MIT has long maintained that professional competence is best fostered by coupling teaching with research and by focusing education on real- world problems. This hands-on approach has made MIT a consistent leader in outside surveys of the nation’s best colleges. MIT was the first
university in the country to offer curriculums in architecture (1865), electrical engineering (1882), sanitary engineering (1889), naval architecture and marine engineering (1895), aeronautical engineering (1914), meteorology (1928), nuclear physics (1935), and artificial intelligence (1960s). More than 4,000 MIT graduates are professors at colleges and universities around the world. MIT faculty have written some of the bestselling textbooks of all time, such as Economics by Paul A. Samuelson and Calculus and Analytic Geometry by George Thomas. Following are some notable MIT teaching milestones since 1969, when humans, including MIT alumnus Buzz Aldrin, first landed on the moon:
1969: MIT launches the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), the first of its kind. The program, which enables undergraduates to work directly with faculty on professional research, subsequently is copied in universities throughout the world. About 2,800 MIT students participate in UROP annually.
1970: The Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology is established to focus advances in science and technology on human health and to train physicians with a strong base in engineering and science.
1971: MIT holds its first Independent Activities Period (IAP), a January program that emphasizes creativity and flexibility in teaching and learning. Almost 800 activities were offered in 2005, including design contests, laboratory projects, workshops, field trips and courses in practical skills.
1977: MIT organizes the Program in Science, Technology, and Society to explore and teach courses on the social context and consequences of science and technology – one of the first programs of its kind in the US.
1981: MIT launches Project Athena, a $70-million program to explore the use of computers in education. Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM each contribute $25 million in computer equipment.
1983-1990: MIT language and computer science faculty join in the Athena Language Learning Project to develop interactive videos that immerse students in the language and character of other cultures. The work pioneers a new generation of language learning tools.
1981: The MIT Sloan School of Management launches its Management of Technology program, the world’s first Master’s program to focus on the strategic management of technology and innovation.
1984: MIT establishes the Media Laboratory, bringing together pioneering educational programs in computer music, film, graphics, holography, lasers, and other media technologies.
1991: MIT establishes the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program, named inhonor of the late Margaret A. MacVicar, to recognize outstanding contributions to teaching. MacVicar, a professor of physics, had conceived of, designed, and launched UROP (see 1969, above).
1992: MIT launches the Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities to extend its pioneering work in computer- and video-assisted language learning to other disciplines. Its first venture was a text and performance multi-media archive for studies of Shakespeare’s plays.
1993: In recognition of the increasing importance of molecular and cell biology, MIT becomes the first college in the nation to add biology to its undergraduate requirement.
1995: MIT’s Political Science Department establishes the Washington Summer Internship Program to provide undergraduates the opportunity to apply their scientific and technical training to public policy issues.
1998: MIT teams up with Singapore’s two leading research universities to create a global model for long-distance engineering education and research. The first truly global collaboration in graduate engineering education and research, this large-scale experiment today is a model for distance education.
1999: The University of Cambridge and MIT establish the Cambridge-MIT Institute, whose programs include student and faculty exchanges, an integrated research program, professional practice education, and a national competitiveness network in Britain.
1999: MIT establishes the Society of Presidential Fellows to honor the most outstanding students worldwide entering the Institute’s graduate programs. With gifts provided by lead donors, presidential fellows are awarded fellowships that fund first year tuition and living expenses.
2001: Studio Physics is introduced to teach freshman physics. Incorporating a highly collaborative, hands-on environment that uses networked laptops and desktop experiments, the new curriculum lets students work directly with complicated and unfamiliar concepts as their professors introduce them.
2001: To provide a model for sharing of knowledge to benefit all humankind, MIT launches OpenCourseWare, a program that makes materials for nearly all of its courses freely available on the web.
2001: MIT establishes WebLab, a microelectronics teaching laboratory that allows students to interact remotely on the web with transistors and other microelectronics devises anywhere and at any time.
2001: MIT’s Earth System Initiative launches Terrascope, a freshman course where students work in teams to solve complex problems in earth sciences. Bringing together physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, management, and communications, the course has enabled students to devise strategies for preserving tropical rainforests, understand the costs and the benefits of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and plan a mission to Mars.
2002: To give engineering students the opportunity to develop the skills they’ll need to be leaders in the workplace, MIT introduces the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program UPOP). The program involves a corporate training workshop, job seminars taught by alumni, and a 10-week summer internship.
2003: MIT Libraries introduces DSpace, a digital repository that gathers, stores, and preserves the intellectual output of MIT’s faculty and research staff, and makes it freely available to research institutions worldwide. Within a year of its launch, DSpace material had been downloaded more than 8,000 times, and more than 100 organizations had adopted the system for their own use.
2003: MIT’s Computational and Systems Biology program (CSBi), an Institute-wide program linking biology, engineering, and computer science in a systems biology approach to the study of cell-to-cell signaling, tissue formation, and cancer, begins accepting students for a new Ph.D. program that will give them the tools for treating biological entities as complex living systems.
2005: Combining courses from engineering, mathematics, and management, MIT launches its Master’s program in Computation for Design and Optimization, one of the first curriculums in the country to focus on the computational modeling and design of complex engineered systems. The program prepares engineers for the challenges of making systems ranging from computational biology to airline scheduling to telecommunications design and operations run with maximum effectiveness and efficiency.