Special interview
The example of advanced
educational practice with ICT in North America
- MIT and Stanford University -
Japanese version here
- MIT and Stanford University -
Japanese version here
March
18, 2008 at Roppongi Academy Hills, Tokyo Japan
Ritsumeikan University is promoting the
educational reform that assumes "Achievement of the learner centered
education", "Creation of the learning community."
This time, about the construction of the learning environment with utilization of ICT to support an Active Learning in the higher education.
We did an interview to professionals of MIT and Stanford University.
Interviewee:
Dr. Peter Dourmashkin / Mr. Daniel Gilbert
- First, I would like to ask
about the strategies at MIT and Stanford University to promote IT
introduction to learning and teaching.
Mr. Daniel Gilbert:
Most importantly, we are not a top-down place, we are a bottom-up place. Only things that the community of professors want to happen, happened.
In the mid 1990s, the president of the university, whose name was Gerhard Casper, laid out a vision to improve the undergraduate experience on the biggest umbrella. So, we were going to make the undergraduate experience better.
So the question was not how do we use ICT, the question was how do we make the student experience better. We did think creatively about using technology to improve the student experience.
And we created several pilot programs and prototyping programs to test out new things. We do not say there is one way, but rather both space and tools and different kinds of technologies and let us invite our faculty on a small scale, their own individual scale, to try things out instead of pushing. On our campus, if we push something, it might fail.
Dr. Peter Dourmashkin:
I would like to give just a few words about the MIT institution culture. MIT is primarily engineering and science research university, and it has a strong program in the humanities, but it is really run by engineers, and engineers have a very particular perspective on how to do things, so it is very constructive and it is often not theoretical, but practical. So they love identifying a problem and trying to solve and sometimes they lack a huge vision, but at the sa
me time they are very good at solving problems.
Then, there is also another part of the MIT culture which is the way it is structured. There are 24 faculty departments and at the same time there are a number of research groups and they are all very independent and decentralized.
Then at the same time there is a whole community of people that are forming very specialized groups, information technology group, all different groups that are working in the interspaces between the departments and the research groups and this whole community, including graduate students, undergraduate students, post-docs and all the employees have a real sense of belonging to one institution.
So, what we call it is that it is possible to work between the cracks very easily and people are encouraged to find solutions, to invent solutions that fit in between sort of the strict institutional boundaries and that allows for creativity in this large umbrella organization. So, it is a very important way that it works.
About the ICT utilization in education and its strategy, I think, in order to generate an innovation in education, a faculty member has to lead it. That is crucial. However, once a faculty member embraces an innovation and there are already a long-established traditions of the faculty members doing this, their support for it, and you do not have to wait and talk with lot of groups for 5 or 10 years, you can act fast which is very important because people's interests change.
Gilbert:
We have a similar culture and sometimes we say it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. But it has to be from the faculty member. But we are encouraged to make things happen and not to do we need to ask the dean or that thing. If you have an idea about either collaboration or use of ICT, do it and then ask for forgiveness.
-There is a cultural difference in Japan and the United States.
Dourmashkin:
It is crucial that faculty identify a learning problem. It is not that we just want to use information technology, here is a problem that we need to solve.
For our TEAL program, the problem was physics education. There was institutional pressure that said our students were not learning physics like other departments want, so there was a clear problem.
In solving this physics problem, Professor John Belcher immediately get a group called the Teaching and Learning Laboratory, which is actually very crucial and it is sort of an education research group, another teachers joined him and support his efforts.
He could get the information technology's group to the Center for Educational and Computing Initiatives (CECI) that is where we did it in the Center for Educational Innovation. So, when we started TEAL in the developmental stage, it was in the information technology group.
We actually based the prototype and the developmental phase in the information technology group even though the physics department was supporting it and MIT institution and outside money was funded. There was an alliance and this is like Japan, but it was fast, an alliance was quickly made between the right groups and that enabled to develop materials that was based on learning.
What drove the innovation was the learning objectives and not sort of objectives about we should have more computers in the classroom, it was the learning objectives.
Gilbert:
The culture of prototyping that Peter described is very strong in Stanford too.
