Newsletter

On July 1, Information Services and Technology (IS&T) announced a new organizational structure focused on the major Institute functions – education, research, and administration.

The new organization is working to provide simpler, user-centered systems that cost less to maintain. It’s also striving to improve consistency in project and service delivery and to develop innovative uses of IT that provide long-term strategic advantage to the Institute through collaboration with key partners and sponsors. While DUE staff may interact with many areas within the new IS&T organization, we primarily intersect through Education Systems and Customer Support.

Education Systems

The Education Systems area, led by Eamon Kearns, serves as IS&T’s gateway for key sponsors including the Dean for Undergraduate Education (DUE), the Dean for Graduate Education (DGE), and the Dean for Student Life (DSL), as well as the MIT Council on Educational Technology (MITCET). This area focuses on the Stellar course management system and on student systems including the MIT Student Information System (MITSIS), Financial Aid, and Admissions.

The  Education Systems area brings course management and student systems together into a single area to better integrate and manage these interconnected systems. IS&T will now be able to more effectively leverage its resources to anticipate and meet the community’s IT needs with regard to teaching and learning. Education Systems will continue the long-standing collaboration between DUE and IS&T around student information systems. DUE’s strategic theme of Championing IT to Provide Information to Students and Faculty, led by the Registrar, Mary Callahan, provides the foundation for this partnership.

As part of the larger Education Systems roadmap, the Student Information Systems Next Generation (SIS Next Gen) project will create an effective, sustainable, and user-centric means of delivering student services. Key priorities for the SIS Next Gen project include:

• Digitization
• Enriching support for advising
• Creating a seamless user experience
• Stabilizing the technical infrastructure
• Fulfilling mandated changes

SIS Next Gen evolved from the VISION Study and the Next Generation Student Services Systems (NGS3) projects, in which DUE and IS&T were considering how to update or replace outdated student systems. These projects and an assessment of the available options led to a recent joint decision to take an incremental approach to improving existing student systems.This incremental approach will enable implementation of high-impact, customer-facing functionality to better serve MIT students, faculty and staff. The first project will be online grading, which is targeted to pilot during IAP 2011. Concurrently, progress will be made toward a technical stabilization of the SIS to assure long-term sustainability.

Callahan is excited about the path ahead for DUE and IS&T:

Recognizing synergies in business needs across departments, creating technical solutions, and strengthening system sustainability will allow us to provide the community with important new tools and innovative services.

Customer Support

In addition to the broad suite of Help Desk, Accessibility, and Usability services available to the MIT community, Customer Support includes a Faculty and Student Experience (FSX) group led by Oliver Thomas. The group’s focus is on:

• developing a deep, strategic understanding of faculty and student technology needs and then helping IS&T and its partners at the Institute to develop the capabilities to address those needs through their service offerings.
• guiding faculty in taking full advantage of the rich ecosystem of technology services available to them.
• working closely with MITCET, the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT), the MIT Libraries, and others in IS&T and at the Institute to support an innovative computing environment for faculty and students.

Existing partnerships, such as the Academic Computing Coordination group (ACCORD), remain critical in coordinating activities across departments engaged in academic computing support and educational technology delivery. Strong collaborative efforts, with direct participation from students, faculty, and key departmental stakeholders, will continue to shape the technology environment that supports student life and learning at MIT.

Recent examples of this ongoing collaboration include:

• a project with the Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR) group in OEIT over the spring semester in which staff from STAR and IS&T worked with students to augment development and support of educational software (http://web.mit.edu/star/).
• several recommendations from the Athena Working Group (sponsored by MITCET and chaired by Professor John Brissom) that will get under way this fall will greatly improve student printing and influence new technology spaces on campus.
• a video portal, jointly developed by staff from OEIT/DUE, IS&T, the Libraries and OCW, is set to become part of the Teaching With Technology site in August. This portal will serve as a terrific new resource for anyone at MIT engaged in video capture for educational purposes.

If you have questions about the new organization, please get in touch with IS&T’s Senior Staff. For specifics about initiatives in the Education Systems area, contact Eamon Kearns. For general IT questions, send mail to the IS&T Help Desk or call 617.253.1101.

See detailed IS&T organization charts with services and staff
 

[On July 1, 2010, ESG joined DUE as part of the Office of Experiential Learning]

If you travel to the 6th floor of Building 24, you will find a unique freshman learning community. Instead of lecture halls, you will find small, informal classrooms. The common space, which includes couches, a hammock and a kitchen, encourages students to gather and discuss ideas, work through challenges, and connect as a community. The environment fosters frequent interaction between students, faculty and staff both inside and outside the classroom. This is the home of the Experimental Study Group (ESG).

