*Engineering Educational Environments for Tomorrow: Quality, Virtuality and Reality*
M. S. Vijay Kumar Ed D, Director of Academic Computing Massachusetts Institute of Technology vkumar@mit.edu; http://web.mit.edu/vkumar/www/

"Six graduate students in architecture are working on an ambitious visionary project- designing a building that breathes through thousands of button-sized turbines distributed over its surfaces, instead of through conventional HVAC machinery and ductwork. Seasoned architects have pointed out the difficulties with the idea, but they admit that it just might work. Three of them are now collaborating from their New York, Milan, and Tokyo offices with the MIT students........ From time to time, researchers in Aero and AstroQwho have developed the tiny turbines for quite another purposeQjoin in to offer their suggestions. Through high-speed electronic connections the participants in the process share access to three-dimensional models and physical simulations of proposals. Through video links they can discuss and criticize the workQmuch as they might discuss a physical model on the table between them......................."
[A vignette from the MIT Educational Technology Council Report ,1997, Editors: William J. Mitchell and Michael Dertouzos]

Emerging applications and the vision proposed by MITUs Council on Educational Technology, which was charged with this task, point to exciting ideas and proposals from faculty members for combining the capabilities of new educational technology with the commitment and skills needed to achieve ambitious educational goals ( this notwithstanding the contention surrounding questions of educational philosophy and the fact that the technological future is filled with uncertainties).

From virtual reality for reifying concepts in freshman Calculus, animated sequences for teaching electromagnetism and visualization-intensive collaboratories for biomedical research to a Virtual Design Studio for architects as well as a Virtual Infinite Corridor that links places (both physical and virtual) and people worldwide into a geographically extended but still coherent community, the kinds of technology enabled educational activities and environments proposed suggest the possibilities of a re-invented campus and a new sense of place.

The recommended implementation path for achieving this vision is centered on a set of carefully chosen experiments designed to probe the possibilities of new educational technologies along several dimensions. The council proposes that specific experiments be carried out in the following broad categories:
- Educational uses of new analytical and synthetic tools such as advanced simulation, visualization, and rendering software, together with the integration of text, sound, and images to help us pursue new and effective ways for teaching our basic science, engineering, management, design, literature, language, music, and humanities courses.
- Educational uses of new information linkage tools in particular, tools for organizing, finding, sharing, leveraging, and distributing information in a RwebbedS world.
-Learning through collaboration for example, by using remote conferencing, electronic mail, the World Wide Web, and various kinds of new groupwork tools that coordinate synchronous and asynchronous learning activities.
- Pursuit of lifelong learning approaches that extend the reach of our institution

The information technology architecture and applications that underpin the scenarios are directed toward promoting the following set of preferred attributes of educational environments:

*Proximity - between learner, faculty & materials; research & teaching; campus & community; workplace & instruction
* Choice - time and place; content and learning styles
*Transparency - process emphasis that makes difficult content accessible and foregrounds workplace practices
* Efficiency - in terms of the production an distribution of educational resources, shared access as well as decreased time on task.
*Transformations in the content, culture and clientele of education - new Interactions, new representations, non-traditional learners & instructors (alumni)

These examples and scenarios suggest a new "architecture" for tomorrow's MIT that supports the seamless integration of the physical and the virtual along with new electronic tools and resources in the educational process.

*From Rhetoric to Reality* Moving from the rhetoric of the rich, technology enabled educational vision to the reality of implementation, will entail some interesting and challenging transition issues:
(i) Building an architecture of systems and services that supports experimentation WITHOUT disrupting production.
(ii) Making high performance available on highly available environments . (Implicit is the connectivity requirements and performance that will allow a set of high quality services to be delivered within the cloister and to the extended community.
(iii) Retaining the strengths of MIT's current distributed computing environment, Athena**, while adding new capabilities and functionality to support a high-performance, media-rich, distributed educational technology. The goal is to extend the advantages of the current architecture - serial reusability, suite of tools and services, security, scalabilty and efficient centralized management - to support an environment configured for a diverse and flexible computing portfolio - heterogeneous hardware platforms, specialized computing and mobile computing, as well as to allow non-disruptive customization and modifications for distributed islands of control.
(iv) Building spaces that support the flexible and seamless integration of a variety of instructional formats and learning experiences.
The media rich educational model for the extended community that is envisaged will certainly require some modifications to the environment made available by Athena, such as:
- Increased bandwidth and multimedia capability; more extensive off-campus use, increased ability to make the most effective use of commercial software and greater capacity to support bottom-up efforts;
The connectivity and quality of service implications of this goal are wide-ranging: guaranteeing the availability of bandwidth; providing support to a widely distributed clientele; allowing customization; maintaining / upgrading materials in light of an evolving technological environment and last, but certainly not the least, security considerations given the need for extensive access and collaboration while maintaining restrictions to preserve the integrity, reliability and even legality of systems.
It is obvious that the technology infrastructure required by the vision presents radical opportunities for exploring and revisioning the educational process as well as redefining the educational community. It is equally apparent that the structural and service requirements for rearchitecting the information technology environment to achieve the desired educational value, without sacrificing viability, cannot be met in their entirety, easily or soon. But, as the Councilon Educational Technology report points out,"we believe it to be a worthy compass heading that we should follow if we are to build a worthwhile extended MIT community."