Engineering Curriculum Redesign: Is My School Ready For This?

As humanity keeps facing grand challenges engineers are expected to be at the forefront and keep providing sustainable solutions to extremely complex problems. In the meantime, we have reached an era where technological advancement moves at a very rapid speed. That poses a big question to academia. “How should we educate engineers to ensure that they are best prepared for a complex world?” For an engineering curriculum to remain effective and relevant frequent redesign is critical. Despite this generally agreed upon understanding, universities sometimes operate under great pressure and move into initiating curricular change without having considered how multifactorial this process can be. At the same time there are little to no tools to help them determine institutional readiness for engineering curriculum redesign. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has placed quality engineering education at the core of its mission since its founding in 1861. Since then, MIT has not only founded a great number of very advanced forward-thinking engineering programs, but has also collaborated with a big number of international governments and schools in order to guide and support their engineering curriculum change. The Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) is a global consortium within MIT working on this exact topic. J-WEL staff are currently working with experts on said matter to develop a tool that universities could use in order to self-assess their initial readiness as well as their progress as they move on with their curriculum redesign process. This practice paper presents the first iteration of said tool

On the Forgetting of College Academice: at "Ebbinghaus Speed"?

How important are Undergraduate College Academics after graduation? How much do we actually remember after we leave the college classroom, and for how long? Taking a look at major University ranking methodologies one can easily observe they consistently lack any objective measure of what content knowledge and skills students retain from college education in the long term. Is there any rigorous scholarly published evidence on retention of long-term unused academic content knowledge? We have found no such evidence based on a preliminary literature review. Furthermore, findings in all research papers reviewed in this study were consistent with the following assertion: the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve [Ebbinghaus 1880-1885] is a fundamental law of human nature – in fact, of the whole animal kingdom and applies to memory of all types: verbal, visual, abstract, social and autobiographical. This fundamental law of nature, when examined within the context of academic learning retention, manifests itself as an exponential curve halving memory saliency about every two years (what we call "Ebbinghaus Speed"). This paper presents the research group’s initial hypothesis and conjectures for college level education programming and curriculum development, suggestions for instructional design enhancing learning durability, as well as future research directions.This work was supported by the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), funded by NSF STC award CCF-1231216

Learning journeys for scalable AI education: an MIT - USAF collaboration

In 2021 the United States Air Force (USAF) and the Department of Defence (DoD) entered into a collaboration with multiple units within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop a new academic program focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) training. Given the size and the diversity within the body of USAF employees, the goal of this collaboration is to design and implement an innovative program that will achieve maximum learning outcomes at scale for learners with diverse roles and educational backgrounds. This program is now piloting and evaluating three different learning journeys addressing three different groups of USAF employees (USAF leaders and decision makers; technology developers; and daily frontend technology users). The learning journeys were designed based on each group’s specific professional needs and academic backgrounds, and they include combinations of online synchronous and asynchronous courses and face-to-face activities. The program’s pilot is currently underway and evaluation research findings are informing the next program iterations. The ultimate goal of this program is to formulate general recommendations on how to serve large numbers of diverse learners at scale in an optimum way. In addition to an evaluation pilot study, MIT experts on AI and the Science of Learning have been asked to review the program and their feedback will be integrated into the next program iteration. This paper presents the three learning journeys as originally designed to serve the three first diverse cohorts of learners, as well as the plan for future improvement and implementation of the program

AI For Leadership: Implementation And Evaluation Of An AI Education Program

AI education is rapidly becoming the next frontier when it comes to solving the world\u27s grand challenges; however, ways to introduce AI to large complex organisations are still vastly understudied. To address this gap in 2021, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) entered into a collaboration with the US Air Force (USAF). The goal of this relationship is to develop, study, and evaluate different learning modalities and online/in-person experiences to introduce AI to the diverse USAF workforce. The USAF is a very complex organisation and its employees vary in terms of educational and cultural backgrounds, as well as in their work-related needs, demands and restrictions. The initial program started in 2021 and a pilot study took place. The pilot evaluated the content, pedagogy, and educational technology used in 3 different learning journeys designed for 6 different learner profiles. Findings from 2021 guided improvements for future iterations. The updated iteration of the learning journey was introduced to the second cohort of the program in 2022. Cohort 2 included 200 USAF leaders, managers and decision makers, and the learning journey consisted of a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online experiences, as well as an in-person active learning component offered on campus to a subgroup of the learners. This research paper will introduce the updated iteration of the program, the evaluation of the learning journey, as well as the overall learner experience

Implementing Agile Continuous Education (ACE) at MIT and beyond: The MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) case