Experimental Study Group (ESG): A dynamic educational community

Each year, 50 freshmen enroll in ESG’s alternative academic program that offers a more personalized approach to the core freshman subjects. What exactly does that mean? It means that ESG students take the same subjects as their mainstream peers, such as 18.01, 8.01 or a HASS subject, but they do so in a learning environment where:

• Class size = 5-10 students
• Classes are highly interactive
• Students influence the pace of the classes
• Teaching is the priority

ESG embraces the philosophy that “education works best when everyone is involved and active.” The small classes provide many opportunities for students to interact with the instructors and fellow students. In the classroom, students are encouraged to ask questions and experiment with novel ways of learning the material. Outside the classroom, collaborative learning is fundamental to the ESG community environment. Opportunities for students to engage faculty, staff and peers in problem solving and discussions are pervasive.

Undergraduate peer teaching is integral to the ESG community. Each year, approximately 30 ESG upperclassmen are trained as teaching assistants through the ESG Teaching Seminar. The seminar is taught by an ESG staff member and provides the foundation for effective teaching. These upperclassmen bring their own experiences in ESG to bear as they provide formal and informal teaching and advising to current freshmen. Every year, several ESG-trained TAs go on to become TAs for mainstream MIT classes and Interphase.

In teaching the freshman core curriculum, the ESG faculty and staff strive to incorporate experimental approaches to teaching and learning that not only engage the students but also improve learning outcomes. Some recent examples include: teaching Math, Physics, Chemistry and Biology classes using problems and examples which relate to creating alternative energy sources; a HASS subject which coupled Introduction to Technical Communication with a mechanical engineering design seminar and challenged small student teams to create and write about their own product design; looking at key principles of physics through sports applications such as gymnastics and scuba diving; and developing a screenplay based on a band of MIT students outthinking terrorists as part of an ESG version of Colossal Failures in Engineering.

Undergraduate seminars for ALL MIT undergraduates

The innovative sprit of ESG has been the foundation for the large number of undergraduate seminars developed and offered by ESG each spring. These undergraduate seminars are 6-unit subjects which are designated pass/fail . Through these seminars, all MIT undergraduates have the opportunity to participate in the ESG style of learning in which classes are small and highly interactive. 80% of students enrolled in ESG seminars are not ESG students. While the number varies, ESG offers 10-12 seminars each spring. During the past 20 years, ESG has offered more than 70 seminars which have been primarily funded by ESG alumni.

Not only are ESG staff and faculty encouraged to develop and teach new seminars, but experienced ESG uppserclassmen who have demonstrated excellent teaching skills are also able to develop their own pass/fail seminars under faculty supervision. Some seminars have been offered once while several have been offered for 4-5 years. The range of topics is constantly changing reflecting the interests of ESG staff, faculty, and students as well as changing topical issues. Seminars offered in the last two years include: Chemistry of Sports, Ancient Greek Philosophy and Mathematics, American Photography, Mathematics of Toys and Games, and Life at MIT - The Psychology of Emerging Adulthood.

40 years of educational innovation

In celebrating its 40th year as an alternative learning environment in 2009, ESG alumni were asked what they considered to be ESG’s value to MIT. Their answers provide a good summary of both the value and impact of ESG on student learning at MIT¹:

• place for students to discover themselves and their interests
• development and training of future teachers
• diversity of educational methods and learning styles
• friendlier and “less scary” version of MIT
• opportunity for students to learn how to develop and teach their own seminars
• more multidisciplinary than mainstream
• incubator/testbed for new courses
• collaborative learning community
• place to experience student-centered learning
• more personal interaction between students and faculty/staff
• special connection of ESG alumni to MIT because of their sense of belonging to the ESG community

Who works in ESG?

