Ad Hoc Committee on Education Via Advanced Technologies
Final Report
Executive Summary
The MIT ad hoc Committee on Education Via Advanced
Technologies (EVAT) was formed in
October 1994 at the request of MIT President Charles M.
Vest, to study the opportunities for MIT
of advanced technologies such as the World Wide Web.
The Committee considered its charge to be to investigate the
educational potential of many
advanced technologies, including the Web, the Internet, CD-
ROMs, hypermedia, interactive TV,
and others. In what follows, references to the Web should be
thought of as referring also to those
other technologies that share many of the Web's features.
The World Wide Web
The features that make the Web (and related technologies)
interesting for educational purposes
include that it is pervasive, fast, convenient, versatile,
popular, and interactive. Of these features,
interactivity is not well understood at this time, but is
probably of great importance for educational
applications. As for the future of the Web, straightforward
extrapolations on technology trends
indicate that the hardware and software supporting the Web
will improve dramatically. However, at
the same time the increasing popularity of the Web will
place increased demands on the Internet.
The Internet today is used for many purposes, and the Web is
one of them, and one that is growing
dramatically. There seem to be two noneducational uses of
the Web. One is a form of public
relations -- an organization publishes Web pages to tell its
story to the public. The other is for more
directed communications, to suppliers, customers, and
partners, and especially internal to the
organization. Educational uses of the Web are much more
limited at present, and seem to fall into
three categories:
1.Interaction, e.g., for simulation of various kinds of
systems;
2.Delivery of intellectual resources to students;
3.Delivery of administrative information (handouts,
problem sets, solutions, etc.)
There is much talk about distance education being enabled by
the Web and other advanced
technologies. The Committee does not believe that anybody
knows today how to do distance
education with the same effectiveness as on-campus
education.
MIT
The many things that make MIT a special and exciting place
do not necessarily confer upon MIT
any advantage in dealing with advanced technologies. Indeed,
the Web and other technologies are
known to all universities. Students at all universities will
be as familiar with these technologies as
MIT students. Authoring tools will be widely available. Many
universities will have facilities,
including computer networks, the equal of MIT's. And we are
not off to a rapid start -- other
universities have either announced or actually implemented
educational activities that make use of
the Web.
One can imagine many possible futures for MIT, depending on
the extent to which MIT is able to
use advanced technologies to support and extend its
educational mission. It is likely that the
computing environment will evolve, either rapidly or slowly,
toward one in which almost all
students own computers, and MIT supplies the network and the
necessary infrastructure, including
print servers, Web servers, data storage, e-mail service,
and specialized computers and other
equipment.
At the same time, the advanced technologies of concern to
the Committee will be evolving. One
way of describing these changes is to note that each advance
in technology has the effect of making
more convenient a student's access to the vast and growing
reservoir of information on the
Internet. Also, the information available is growing more
reliable and broader in scope. Probably
within a few years half of all MIT subjects will make
significant use of Web-based resources, and a
few subjects will be radically changed in the process. The
Committee views with favor use of
advanced technologies to permit students to access
intellectual resources of all sorts.
It is tempting to think of using the advanced technologies
to export MIT education beyond the
campus. We have identified three possible new markets: newly
admitted students before they arrive
on campus; our own students temporarily off campus; and our
alumni/ae. However, there are
reasons why MIT may not be well equipped or well situated to
compete with other higher
educational institutions in reaching students besides those
with an affiliation already established.
Of all the possible futures for MIT, the most disturbing is
the one in which others find out how to
offer distance education using advanced technologies, and
MIT either does not learn how, or elects
not to offer it. The economic strength of MIT could be
seriously undercut by competition in this
arena.
Recommendations
The Committee recommends that some short-range actions be
taken to insure that all participants in
the educational mission have convenient access to the World
Wide Web, and opportunity to use it
as a routine part of daily life. It is also recommended that
some limited experiments start in the area
of distance education, and that funds be made available to
support development of Web-based
interactive curricular material. It is also recommended that
a regular faculty committee be charged
with oversight of academic computing.
The Committee recommends that several medium-range actions
be taken to bring the advantages of
the Web to all MIT subjects. Also called for are actions or
studies leading to actions to use the Web
for internal administrative purposes, and to use it to reach
out to all admitted students and to
alumni/ae. It is also recommended that, as an experiment,
one EECS subject be made available to
VI-A students at the plant. It is further recommended that
MIT should investigate some possible
inter-university collaborations using the Web.
Finally, the Committee recommends that long-range studies
should be made of the opportunities
and risks associated with new educational markets, as
enabled by advanced technologies. The most
plausible such new markets are our own alumni/ae and bright
high-school seniors.