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The iCampus Technology-Enabled Active Learning Project at MIT: An Interview With Phillip Long

Innovate (05/09) Vol. 5, No. 4, Morrison, James L.; Long, Phillip



Former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Phillip Long discusses the recently concluded iCampus project, a research collaboration between MIT and Microsoft Research focused on developing and implementing technologies to facilitate more effective learning. Driving the project were concerns about low attendance and a high drop-out/failure rate for certain courses. Long cites as an example a physicist's redesign of his Technology-Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) initiative to improve attendance and reduce attrition in his introductory physics class by adopting a more dynamic teaching strategy that includes peer instruction. The TEAL model organizes students into teams, each of which is given three computers, a projector, a ceiling-mounted camera, and a whiteboard so that students can share work that might be valuable to the rest of the class. Through the iCampus program, MIT established the iLabs project to put repeatable and sustainable experiments online using standardized Web services to meet common needs. Long says these needs include a way of authenticating and authorizing access to each experiment, a data storage functionality, and a scheduling service. The iLabs remote laboratory software architecture was developed to embed specific learning objectives into the interface. The long-term continuance of iLabs is the goal of a still-embryonic consortium of educational, governmental, and corporate institutions.

(from ACM TechNews)