Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA)

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://www.mit.edu/) - a coeducational, privately endowed research university - is dedicated to advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute has more than 900 faculty and nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and is organized into five Schools -- Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Management, and Science -- and the Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology. Within these are twenty-seven degree-granting departments, programs, and divisions. In addition, a great deal of research and teaching takes place in interdisciplinary programs, laboratories, and centers whose work extends beyond traditional departmental boundaries. The board of trustees, known as the Corporation, consists of about 75 leaders in higher education, business and industry, science, engineering and other professions.

The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges. MIT is dedicated to providing its students with an education that combines rigorous academic study and the excitement of discovery with the support and intellectual stimulation of a diverse campus community. We seek to develop in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind. Two sectors will work on the project: Open Knowledge Initiative and Center for Advanced Educational Service.

The Open Knowledge Initiative
The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI, http://web.mit.edu/oki) addresses a critical need in higher education: meaningful, coherent, modular, easy-to-use internet-based environments, for assembling, delivering and accessing educational resources. OKI is building a scalable, sustainable open-source reference system for internet-enabled education. MIT, Stanford and its collaborators have been working to define the parameters of an architecture whose components address key educational management functions. These solutions will have implications and potential benefits far beyond Cambridge or Palo Alto. By addressing the needs of a more diverse range of schools, OKI seeks to drive collaboration and spark an open-source developer community to build a sustainable support model. The generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides start-up funds for an initial two-year period.

The Open Knowledge Initiative will identify, design, and package a set of web-enabled learning components to serve the widest range of educational environments. Our solutions will enhance and streamline the development, delivery, and sustainability of interesting and advanced knowledge components in the future. Our efforts will include strategies for engaging the educational community to inform the design of the product and support its ongoing development and use. A key characteristic of the project will be its adherence to the open-source approach for software development.

OKI will create the infrastructure to develop pedagogical applications that promote the management of learning content. Through this foundation, we intend OKI to become a community, a process, and an evolving open-source toolset. OKI's architecture and open-source approach is designed to encourage collaborator institutions and a broader educational community to contribute tools and services to continuously expand its utility. Wherever possible, OKI will look towards existing or proposed industry tools, open-source solutions, and consortium developed standards. Like all good architecture, we hope to create spare yet elegant solutions, while still providing the services to make it a fertile environment for academic developers. MIT and Stanford University are joining with core collaborators in developing the initial design of the infrastructure and basic tool set. Once the initial code base and architecture is established, OKI will look for beta adopter partners to implement the system on their campuses. For an effort such as this to be sustained and supported, we feel strongly that it must take advantage of the strength and creative vitality of the open source community. OKI is committed to working with its collaborators and early adopters to establish a dynamic open-source framework for continued development, support, and training.

The Center for Advanced Educational Services
The Center for Advanced Educational Services (CAES) is the main MIT facility for support of, and research in, technology-facilitated education. To the community beyond our campus, CAES is the main source of MIT continuing professional education, often via distance learning. We also design and conduct significant experiments in technology-enabled learning, create and distribute MIT educational offerings worldwide, and deliver lifelong distance-learning opportunities. In the 21st century, MIT must assume a broader leadership role in education, both nationally and internationally. This is the key premise supporting the creation of CAES, the Center for Advanced Educational Services. Putting this goal into operation requires increased utilization of advanced technologies to distribute MIT's educational offerings -- both current and future -- beyond the Cambridge campus. CAES is an Institute-wide facility that hopes to build from related efforts at MIT to enhance all three MIT core activities: on-campus teaching; on-campus research; off-campus learning/collaboration.

Research. The Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) is a research division within CAES that focuses on advanced technologies emerging for educational uses and evaluates their effectiveness. It was created to advance the state-of-the-art and practical use of computation and communication technologies for learning and teaching. A key part of CECI's mission is to collaborate with other CAES units to create new educational products and services. CAES stays on the leading edge of technology-facilitated education by exploring emerging technologies primarily through our research unit - the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) -as well as partnerships with Institute colleagues.

Key people: Dr. M. S. Vijay Kumar, Dr. Nishikant Sonwalkar

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