CHRIS
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Tue, 30 May 95 14:08:38 EST
From: ckemerer (Chris F. Kemerer)
To: penfield@mtl.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Executive Summary Draft
Cc: rclarson@mit.edu
Fcc: Savebox
Paul - I am not going to be able to attend tomorrow's meeting, so I will
email my comments on the various sections to you today.
I am focusing my comments on the 'distance learning' paragraphs, as
these are the ones that I feel require the greatest editing to properly
reflect the views of the entire committee. As an aside, through several
conversations I believe that Dick Larson and I share common views on
this subject, and I am happy to have him 'proxy' for my vote on distance
education at tomorrow's meeting (and therefore am CCing him on these
messages).
On the Executive Summary, I have a problem on page 2, last sentence of
the WWW section: "The Committee does not believe that anybody
knows today how to do distance education with the same effectiveness as
on-campus education." Actually, many institutions, especially Stanford,
seem to do this very well. And I don't think we really know how to
measure how "effective" we are on campus, so therefore I would disagree
with this sentence. A sentence that I could live with that may capture
the spirit of what you intend is: "Distance education via advanced
technologies is an emerging new skill; many different models and
technologies are currently being employed, and we expect that there will
be a significant amount of process learning in the immediate future as
to how best to offer distance learning technologies." I would then
follow with your sentence at the end of the "MIT" section about the fear
that MIT may fall behind others in the use of this. This then leads
into the recommendations section, were you suggest some experimentation.
Finally, in the Recommmendations section, you suggest an EECS experiemnt
with VI-A students for distance learning. That's fine with me if there
is an EECS champion for this, but I would ALSO want to include that we
encourage the efforts of the Systems Design and Management program that
Joel and Glen have supported, and that already has two champions in
place, Ed Crawley and Tom Magnanti. They have strong proposals and
plans in place, and are ready to go with experiments in 95-96.
In addition, over the Spring semester the Provost has approved Sloan's
plans to remodel an electronic classroom to support distance learning.
I think the EVAT committee will look sort of bad if we are not behind
this effort, since that means that (a) either we failed to address this
need of the Institute, or (b) we legitimately don't think the Institute
should do it, but were tardy in our report and therefore let the Provost
make a bad decision. Obviously, my feeling is that we need to get on
the bandwagon here.
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