But it also means that people understand there will be failures. But most important thing is you learn from those failures, you do not make the same mistakes twice and so that is something that most broadly the culture accepts that it is OK to make a mistake if you have this noble goal and you say version 2 will be better.
Usually people often say this worked; this worked; this did not; this one, yes, it is all right; so keep those first two, think about that one and strengthen that other one. It is not all or nothing. It is not 100% success or 100% failure.
It is a culture of continuous improvement.
Dourmashkin:
I am in agreement with that. It usually takes three tries to get a project to work and so you do not have to have it perfect on the first try and people understand that no matter how much you plan, you try once and then you will discover things that you just never could have thought about until you actually tried it and that is, experimental science. That is what experimenters know all the time that you discover things in the process. So, usually, three times is what most people expect that it would to take to get something right.
In the course of trying out a number of innovations, something was discovered and not just at MIT but in a lot of places. It was that the traditional transfer of information that was done in lecture-based classes could be done more efficiently with information technologies.
For instance, there are courses at MIT which are videotaped lectures and those lectures are on live, and students can see the lecture any time they want. In fact, studies were made that students looked at the lectures at 2 a.m. in the morning at maximum. Because that part of teaching, just transferring information, can be done efficiently, with information technologies, the classroom opened up to become a place for discussion about the concepts and about generating new ideas and understanding and learning and so the idea that you would sit in class and just take notes, information technology can do that much better.
We used to say this expression, a lecture class is just a process of transferring the lecturer's notes to the student's notes, with nothing learned in between.
-In Japan, there is a general teaching style; teacher lectures, students take notes.
And when we start the discussion about introduction of e-learning, faculty often argues "do you say that teachers are no longer needed?"
Dourmashkin:
It is a new role for the faculty.
I am not completely sure about the history of Japanese education, but I know in Tokugawa Period, the samurai needed to do something, and so they became the teachers and scholars, and the model was transmission of Chinese classics and very structured system.
In western cultures, the lecture comes from the religious background. Monks read lectures because it was too hard to write the book, illuminated manuscripts were so hard to write that there was a shortage of books, so one person would stand in front of many and read the book. Now, this was 12th century, we can do better.
-How many numbers of supporting staff in addition to faculty members?
Dourmashkin:
I try to describe the team of people that were involved.
In the development stage, a faculty member picked me, and I joined the faculty member as a designer of the pedagogy and the fundamental structure.
I am a physicist, so I represent a specialist in the field, but I was picked not just because I was a physicist but because I had a long history in MIT of teaching in a number of teaching programs and that is unusual. So, I was a person who is not along traditional paths in the research universities. I was one of these people in between cracks and yet I had a track record of teaching so that I had creditability.
So I was brought in as a specialist in both how students learn and in teaching, but there is another type of teaching specialist in our team which acted as a consultant and that was from a group called The Teaching and Learning Laboratory. This was an expert in both physics education and research, so there is a big research community that has written quite a bit on best practices in physics and a lot of times academicians do not listen to the research that has been done in the field. The faculty, they just do not know because teaching is secondary to what they do.
Then, I had a person I worked with who was my colleague and together we prepared and developed materials, and you need our information technologies group, who developed a lot of the visualizations, wrote the software and we had four people from information technology group who were responsible for various aspects of the technology. The faculty member made that his research group, so they are able to use the educational innovation as a part of his research, this is a key.
Gilbert:
I just to build on that, a key ingredient is some challenge to think differently about roles and to look for expertise in unusual places or outside of your group. So, the example of a faculty member creating a research project from a staff group around his teaching is very different than traditional research project with graduate students doing a lot of the work.
So in our case, in my role, I have been charged with figuring out ways to make things happen. That is exciting, but that is not a job description. My performance evaluation, I am fortunate that I have worked in for a manager and a culture that understands there is not a checklist of this happened and this did not, but it is a more holistic approach of are we generating innovative ideas that benefit faculty and students.
Dourmashkin:
So now another key part is actually interesting how this developed. To build the space, the architectural space, the information technology group did that job and that is not their specialty, but that was the prototype and as the project developed other people at MIT who were more specialized in that and made it their focus took over that task because they were much better at it, so people came into the group when they saw what we were doing and brought their expertise in, good example of that. So, in the prototype stage, we were not having the world-class experts, but people came in quickly.
