpace. Overall this work will also be part of a larger institutional effort aimed at productively managing the lifecycle of educational image content.

Research Tools for Teaching

As an extension of our work in bringing High Performance Computing resources to teaching and learning, (stellar.mit.edu/S/project/computationallyinten/) we are working on porting software tools used by researchers in the disciplines into the teaching domain. Participating faculty see the value of this work in its potential to prepare our students to conduct research in their fields and to teach with the same tools used in research. An example of this is the use of a Broad Institute workflow control software package for creating reproducible research results.

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The Next Step for Successful Projects

Many new educational technology application s for undergraduate education and student life have been developed through generous support from programs such as Microsoft Research's iCampus and the d'Arbeloff funds. IS&T Academic Computing is working with these initiatives to extend the value from these projects to other areas as appropriate, through integration with centrally-supported technology services. ShuttleTrack, for example, makes getting around the campus a little easier by tracking the MIT shuttle vans on a map in a browser window or a cell phone screen.

We will also direct our efforts towards linking systems such as Stellar and Sakai, OCW and Dspace to present the community with an efficient and coherent process for the entire lifecycle of course materials from content acquisition, to production, delivery and use, to preservation.

Understanding the role technology can play in realizing the plans for the undergraduate Common Core will be a critical element of planning the steps ahead. Taking stock of the current state and use of educational technology systems and services is an important prerequisite for planning to meet future needs. A joint undertaking by the MIT Libraries, OCW, and IS&T Academic Computing has been launched for this purpose.

A Collaborative Effort

In the year ahead we will continue exploring this equilibrium by working closely with faculty to better understand their needs and help them integrate technology into their teaching methods. Collaboration will ensure that the technologies provided answer real needs and inspire more effective ways of teaching and learning.

We welcome your interest in learning more about educational technology, and invite you to participate in discussions on ed tech topics and share your own experiences with colleagues. The Crosstalk Seminar Series (webmit.edu/acs/crosstalk) and the Ed Tech Times online newsletter (edtech.mit.edu/times) provide useful forums. And, of course, please contact the Educational Technology Consultants at x3-0115, et-consult@mit.edu to find out more about Academic Computing services and projects offered, as well as to send us your ideas.

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