The iCampus Technology-Enabled Active Learning Project at MIT

Want to learn about some of MIT's leading-edge learning and technology pilots? In Innovate: Journal of Online Education, James Morrison interviews Phillip Long about MIT's "iCampus," a leading-edge collaboration with Microsoft which began in 1999. Long says that the most important results came from uses of technology to facilitate team-oriented active learning projects. MIT is now moving iLabs to a number of locations with a funding consortium to extend its life.

"Okay. That sounds reasonable. People have been putting experiments on the Internet since the Internet came into being; there's nothing novel about that. The problem has been that in the past, they chose idiosyncratic strategies for doing so. It was a cottage industry in that regard; we had not yet thought carefully about how to create an architecture, design, and tools that were easily replicable and sustainable. Every faculty member chose what to do based on what he/she knew—for example, a certain programming language or a particular design approach—and that instructor put something up and it was great; it worked as long as the graduate student who was there when it was built stayed.

MIT went down that same path. We built a bunch of experiments and then put them online using these same idiosyncratic methods. And sure enough after a short period of time, they all started to bit rot in one fashion or another. Each time we put one up, we gained very little in terms of benefit for implementing the next one. We thought, "There's got to be a better way." iCampus gave us the funding to explore that through a project called iLab. Then Hal Abelson, a colleague, made the point that we should be thinking about this from an architectural point of view; that is, we should be thinking about how to use standardized services that all experiments can use to meet common needs."

Read the full article here:
http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=666&action=article