Remember, we understand that what we did was unique to Stanford and MIT and the important thing here is not whether our culture will immediately go over to Japan, but I think what is important is that it is kind of something that Professor Nagata was talking about. Here is how we did it.
What is crucial is to transform it here and find a context in Japanese culture that can take the things that worked for us and adapt it and make it work inside the Japanese culture. So, when I describe things, I realize that there is a big step that needs to be made.
Gilbert:
So, we can help with the input culture, our experience and specific lists of things, but the transformed part is the hard part that you were trying to.
-It is important to work closely with faculty, how you get the opinions and comments of the faculty?
Gilbert:
So, for me this is exactly how I became connected with the Wallenberg Hall project and that was as a graduate student. I worked with faculty who had been known to be exciting teachers, good teachers, nothing to do with technology, just good teachers, and I worked with a group of them to write scenarios, if you are familiar with scenario-based designs, so it is a design approach to almost write a story, like a movie or a book.
So it would be, Professor Peter walks into class at 10 o'clock, he puts his computer down, students start an experiment, after working on the experiment for 10 minutes first, then he gives a 15 minute overview lecture, then back to the experiment, then different teams sort of…, and "oh, 1 o'clock, the class is over," I go back to my office, students have uploaded everything, it is a story of the way things should be. A story of the way things should be.
Then my task was to work backwards from this wonderful blue case, I will say blue sky, wonderful wish dream land, then work backwards to what you can accomplish in the immediate term, medium term and long term, maybe never, but who knows, things change so fast.
Then that way we could demonstrate to the faculty, "hey, we are listening." You said, "You wish A, B, and C."
We know we can do A and we will deliver that.
We are pretty sure we can do B in a couple of years.
Here is a way to test it. C might be never.
I might be talk to my colleague who is an expert in how people teach Japanese language, instead of physics, and maybe they have an idea from how you teach Japanese language that connects with what your goals are, in terms of what students do, not the subject matter but what they are doing.
It maybe can help that other subject expert make a connection that he would have thought of and probably would not intersect with a person, a physicist and a Japanese teacher probably do not see each other too often. But if I can connect them, maybe that can be a dream faculty interaction.
Dourmashkin:
So, I will describe a couple of ways of uniting the faculty. That is very simple at MIT. One of the staff groups is support services for students and it is in the team for undergraduate education and this is a very large group. There are about 40 people working in this group, for all different parts of support services. One of the activities that they organize is every month all the faculty, who are teaching first year students, are invited to come together for lunch. There is not necessarily an agenda, but it is just an open discussion about their experience in the first year.
Now, what is interesting about this is not everybody comes, but the people who do come are the people who are interested in undergraduate education and this is how the faculty can see who is interested and so whenever there are initiatives, it usually comes from that group. You do not have to go every month, it is not a club, it is just an informal discussion, very simple lunch, not a fancy lunch because it has to happen fast, it is in two hours and no drinking, but it unites people.
Information technologies group can do a similar thing, and people can just say what are our needs, what is our wish list and also people complain. You know what do we all complain about because in the complaints, people start thinking, "what can I do to solve those complaints." So that is a simple exercise that is actually very interesting.
- Thank you very much
------
After the interview...
We can talk pleasantly, and positively though an interview. We really appreciated the openness of two professionals. We made point that the introducing ICT should not be aimed at.
It was a wonderful opportunity to learn from the great experiences both MIT and Stanford University.
We felt that we could figure out how to work collaboratively with faculty to administrative staff.
However, the United States case should not be directly brought to Japan, as two professionals suggested. We should respect each culture and a tradition.
We were able to be made strong to make an effort further more aiming at promotion of the educational reform that used ICT that was able to make the best use of the individuality of Ritsumeikan University, the strong point, and teachers' zeal.
Acknowledgements:
We appreciate the great support from Dr. N (T University), and Dr. M (A University), Ms. N for the perfect interpretation, and wonderful presentation from Dr. Dourmashkin and Mr. Gilbert.
