Space Shuttle MOOC Inspires Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur in Australia, Gary has drawn leadership inspiration from MITx courses taught by astronauts
Gary Smith, an entrepreneur from Australia, is one of the many people for whom online courses from MIT has facilitated lifelong learning. Having first read about MITx, which delivers massive open online courses (MOOCs) for free through the edX platform, in a newspaper article in 2014, he quickly enrolled in his first course.
“I was hooked,” Gary said. “I almost couldn’t believe I could take a course at institutions like MIT and Harvard from Australia.”
Gary has since taken several MOOCs, including the MITx/HarvardX collaboration Visualizing Japan (1850s–1930s): Westernization, Protest, Modernity, which examines Japanese history through images, and Engineering the Space Shuttle, which was taught by the same scholars who designed, built, and operated the world’s first reusable space shuttle.
While Gary’s interest in Japanese history stems from his travels to Japan for work and with his sons on their junior rugby tours, he admitted that, “for a person whose background is media and marketing and whose education is in economics and business, engineering seems totally out of the square.”
But the lessons from the course have translated into these other parts of Gary’s life in valuable ways.
“The Space Shuttle is probably the most complex flight vehicle ever built,” he said. “Understanding, though on a limited basis, the complexity of the project and the integration of systems, management of disparate organizations and coordinating massive teams has relevance with developing and running large companies.”
Aaron Cohen, who directed the NASA Johnson Space Center from 1986–1993 and co-taught Engineering the Space Shuttle, was especially inspiring. To Gary, he offered an example of effective leadership that transcends disciplinary boundaries.
“I feel I have had a unique experience being able to hear from those that made human space flight a reality,” Gary said. “I watched [several] of the lecture videos a number of times simply because the presenters were so interesting.”
In addition to the many spheres of knowledge that edX and MITx have opened up, Gary is drawn to courses that “may position [him] better to be able to do good for society, through knowledge, support, training and promotion.”
As a firm believer that “education should be a right, not a privilege, and that education should not be discriminatory,” Gary appreciates MITx’s mission of extending MIT’s educational resources worldwide for its impact on not only his own life, but also on the lives of millions of learners around the world.