The Center, which is associated with a wide variety of innovative projects and programs, designs and conducts experiments in technology-enabled learning and creates and distributes MIT educational offerings worldwide.

CAES is comprised of six primary groups: The Advanced Study Program (ASP), The Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI), The Educational Media Creation Center (EMCC), MIT Video Productions (MVP), The Professional Institute (PI) and Streaming Media and Compression Services (SMCS). Within these groups are a host of subgroups.

As explained on its website, "CAES is involved in the design, implementation, and management of a number of exciting technology-enhanced learning programs and projects."

A small sampling of some of this excitement includes the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA), an innovative, part face-to-face and part asynchronous-and-synchronous-distance-learning engineering education and research collaboration with National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.

There’s also MIT World, "a free, open, video streaming web site that provides on-demand video of significant public lectures and events at MIT. Another project is called PIVoT, for Physics Interactive Video Tutor. PIVOT "is a video-rich, interactive web-based learning environment."

And there’s a great deal of the extraordinary work coming out of CECI, such as Project iCampus, Operation Futuro, the Database Visualization in 3D Project, the Technology Enabled Active Learning Project, and much more.

Basically there isn’t nearly enough room here to talk about everything, so it is strongly recommended to visit the CAES website at http://cases.mit.org for a more complete overview of all that’s going on within the groups and subgroups of the Center.

And at the helm of all this is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of CAES Richard C. Larson. For Larson’s bio, please visit http://caes.mit.edu/people/larson.html.

EP: A theme we’ve seen in some of your presentations centers around "inventing the global classroom." What’s going on at MIT to facilitate the growth of the global classroom?

Larson: There are a number of issues. One is the question of improved pedagogical models for distance learning in general, nationally and internationally. How do you change the pedagogy of distance learning compared to an on-campus course to make it a good learning environment? We are trying to figure out the right pedagogical model within the context of the SMA program, and our newly evolving Cambridge/MIT Institute (and other CAES programs).

EP: What has your R & D related to distance learning pedagogy shown you thus far?

Larson: The issues are how much synchronous, how much asynchronous, how much peer-to-peer learning, and how much active learning can you do via the web versus in the classroom. We’ve tried a combination of all these methods, and I can’t say that we have found the silver bullet. I think the trend is to record the lecture and then focus on the interactivity. Students view the lectures asynchronously, and then we might have an additional special class with the professor talking interactively live with students on issues of a conceptual nature, responding to homework questions, or having a tutorial recitation.

EP: What really excites you about your research on the development of effective pedagogical models for distance learning?

Larson: Of particular interest to some of us is the question of what replaces the broadcast lecture mode, and we have a number of large experiments in that area. One is called the Physics Interactive Video Tutor (PiVOT). The interesting thing about PiVOT is that the students can digest material in a variety of ways based on their own learning styles and needs. PiVot requires that you have three servers in harmony: a web server, a video server and a database server with an Oracle database. We are spending major resources on creating improved video tutor shells with more and more functionality and robustness so you can pore any kind of content into this - Shakespeare, economics, psychology - whatever you want.

EP: What about the challenge presented when dealing with high-bandwidth online teaching and learning, especially since we’re talking about lots of video streaming here?

Larson: The lack of bandwidth is a short-term problem that should be resolved soon. A lot of companies have gone bankrupt because they created so much bandwidth. So, hopefully a lot of cheap bandwidth will become quite accessible soon. So, I guess it is either the last mile phenomenon, or often we run into the corporate firewall phenomenon. Also, there are some places where the Internet connection is not so good.. Other places like Singapore, Korea and parts of Japan, for example, are quite good.

EP: So how do you see these streaming-video-intensive pedagogical models developing in the future?

Larson: I see online pedagogy, using the web, and inventing new pedagogical models still in their infancy. We are going to find much more compelling pedagogical models. We are going to finally ditch the old chalk-and-talk broadcast lecture style and find out exactly how to utilize the web with all of its complexity and enabling technologies. I think we are not at a mature point. We haven’t solved this. We are at the very beginning of figuring out how to do this.

EP: Can you tell us what’s going on inside MIT’s Academic Media Production Services (AMPS) unit?

Larson: Well there’s the Educational Media Creation Center (part of AMPS), which is kind of a one-stop shop for web-based production. In addition to being customer responsive, they are also customer anticipatory. They are creating a course management system called Stellar, which is currently being used by MIT only. Its primary client is the SMA program. AMPS also contains all of MIT’s video production capabilities in MVP - MIT Video Productions. Also they have MIT’s primary streaming media digitization and web hosting facilities.

