Spotlight on Mary Ellen Wiltrout, MITx Digital Learning Lab
Dr. Mary Ellen Wiltrout is an MITx Digital Learning Scientist in the Department of Biology. She received her PhD in biology studying translesion synthesis at MIT. Since 2009, she has worked in education and curriculum development, teaching her own courses, overseeing the development of innovative digital learning content and tools, and conducting education research. As part of the MITx Digital Learning Lab, Dr. Wiltrout currently works with MIT Open Learning and her academic department to improve the education experience for MIT faculty and students, as well as learners around the world.
In a recent interview with Open Learning, Dr. Wiltrout shared insights into the impact that her work in digital learning has had on MIT’s campus and globally. With her team—a group of two postdoctoral Digital Learning Fellows and several graduate and undergraduate contributors—Dr. Wiltrout brings disciplinary expertise and knowledge of evidence-based teaching practices to the digital learning space.
As a member of the MITx Digital Learning Lab and the Department of Biology, you and your team design and develop online courses and digital learning materials, with a focus on biology content, for use on campus and globally. What does this collaboration entail? How has it shaped the projects you work on?
Our team is supported by Open Learning and by the biology department, and this has been important for how things operate. Because we’re in the department, it allows for our relationships with faculty to develop and for the work to happen more easily. So I don’t categorize my work as Biology work or Open Learning work. All of the work is related to using digital learning to improve the educational experience on campus and sharing our courses with the world through the MOOCs on edX.
What does overseeing the development of a digital learning strategy involve?
A big part of my work is project management—keeping things on track. The projects we have are very large and involve a product that we then present to the world on a certain deadline. I oversee all the different aspects of these projects, like video editing, coding, writing problems—putting the pieces together in a timely fashion so that we meet larger deadlines.
I have two postdocs who work full-time with me as Digital Learning Fellows, and other grad students and people around MIT who help part-time with the projects. So I do things like mentor and manage the team. The postdocs, who focus on teaching and digital learning, are training with me in that sense.
Our team also focuses on education research. We’ll study our interventions in the digital learning space to try to understand whether it’s improving the student learning experience. Sometimes we look at other aspects, like course design—how we design the online course or the website for students and how these choices impact student behavior.
There’s the large MOOC projects, but we also work with faculty on campus who want to use digital learning to improve the student experience. We typically try to start with on-campus projects, to get things started. There might be something that the faculty wants to do but doesn’t have the time or capacity or know-how to do—we try to solve these problems largely in our work.
What are some of the challenges of developing and executing digital learning strategies?
We want to use evidence-based teaching—meaning practices that have been supported by literature on the best ways for students to learn and for people to teach—but to have such major changes happen on campus requires time. We can’t just tell someone to do something and then they do it. And we can’t make the changes ourselves and expect everyone else to follow suit. There has to be a careful balance of finding something that faculty and departments want to do; if it’s solving a problem, we then help them in some way. They can then see the benefits for themselves and their students. So we usually have to do things in an iterative process rather than completely changing a course. For the students and the faculty, this is a better method that allows them to get used to new practices. We also learn from interventions that we’ve done in previous years. Did that work well? Why did it work or not work?
So the challenges really are the barriers to change that many higher education institutions face—that the faculty have minimal time, that they’re constrained by not knowing about evidence-based practices in the literature. We solve these problems by taking on creating the course materials that are digital. We have the background in educational research to help with that. For us to try to get people to adopt these practices takes working with them for several semesters. We make small changes each year, which add up to bigger changes for a course.
You were part of the team for one of the most innovative, early MOOCs, Introduction to Biology – The Secret of Life (7.00x). Based on your experiences working on MOOCs, what are your thoughts on how they benefit learners?
We really need to look at individuals to understand the impact that MOOCs have. The most interesting type of data would be the people that I get to know personally that are taking our MOOCs or just reading our discussion forums. For example, this summer I met with a student who’s starting his freshman year at MIT this week, whom I first met when he was in middle school. He’s from Minnesota and he started doing our intro bio course when he hadn’t even taken AP Bio yet. So he was bored in high school when he started. He took the required classes but he still did more—he did many of the MITx courses online after school and did so well in them that he became a community TA for our courses. He took additional MOOCs that we offer—upper-level molecular biology when he was only 15 or 16. He would be responding to the forum, answering questions from or discussing things with people who could be working in the biotech industry. That was interesting to watch over time. He started working in a lab at the nearby university doing research and in his last year of high school took only college-level courses. He went from just learning about biology to being really interested in it and many other sciences and now he’s here at MIT.
Another student whom I met this summer took the intro bio course a little over a year ago and then emailed us to ask about other resources. We started talking to him and we told him about things like iGEM, where students can do science projects at their local schools, and BioBuilders, which is related to biological engineering, because he wanted to do something related to lab even though he wasn’t at a lab. He started a science club at his high school and this summer, he was accepted to one of the engineering camps that MIT runs. He said he wouldn’t have believed a year ago that he actually would be here at MIT after learning from MIT faculty online—he never thought it’d be possible.
And then some of our learners are older adults who are changing careers or retired and do MOOCs for fun. We also have young people—as young as 9 or 10—who are trying to take these courses, so there’s a complete spectrum of people who enroll in MOOCs.
How have your experiences in the physical classroom impacted the work you do in the digital learning space?
My team includes PhDs in biology, so we have the discipline knowledge, but we also have a lot of experience teaching in-person and with the education research field. We can put all these pieces together and apply them to digital learning. I was part of the HHMI Summer Institute in which we were facilitating other people with active learning—a lot of those principles can be applied to something digital. For example, in a classroom there’s a 50-minute lecture, which is not necessarily the best practice. So if we have anything online, we break the video into smaller pieces and then include questions after the smaller pieces. There’s some active component even if learners are doing something like watching videos that are maybe more passive. So we can apply most of the principles in the digital format even if they were meant to be more for an in-person class experience.
We give feedback to the faculty as well when we have conversations about digital learning that can then impact what they do in the classroom.
What makes the Digital Learning Lab’s model for developing digital learning content and materials innovative?
I think the model of the Digital Learning Lab and people like us in academic departments is unique to MIT. Typically, there’s some sort of central staff that have separate goals. So there might be people who do video editing, people who do instructional design, people who put Word documents online. Our model is very different because we create content; in our case, we even do the video editing, create the images, do the animation, write the problems, encode the problems, and discuss ideas with the faculty to try to make things happen. That model tends to be effective at MIT because we do have discipline expertise. That’s not necessarily the case at other institutions.
We started as a group and it’s become pretty well-established, and that’s something Open Learning wants to expand upon. Not every department has a group like us. We’d be happy if every department had this model. It’s just an issue of finding the right people, getting departments to buy in and commit to digital learning. Those sorts of things are just the barriers to institutional change but there are many departments now that have at least a junior person, and at least five departments that have more of a team, and individual persons who do similar work.