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[Director of Academic Computing Vijay Kumar tells how innovative technologies at the Institute can assist faculty.]
"It has been 30 years since MIT last saw such a groundswell of educational innovation and it's beginning to transform the classroom experience."
This headline, from an article in the May 2002 edition of Technology Review about the unprecedented nature of MIT's engagement with technology-enabled educational transformation, is indeed supported by the initiatives that have been launched over the past couple of years.
In recent months, more progress and new milestones have been achieved in these areas:
The success of these educational experiments and projects requires an organizational and technical infrastructure that will support their large scale and sustainable implementation, including their integration with the institutional infrastructure.
The recently configured AMPS (Academic Media Production Services), along with the development of the Stellar platform for learning management with its foundational project OKI, represent key initiatives in this regard.
AMPS
Academic Media Production Services (AMPS) http://web.mit.edu/amps is an organization that delivers an array of professional, high quality, cost-effective technology services to support the production and delivery of educational materials. AMPS staff support faculty and academic programs in a variety of ways: from building course Websites and on-line educational tools to help in delivering video-based instruction for local and distance audiences. AMPS services include the design and operation of facilities such as the Linc in Building 9, Building 1-390, and Building 8-404, for supporting diverse needs of broadcast instruction and small-group research interactions.
AMPS staff with competencies in video production, digital media production and delivery, education design and integration are available to not only help faculty find the right multimedia technology solutions for their courses as they explore new pedagogical models, but also execute a well-planned and sustainable educational project.
Besides the support to faculty initiatives being provided through Stellar and OCW, AMPS portfolio of projects and clients http://web.mit.edu/amps/projects/portfolio.html includes SMA, MUST, i-Campus, and d'Arbeloff-supported educational innovation projects, the Museum Loan Network, as well as some external projects through CAES.
The organizational capacity for supporting educational technology being created through AMPS is complemented by the robust technical substrate being developed through Stellar and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI).
Stellar
The Stellar development project http://stellar.mit.edu/ grew out of the needs of MIT's educational programs as part of the strategic Singapore MIT Alliance (SMA), depending in part on supplemental Web-based learning materials that are securely, conveniently, and reliably available. As the SMA program demands grew and diversified, the effort to support and sustain this critical application multiplied. It quickly became apparent that a reliable system that was also easy for faculty and technology support staff to use, maintain, and support, was needed.
Stellar was, however, envisioned from the start as a foundation upon which not just SMA, but departments, labs, and centers across the Institute could build. This required a learning environment that fully endorsed current software standards, ran on MIT standard hardware, and leveraged MIT enterprise systems.
Stellar has been adopted as the core of the SMA program's Web-based course delivery system. It is also used by selected departments and courses who participated in the early stage pilot rollout.
Stellar features support for a range of commonly needed content management and course administration tasks, in addition to enabling teaching and learning through a range of educational services. Stellar's functionalities include:
1. Content Management Course
materials prepared using popular authoring tools, such as Microsoft
Word, PowerPoint, Dreamweaver, PDF authoring tools, etc., can be
uploaded. These materials are then available to students directly, in
the format in which they were prepared. Streaming video and other
advanced multimedia materials can also be used.
2. Course Calendar Materials are also
available in a calendar listing, so that students know how the
materials have been scheduled.
3. Announcements Faculty can author
and schedule announcements. Current announcements are also listed on
the course home page.
4. Threaded Discussion Board Allows faculty to set up forums within a class for different purposes, and for faculty and students to post messages and communicate. Documents can also be attached as a way of exchanging materials during the dialog.
Among the advantages of Stellar are:
As an operational system Stellar has provisions in place for backups, disaster planning, continued enhancements, and support. To access MIT Stellar, all you need is a Web browser. Current versions of Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer are supported.
Stellar is also being considered as an enabling infrastructure for educational technology projects as part of the Cambridge MIT Institute (CMI), as well as those supported by i-Campus and the d'Arbeloff initiatives. Stellar functionality is also available to courses being published on the Web as part of OpenCourseWare.
This fall, Stellar support will be available to faculty through the combined efforts of the Academic Computing Support Team (IS) and AMPS. To request Stellar for your course, fill in the Stellar Course Request and Information form at http://stellar.mit.edu/contact/index.html.
Stellar's Future – OKI
Stellar is on a path to converge with the design specifications under development by the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) http://web.mit.edu/oki.
OKI is an MIT-led collaboration of major universities to develop a layered, component architecture, for educational applications and learning systems. Funded by the Mellon Foundation for the first two years, other key partner institutions include Dartmouth College, Harvard University, North Carolina State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Washington, and the University of Cambridge.
A practical initiative driven by the need to support faculty who are trying to do sophisticated and creative work with online education, and who have become increasingly frustrated with available tools and products, OKI's focus on interoperability and an open layered architecture is specifically designed to support evolving and flexible teaching and learning requirements. The design and deliverables of the project have been primarily influenced by pedagogical considerations.
OKI is defining an architecture that precisely specifies how the components of a learning technology environment communicate with each other and with other campus systems. By clearly defining points of interoperability, the architecture allows the components of a complex learning environment to be developed and updated independently of each other.
This leads to a number of important benefits:
The interface methods defined by OKI support the ongoing integration of three general categories of software:
Once this architecture is fully adopted by the education market, new components may be plugged into the learning infrastructure using OKI's tightly defined and standardized application programming interfaces (APIs). This will allow us to more easily take advantage of new technology and new learning components as they become available. It will also allow components to be updated individually without destabilizing the overall environment.
The OKI architecture enables the sharing of learning content and software applications among schools and departments. The common architecture and common interfaces will allow schools to more easily implement components developed by other organizations, as long as all parties are conforming to the architecture. To demonstrate this, OKI will make the learning management environments of MIT, Stanford, and the University of Michigan available as open source code.
Finally, selected Common Services defined by OKI will be integrated into Stellar, a significant first step toward leveraging the pioneering work of OKI. As this integration progresses, future versions of Stellar will fully implement the OKI architecture, making Stellar MIT's OKI implementation. A consistent theme in the evaluations of Stellar has been its robustness as a platform to meet MIT's educational goals, as required by OCW and other educational technology initiatives.
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