DIGITAL LEARNING IN EDUCATION @ MIT
News from Residential Education at ODL: Vol. 2, Issue 4, June 2018.
In this issue:
- Residential Digital Innovations
- 2018 Teaching with Digital Technology Award Winners
- What's New in MITx?
- xTalks Faculty Survey: we want to hear from you
- News from MITili
- J-WEL Updates
Residential Digital Innovations
To learn more about digital innovations and initiatives on campus, visit the new Residential Digital Innovations page on Open Learning. Excerpt below:
Browse through a searchable collection of case studies and videos that describe how MIT faculty are leveraging the capabilities of MITx and other digital tools to deepen and strengthen learning for on-campus students.
Teaching with Digital Technology Awards: 2018 Winners
We are proud to announce this year's winners:
- Simona Socrate, Mechanical Engineering
- Chris Caplice, Center for Transportation and Logistics
- Michael Yaffe, Biology
- Eric Huntley, Urban Studies and Planning
We congratulate the winners and the nominees!
In its third year, the Teaching with Digital Technology Awards are student-nominated awards for instructors who have effectively used digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT. The goal is to recognize instructors for their innovations and to give the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their practices. This year we received 99 nominations for 58 different faculty and instructors. The awards are co-sponsored by Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor.
To learn more about this year's winners and their work, watch the TWDTA video.
What's new in MITx?
MITx remains a popular and well-supported platform. It was recently updated with several notable feature changes such as:
- The page of available MITx courses is now a list organized numerically (course images removed). We hope this will make it easier for users to locate relevant sites.
- Improvements to the course outline allow users to expand sections of their course and navigate more quickly to desired content.
- ‘Rapid Response', a new problem type, enables instructors to replace 'clicker questions' in their classes. It includes the ability to open and close a problem quickly and a bar chart showing student responses.
Release notes with more details on the upgrade changes will be shared with instructors soon. A reminder: if you have questions, MITx support is a helpful, comprehensive resource, for everything from an in-person pedagogical consultation to quick technical questions about the platform. MITx educational technologists want to help users meet their goals through support, guidance, and partnership. If you're new to MITx, educational technologists can help make initial set-up and course creation easy and transparent.
Faculty Survey
xTalks: Digital Discourses
MIT faculty and instructors: please fill in this short xTalks survey so that our programming can best serve your interests. Thank you!
MITili
The MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili) is collaborating with Harvard University and Florida State University to propel students in early childhood literacy. The new program, Reach Every Reader, brings some of the top researchers in their field together to work on rigorous scientific approaches to personalized learning and literacy. Recently, MITili Deputy Director Parag Pathak was awarded the John Bates Clark medal for his work that led to significant improvement in the assignment of students to public schools. MITili will also be awarding their first round of research grants at the end of June.
J-WEL
The Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) promotes excellence in education through three collaboratives that, together, describe a pathway of lifelong learning: preschool to 12th grade (pK-12), led by MIT professors Angela Belcher and Eric Klopfer; higher education, directed by Professor Hazel Sive; and workplace learning under the leadership of George Westerman, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy.
J-WEL connects its members, which include schools, universities, government agencies, NGOs, and companies from around the world, with MIT innovators in education to foster transformation in educational systems. Last month, the lab celebrated its one-year anniversary. During its first year, J-WEL awarded over $490k in grants to MIT faculty for work in education innovation. The lab also hosted two J-WEL Weeks. Combined, the gatherings had over 220 attendees from 28 countries.
News from Residential Education at ODL: Vol. 2, Issue 4, June, 2018. To suggest article topics, ask questions, or subscribe to this newsletter, please email res-ed-newsletter@mit.edu.