The rapid pace of change in technology, business models, and work practices is causing ever-increasing strain on the global workforce. Companies in every industry need to train professionals with updated skill-sets in a rapid and continuous manner. However, traditional educational models — university classes and in-person degrees— are increasingly incompatible with the needs of professionals, the market, and society as a whole. New models of education require more flexible, granular and affordable alternatives. MIT is currently developing a new educational framework called Agile Continuous Education (ACE). ACE describes workforce level education offered in a flexible, cost-effective and time-efficient manner by combining individual, group, and real-life mentored learning through multiple traditional and emerging learning modalities. This paper introduces the ACE framework along with its different learning approaches and modalities (e.g. asynchronous and synchronous online courses, virtual synchronous bootcamps, and real-life mentored apprenticeships and internships) and presents the MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) as an illustrative example. MIT ReACT is an institute-wide effort to develop global education programs for underserved communities, including refugees, displaced persons, migrants and economically disadvantaged populations, with the goal of promoting the learner’s social integration and formal inclusion into the job market. MIT ReACT’s core programs are the Certificate in Computer and Data Science (CDS) and the MicroMasters in Data, Economics and Development Policy, which consist of a combination of online courses, bootcamps, and global apprenticeships. Currently, MIT ReACT has regional presence in the Middle East and North Africa, East Africa, South America, Asia, Europe and North America

Early engineering: A developmentally appropriate curriculum for young children

Engineering education for the pre-college years is a developing academic discipline that emanates from the need to understand and improve the ways that engineers are formally educated. To date, there are no curricula available that incorporate engineering at a preschool level. The focus of this study is on the development of an early engineering curriculum for a preschool classroom which will complement the traditional emphasis on developing basic literacy, numeracy, and science along with social, emotional, and motor skills, while retaining high fidelity of the early engineering content addressed. The current work presents a qualitative case study examining the developmental appropriateness of the early engineering curriculum and reports on its effect on children\u27s learning and on the teacher\u27s experience while implementing the early engineering curriculum in class for three months. The setting for this study is a suburban university campus-based child care program in the Midwestern U.S. The participants are 11 children, 10 boys and one girl, their parents, and the classroom teacher. The children\u27s learning is divided into the categories of knowledge, skills, dispositions, and feelings; subcategories of these four main categories are also discussed. The findings support the developmental appropriateness of the early engineering curriculum developed, along with the feasibility and the necessity of the implementation. The teacher\u27s experience is analyzed based on factors reported by the teacher and the researcher that either facilitated or hindered the implementation process. These factors included multiple stakeholders, namely, the teacher, the children, the parents, the school administration, and the curriculum developer. The factors are intended to be used as guides to form future elaborate versions of the early engineering curriculum. Questions regarding the optimum systematic assessment method for this curriculum are also raised as points of future research

Changes in design thinking through participation in design based wilderness education

In the summer of 2014, 30 students from the Singapore University of Technology and Design and 6 students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology participated in a 10-week Global Leadership Program (GLP) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. GLP provides students with the opportunity to develop design thinking and engineering science competencies alongside leadership skills. A curriculum combining elements of design-based learning and wilderness education was developed and implemented to holistically address the development of these three skillsets. This pilot study is the group’s first attempt to investigate the effect of participation in design-based wilderness education on student design thinking. Through qualitative analysis of student interviews 8 major themes that students associated with changes in their design thinking were identified: being flexible, the importance of high-fidelity testing, the value of simplicity, the importance of trying, survival as motivation, having empathy for others, trusting the process, and identifying team strengths

Leadership Development through Design Based Wilderness Education

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been collaborating since 2010 with the Singapore Ministry of Education to help develop the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). One element of this collaboration, the Global Leadership Program (GLP), aims to provide SUTD students with the opportunity to interact with the MIT community and experience MIT’s academic culture. During GLP students participate in a program designed to develop leadership ability while also increasing their understanding of engineering science and design thinking. This paper introduces a curriculum combining the pedagogies of design-based learning and wilderness education that was implemented in the summer of 2014 to holistically address the development of these three competencies. Through design-based learning activities, both for and in a natural environment, students were encouraged to develop competencies in engineering science and engineering design while exploring the diverse attributes essential for success as an engineer. This paper examines the results of a retrospective post-then-pre survey administered to the participants upon completion of the program to explore the effects of the program on the development of professional engineering competencies. We find a statistically significant increase in items associated with Individual Leadership Skill, Group Leadership Skill and the role of Society and the Economy. These results are triangulated with student exit interviews and instructor observations