<view teaching staff>
<view administrative staff>

• Professor Alex Slocum, Director and Professor of Mechanical Engineering
• Dr Peter Dourmashkin – Associate Director, Senior Lecturer and Head of Physics
• Dr. Holly Sweet - Associate Director
• Dr. Analia Barrantes – Lecturer in Physics
• Dr. Patricia Christie – Lecturer and Head of Biology and Chemistry
• David Custer – Lecturer in Writing
• Dr. Jeremy Orloff – Lecturer and Head of Mathematics
  
• Graham Ramsay - Program Coordinator
• Dr. Gabrielle Stoy – Lecturer in Mathematics

You want to see more…Check out:

• ESG website
• ESG Courses on OpenCourseWare
• ESG Vlogs on YouTube: What is it like to be in ESG
• ESG Videos: Highlights of ESG
• ESG Undergraduate Seminars
• “Cooking up a new approach to chemistry” – TechTalk – Feb 2009
• Office of Experiential Learning

¹Source: 2008-2009 ESG President's Report

The annual DUE Infinite Mile Award Ceremony and Reception was held on Wednesday, June 9, 2010. The DUE community came together to celebrate the many diverse achievements and contributions of our colleagues across DUE. Recipients were recognized for their unique contributions that exemplified leadership, creativity, ingenuity, and drive.

By sharing in our individual and collective accomplishments, our community forges a sense of togetherness which serves us well as we face the new challenges that come our way each year. The Infinite Mile celebration is also a wonderful reminder of how fortunate we are to work among such talented colleagues whose many accomplishments positively impact student life and learning at MIT. Congratulations to all of the 2010 DUE Infinite Mile recipients!

Visit the DUE Infinite Mile awards page for a full description of each award (Certificate required - DUE staff only)

2010 DUE Infinite Mile Award Recipients

In June, DUE, ODGE and DSL jointly launched the new twitter account @MITstudents.This is part of our continuing joint effort to enable better information sharing with students and to do so via the technologies they are using.

Anyone in DUE can request a tweet on @MITstudents.  I encourage you to consider this new communications vehicle as you plan how to get important announcements, notifications, etc. to students. You can send tweet requests as needed or you can send a list of tweets you need throughout the year with dates. For example, the Registrar's Office provided a list of tweets for key student milestones in the 2010-11 academic year.

Details on requesting a tweet on @MITstudents are available on our website: http://due.mit.edu/due-staff-resources/request-mitstudents-tweet
[certificate required - available to DUE Staff only].

DUE, ODGE and DSL communications have joint responsibility for tweets. Here are a few more details:

• Twitter account of announcements, updates and information related to student life and learning at MIT: 
  • Letters, announcements, updates from the senior officers.
  • Updates on Institute committees that are addressing issues or considering changes that directly impact students [ex: Committee on Dining; Athena Study Group].
  • Announcements/reminders of major milestones and events of interest to most students [ex: reminders from Registrar on key deadlines; appointment of new Dean for Graduate Education; Community Spring Break, etc.]
• Content is of specific interest to students.
• Not a replacement to email and website communication but an alternative for students who use this technology.
• We will follow MIT Twitter feeds and retweet updates, announcements, and other useful information.
• All tweets or retweets will not necessarily be of interest to both graduate and undergraduate students.

OEIT co-hosted the MIT Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) 2010 Conference on May 23-26. Approximately 200 participants from 40 different countries shared their ideas about and experiences in how universities worldwide can better provide distance education and e-learning resources to help improve student learning.

The OEIT contributed to the LINC conference in multiple ways. Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean & OEIT Director delivered a plenary talk entitled “Network Enabled Open Education: Changing the Landscape of Learning Opportunity.” Toru Iiyoshi, OEIT Senior Strategist, helped the conference planning as well as chaired three sessions: “Technology-Enabled Education and the Lifelong Learner,” “Technological Innovations for Learning,” “The Blending of Educational Models: Classroom and Technology-Enabled.” Jeff Merriman, OEIT Associate Director, and Brandon Muramatsu, OEIT Senior Consultant, along with Iiyoshi and Kumar, presented on OER-supporting tools and resources at the pre-conference workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER).
 

Last week, MIT launched a new Student Life and Learning website:

http://web.mit.edu/student/

The site was a collaborative effort among DUE, ODGE and DSL and will act as a more user-friendly portal to a host of resources, as well as a window to current information on news and upcoming events. The goal of the site is to help students and parents easily find key offices, programs, and resources.

What you need to know:

• URL = http://web.mit.edu/student/
• Serves as a directory for topical areas. You can see a short list of popular links or go deeper for a more complete list
• Gives you up-to-the-minute information on bus schedules, menus, community events, and news
• Displays the latest tweets from the recently launched @MITstudents twitter feed
• This site is linked directly from the MIT homepage; click students under community
• Covers both undergraduate and graduate life and learning