[May 16, 2008 updated]
------
This time, about the construction of the learning environment with utilization of ICT to support an Active Learning in the higher education.
We did an interview to professionals of MIT and Stanford University.
Interviewee:
Dr. Peter Dourmashkin （Photo Left )
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（MIT）, Department of Physics, Senior Lecturer
Mr. Daniel Gilbert （Photo Right)
Stanford University, Academic Technology Specialist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（MIT）, Department of Physics, Senior Lecturer
Mr. Daniel Gilbert （Photo Right)
Stanford University, Academic Technology Specialist
Interviewer: Keiko Noda, Yoko Morita, Learning Technology Support Office, Ritsumeikan University
Dr. Peter Dourmashkin / Mr. Daniel Gilbert
Mr. Daniel Gilbert:
Most importantly, we are not a top-down place, we are a bottom-up place. Only things that the community of professors want to happen, happened.
In the mid 1990s, the president of the university, whose name was Gerhard Casper, laid out a vision to improve the undergraduate experience on the biggest umbrella. So, we were going to make the undergraduate experience better.
So the question was not how do we use ICT, the question was how do we make the student experience better. We did think creatively about using technology to improve the student experience.
And we created several pilot programs and prototyping programs to test out new things. We do not say there is one way, but rather both space and tools and different kinds of technologies and let us invite our faculty on a small scale, their own individual scale, to try things out instead of pushing. On our campus, if we push something, it might fail.
Dr. Peter Dourmashkin:
I would like to give just a few words about the MIT institution culture. MIT is primarily engineering and science research university, and it has a strong program in the humanities, but it is really run by engineers, and engineers have a very particular perspective on how to do things, so it is very constructive and it is often not theoretical, but practical. So they love identifying a problem and trying to solve and sometimes they lack a huge vision, but at the sa
me time they are very good at solving problems.Then, there is also another part of the MIT culture which is the way it is structured. There are 24 faculty departments and at the same time there are a number of research groups and they are all very independent and decentralized.
Then at the same time there is a whole community of people that are forming very specialized groups, information technology group, all different groups that are working in the interspaces between the departments and the research groups and this whole community, including graduate students, undergraduate students, post-docs and all the employees have a real sense of belonging to one institution.
So, what we call it is that it is possible to work between the cracks very easily and people are encouraged to find solutions, to invent solutions that fit in between sort of the strict institutional boundaries and that allows for creativity in this large umbrella organization. So, it is a very important way that it works.
About the ICT utilization in education and its strategy, I think, in order to generate an innovation in education, a faculty member has to lead it. That is crucial. However, once a faculty member embraces an innovation and there are already a long-established traditions of the faculty members doing this, their support for it, and you do not have to wait and talk with lot of groups for 5 or 10 years, you can act fast which is very important because people's interests change.
Gilbert:
We have a similar culture and sometimes we say it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. But it has to be from the faculty member. But we are encouraged to make things happen and not to do we need to ask the dean or that thing. If you have an idea about either collaboration or use of ICT, do it and then ask for forgiveness.
-There is a cultural difference in Japan and the United States.
Dourmashkin:
It is crucial that faculty identify a learning problem. It is not that we just want to use information technology, here is a problem that we need to solve.
For our TEAL program, the problem was physics education. There was institutional pressure that said our students were not learning physics like other departments want, so there was a clear problem.
In solving this physics problem, Professor John Belcher immediately get a group called the Teaching and Learning Laboratory, which is actually very crucial and it is sort of an education research group, another teachers joined him and support his efforts.
He could get the information technology's group to the Center for Educational and Computing Initiatives (CECI) that is where we did it in the Center for Educational Innovation. So, when we started TEAL in the developmental stage, it was in the information technology group.
We actually based the prototype and the developmental phase in the information technology group even though the physics department was supporting it and MIT institution and outside money was funded. There was an alliance and this is like Japan, but it was fast, an alliance was quickly made between the right groups and that enabled to develop materials that was based on learning.
What drove the innovation was the learning objectives and not sort of objectives about we should have more computers in the classroom, it was the learning objectives.
Gilbert:
The culture of prototyping that Peter described is very strong in Stanford too.
