Advancing innovation in education
By Carolyn Tiernan | MIT Jameel World Education
The MIT Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) at Open Learning recently hosted Ideas to Impact, its annual flagship online Connections conference. The J-WEL team, MIT colleagues, and our members came together to reflect on the year’s accomplishments, strengthen relationships, and look to the future. The Connections agenda previewed the three themes for J-WEL in 2025: campus innovation pipelines, sustainability, and AI for education.
Innovation Pipelines
Anjali Sastry, J-WEL’s faculty director, kicked off the event by introducing the concept of campus innovation pipelines, a framework for universities to map and examine the activities, norms, and behaviors that enable innovation on campus. With its myriad non-linear touchpoints, it is an institution’s innovation pipeline that ultimately brings ideas and solutions to life, from problem formulation and ideation to productization, market entry, or open-source dissemination. Innovation pipelines are a framework through which solutions to many topics and challenges can be explored, such as sustainability and AI — the other two J-WEL themes for 2025.
J-WEL members shared their own examples of projects happening at different points on the innovation pipeline. Paula Elksne-Reveliņa, director of the Education Innovation Lab at Riga Business School (RBS), spoke about the progress of the Education Innovation Laboratory — a strategic initiative created with the support of J-WEL — to foster innovation within Riga Technical University (where RBS is based) and across Latvian universities. She welcomed speakers from three Lab project teams representing Riga Stradins University, Children’s Clinical University Hospital, and University of Latvia whose projects focused on innovation in communication, healthcare, and doctoral education. The speakers shared several key learnings from their projects that drove successful innovation practices; consistent across all of the projects were the importance of mindset shifts, strategically securing stakeholder buy-in, and the integration of action learning.
Jorge Meza Aguilar, director of admission and experience of the university career at Universidad Iberoamericana (IBERO), shared how IBERO is innovating at the first-year student level to increase undergraduate admissions and improve the student experience on campus. He gave an overview of the student journey mapping exercise he and his team conducted and is now using to drive continuous improvement at each student touchpoint by leveraging UX and service design principles. The data he is gleaning from this exercise is enabling his team to make better decisions, have personalized conversations with prospective students, customize scholarship programs and create more powerful marketing campaigns. Meza first shared this work with members that attended J-WEL’s in-person workshop this past September focused on the first year student experience.
Sustainability
Universities must not only contribute to climate change solutions, but produce graduates that are equipped to effectively respond to sustainability challenges. Sustainability is a broad topic that J-WEL will explore in 2025 through a few lenses: how innovative sustainability efforts are being incubated on campus, what educational frameworks need to be taught in order to graduate students, and how to encourage faculty to tackle these global challenges. We will also examine MIT’s Climate Project as a representative example of how innovative sustainability efforts might be incubated on campus. These insights will aid in the identification and initiation of new conversations, content, and collaborations across the J-WEL member network to tackle the global climate change challenge.
At Connections, Julie Newman, director of the Office of Sustainability, introduced attendees to the ways that MIT fosters innovation related to sustainability on campus and within the larger Cambridge and Massachusetts ecosystems. J-WEL grantees Chris Rabe, education program director at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative and Lana Cook, associate director of the MIT Systems Awareness Lab, shared highlights of their research around some of the curriculum and educational frameworks related to sustainability taught on campus. Finally, Jason Jay, director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan, brought the conversation to a global impact level through his brief tour of the En-ROADS climate simulator. Developed by Climate Interactive, MIT Sloan, and Ventana Systems, this tool is leveraged worldwide to model the potential impacts of climate mitigation strategies.
AI for Education
Generative AI’s impact on education systems has evolved rapidly since ChatGPT was introduced in late 2022. The J-WEL community explored this theme in depth in 2024, from the ethics and governance perspective to real-life applications of AI by students, entrepreneurs, faculty, and administrators. However, with the technology’s capabilities continuing to quickly evolve, we will carry this theme forward into 2025.
Several speakers at Connections underscored the importance of AI as a tool that requires universal fluency, and for educators to use to elevate teaching and student outcomes. MIT Open Learning Vice Provost Dimitris Bertsimas shared his vision to deliver Universal AI education that will provide both in-depth technical expertise and cross-disciplinary education in AI. MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program Director and Professor Eric Klopfer and Research Scientist Kate Moore reinforced the importance of AI fluency through the example of the Everyday AI curriculum, and shared their research into how K-12 teachers are using AI as a tool in the classroom.
On the J-WEL member side, we heard from three representatives from the AI4U working group, J-WEL’s first member-led group that is bringing together senior faculty and administrators in an open format to share, experiment and co-create ideas, methodologies and insights around implementing and utilizing AI in education to benefit the work of J-WEL members and beyond. Robert Clarisó Viladrosa, lecturer at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya; Melchor Sánchez Mendiola, professor of medical education and coordinator of Assessment, Educational Innovation and Development at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM); and Maura Pompa Mansilla, coordinator of Management and Systematization of Knowledge in Education, also of UNAM, are members of the AI4U group and spoke to several AI-specific initiatives at their institutions.
In 2025, J-WEL will continue to explore the impacts, implementations, and innovations of artificial intelligence on the education sector through the lens of both MIT and member institutions.
Part of MIT Open Learning, the Jameel World Education Lab enables research and outreach with faculty from across MIT, member institutions, and educational innovators worldwide to transform learning at scale.
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