EP: Why go through the labor-intensive process of building another web platform when there are course management systems like Blackboard and WebCT that can provide such software?

Larson: A lot of people talk about the straightjacket these (vendor) web platforms can put you in. There is this thought that at leading research universities we are so idiosyncratic; we are so experimental; we are a little bit risk prone; we like to try different things; and, in fact, we don’t want to be in this kind of straightjacket. So Stellar is our first attempt, starting at the low level, at the plumbing level below the ground, those things that the applications people care about. We are trying to get all the plumbing fixed so it becomes invisible with interesting pedagogical models on top. This is being married with a collaborative project called the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI).

EP: Okay, there’s that word "open" that we hear about so often. What exactly do you mean by "open"?

Larson: The idea is that, with the collaboration of maybe a dozen or so Research One universities, we will get all the plumbing fixed. As we also build above ground, we will have an open architecture that these universities will support, that will encourage people to develop pedagogical models on top that are flexible and open, meaning open source, meaning interoperable, scalable, reusable, extensible - all those wonderful ables.

EP: Also meaning OKI compliant... How will this fit in with today’s alphabet soup of software compliancy and standardization models?

Larson: With regard to compliancy, we do have a lot of different standards right now. Some of the standards are almost competing with each other. We have to focus down so we end up with one set of standards. You have SCORM; you have IMS; you have OKI. You throw up your hands in disgust after a while. It gives you an Excedrin headache. I have to say most CAES activities put that in the background and assume that this is going to sort itself out. The areas we are most interested in are the pedagogical models. We will build them on top of the prevailing architecture. The notion then is that this will be supported by collaboration. Stanford is one of the big collaborators. North Carolina State is another. They are building the foundation. We can add, over time, different pedagogical functionalities on top of this platform. If the foundation is on granite rock below, you don’t have to worry about other things, like authentication and tying into legacy registrar’s databases. Hopefully all this will be solved in the plumbing done below the ground.

EP: How does CAES tie into MIT’s highly publicized OpenCourseWare (OCW) Initiative, and how much progress has OCW made thus far?

Larson: Announcing OCW was a hallmark event, a ten-year effort announced in one press release that was an 8.5 Richter earthquake around higher education. Several CAES people are involved in OCW, particularly Steve Lerman, who is the interim manager until we get a full-time director. Some staff members at CECI have played leadership roles. Also Stellar will be the platform for OCW. There are about ten OCW courses up for inspection by the MIT campus to give feedback and suggestions. I think that by the end of the summer they hope to have several dozen courses open to the public. Also, our MIT World project is sort of a baby sister of OCW.

EP: We watched a fascinating MIT World video lecture recently. Can you tell us more about MIT World?

Larson: It’s for those who say "I don’t only want course materials from MIT; I also want to see some of the excitement going on at MIT today." A lot of that excitement comes from an average of eight public seminars, talks, colloquia, lectures, etc. that are held each day from September 1 through May 31 on the MIT campus. Even those of us on campus often can’t attend these because of conflicts. By recording and making the event on-demand off the web, it allows everybody to attend. But the key thing is that our alumni said they wanted some electronic tethering to MIT over their lifetime. So the alumni association is the primary driver with us behind MIT World. Also, our office of corporate relations and the industrial liaison program at MIT like to see what’s going on. Some of these public seminars talk about pre-publication research results. (For instance), if it’s in the pharmaceutical area or the chip-design area, this can be quite relevant to our corporate partners.

EP: This idea of sharing information is really nothing new at MIT.

Larson: That’s correct. There are probably more than 100 MIT courses open to the public. You just have to go the MIT websites and see what’s there, but they are all homegrown. If you’re willing to take the idiosyncratic one course at a time, there are lots of them up right now. (For example) with some Lord Foundation money we put up a linear algebra course with Gilbert Strang. He is one of the world’s leading researchers and teachers in linear algebra. For many people these days in the technical arena, it’s much more important than calculus. All your animations and simulations out of Hollywood require linear algebra. All of Strang’s 35 lectures are online for the world to see. So in some sense, OCW is a continuation of MIT’s open policy that we had since 1995 or 1996. OCW is expansion and will make course material more robust, more accessible and searchable.

MIT Center for Advanced Educational Services