But it also means that people understand there will be failures. But most important thing is you learn from those failures, you do not make the same mistakes twice and so that is something that most broadly the culture accepts that it is OK to make a mistake if you have this noble goal and you say version 2 will be better.
Usually people often say this worked; this worked; this did not; this one, yes, it is all right; so keep those first two, think about that one and strengthen that other one. It is not all or nothing. It is not 100% success or 100% failure.
It is a culture of continuous improvement.
Dourmashkin:
I am in agreement with that. It usually takes three tries to get a project to work and so you do not have to have it perfect on the first try and people understand that no matter how much you plan, you try once and then you will discover things that you just never could have thought about until you actually tried it and that is, experimental science. That is what experimenters know all the time that you discover things in the process. So, usually, three times is what most people expect that it would to take to get something right.
In the course of trying out a number of innovations, something was discovered and not just at MIT but in a lot of places. It was that the traditional transfer of information that was done in lecture-based classes could be done more efficiently with information technologies.
For instance, there are courses at MIT which are videotaped lectures and those lectures are on live, and students can see the lecture any time they want. In fact, studies were made that students looked at the lectures at 2 a.m. in the morning at maximum. Because that part of teaching, just transferring information, can be done efficiently, with information technologies, the classroom opened up to become a place for discussion about the concepts and about generating new ideas and understanding and learning and so the idea that you would sit in class and just take notes, information technology can do that much better.
We used to say this expression, a lecture class is just a process of transferring the lecturer's notes to the student's notes, with nothing learned in between.
-In Japan, there is a general teaching style; teacher lectures, students take notes.
And when we start the discussion about introduction of e-learning, faculty often argues "do you say that teachers are no longer needed?"
Dourmashkin:
It is a new role for the faculty.
I am not completely sure about the history of Japanese education, but I know in Tokugawa Period, the samurai needed to do something, and so they became the teachers and scholars, and the model was transmission of Chinese classics and very structured system.
In western cultures, the lecture comes from the religious background. Monks read lectures because it was too hard to write the book, illuminated manuscripts were so hard to write that there was a shortage of books, so one person would stand in front of many and read the book. Now, this was 12th century, we can do better.
-How many numbers of supporting staff in addition to faculty members?
Dourmashkin:
I try to describe the team of people that were involved.
In the development stage, a faculty member picked me, and I joined the faculty member as a designer of the pedagogy and the fundamental structure.
I am a physicist, so I represent a specialist in the field, but I was picked not just because I was a physicist but because I had a long history in MIT of teaching in a number of teaching programs and that is unusual. So, I was a person who is not along traditional paths in the research universities. I was one of these people in between cracks and yet I had a track record of teaching so that I had creditability.
So I was brought in as a specialist in both how students learn and in teaching, but there is another type of teaching specialist in our team which acted as a consultant and that was from a group called The Teaching and Learning Laboratory. This was an expert in both physics education and research, so there is a big research community that has written quite a bit on best practices in physics and a lot of times academicians do not listen to the research that has been done in the field. The faculty, they just do not know because teaching is secondary to what they do.
Then, I had a person I worked with who was my colleague and together we prepared and developed materials, and you need our information technologies group, who developed a lot of the visualizations, wrote the software and we had four people from information technology group who were responsible for various aspects of the technology. The faculty member made that his research group, so they are able to use the educational innovation as a part of his research, this is a key.
Gilbert:
I just to build on that, a key ingredient is some challenge to think differently about roles and to look for expertise in unusual places or outside of your group. So, the example of a faculty member creating a research project from a staff group around his teaching is very different than traditional research project with graduate students doing a lot of the work.
So in our case, in my role, I have been charged with figuring out ways to make things happen. That is exciting, but that is not a job description. My performance evaluation, I am fortunate that I have worked in for a manager and a culture that understands there is not a checklist of this happened and this did not, but it is a more holistic approach of are we generating innovative ideas that benefit faculty and students.
Dourmashkin:
So now another key part is actually interesting how this developed. To build the space, the architectural space, the information technology group did that job and that is not their specialty, but that was the prototype and as the project developed other people at MIT who were more specialized in that and made it their focus took over that task because they were much better at it, so people came into the group when they saw what we were doing and brought their expertise in, good example of that. So, in the prototype stage, we were not having the world-class experts, but people came in quickly.
Remember, we understand that what we did was unique to Stanford and MIT and the important thing here is not whether our culture will immediately go over to Japan, but I think what is important is that it is kind of something that Professor Nagata was talking about. Here is how we did it.
What is crucial is to transform it here and find a context in Japanese culture that can take the things that worked for us and adapt it and make it work inside the Japanese culture. So, when I describe things, I realize that there is a big step that needs to be made.
Gilbert:
So, we can help with the input culture, our experience and specific lists of things, but the transformed part is the hard part that you were trying to.
-It is important to work closely with faculty, how you get the opinions and comments of the faculty?
Gilbert:
So, for me this is exactly how I became connected with the Wallenberg Hall project and that was as a graduate student. I worked with faculty who had been known to be exciting teachers, good teachers, nothing to do with technology, just good teachers, and I worked with a group of them to write scenarios, if you are familiar with scenario-based designs, so it is a design approach to almost write a story, like a movie or a book.
So it would be, Professor Peter walks into class at 10 o'clock, he puts his computer down, students start an experiment, after working on the experiment for 10 minutes first, then he gives a 15 minute overview lecture, then back to the experiment, then different teams sort of…, and "oh, 1 o'clock, the class is over," I go back to my office, students have uploaded everything, it is a story of the way things should be. A story of the way things should be.
Then my task was to work backwards from this wonderful blue case, I will say blue sky, wonderful wish dream land, then work backwards to what you can accomplish in the immediate term, medium term and long term, maybe never, but who knows, things change so fast.
Then that way we could demonstrate to the faculty, "hey, we are listening." You said, "You wish A, B, and C."
We know we can do A and we will deliver that.
We are pretty sure we can do B in a couple of years.
Here is a way to test it. C might be never.
I might be talk to my colleague who is an expert in how people teach Japanese language, instead of physics, and maybe they have an idea from how you teach Japanese language that connects with what your goals are, in terms of what students do, not the subject matter but what they are doing.
It maybe can help that other subject expert make a connection that he would have thought of and probably would not intersect with a person, a physicist and a Japanese teacher probably do not see each other too often. But if I can connect them, maybe that can be a dream faculty interaction.
Dourmashkin:
So, I will describe a couple of ways of uniting the faculty. That is very simple at MIT. One of the staff groups is support services for students and it is in the team for undergraduate education and this is a very large group. There are about 40 people working in this group, for all different parts of support services. One of the activities that they organize is every month all the faculty, who are teaching first year students, are invited to come together for lunch. There is not necessarily an agenda, but it is just an open discussion about their experience in the first year.
Now, what is interesting about this is not everybody comes, but the people who do come are the people who are interested in undergraduate education and this is how the faculty can see who is interested and so whenever there are initiatives, it usually comes from that group. You do not have to go every month, it is not a club, it is just an informal discussion, very simple lunch, not a fancy lunch because it has to happen fast, it is in two hours and no drinking, but it unites people.
Information technologies group can do a similar thing, and people can just say what are our needs, what is our wish list and also people complain. You know what do we all complain about because in the complaints, people start thinking, "what can I do to solve those complaints." So that is a simple exercise that is actually very interesting.
- Thank you very much
------
After the interview...
We can talk pleasantly, and positively though an interview. We really appreciated the openness of two professionals. We made point that the introducing ICT should not be aimed at.
It was a wonderful opportunity to learn from the great experiences both MIT and Stanford University.
We felt that we could figure out how to work collaboratively with faculty to administrative staff.
However, the United States case should not be directly brought to Japan, as two professionals suggested. We should respect each culture and a tradition.
We were able to be made strong to make an effort further more aiming at promotion of the educational reform that used ICT that was able to make the best use of the individuality of Ritsumeikan University, the strong point, and teachers' zeal.
Acknowledgements:
We appreciate the great support from Dr. N (T University), and Dr. M (A University), Ms. N for the perfect interpretation, and wonderful presentation from Dr. Dourmashkin and Mr. Gilbert.
[May 16, 2008 updated]
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