Technology Day 2000 - "Clicks & Mortar, Future of Physical University”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PRESENTER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to our afternoon panel on Clicks and Mortar, the Future of Physical University. It's an appropriate topic in many, many ways.

About a century and a half ago, 1852, Henry Cardinal Newman wrote a book called The Idea of the University in which he examined the nature of the university, what it was to be a university, what it was to be an educated person. Ideas have changed considerably since that time but the fact remains that the concept of the university is an important part of our culture and ever more important these days.

How do we define the university? We can define it as a place. From the very, very beginning when Plato strolled up and down with his students in the Groves of Academus to the building of the great universities of Europe, Bologna, Paris, at Oxford, at Cambridge, it was a place to which people came to enhance, further their education, to be with like-minded people. So first and foremost, it was a place.

But it is also a community. It is a community of scholars, of people seeking to advance the forefront of knowledge, celebrated from the oldest times in antiquity. [INAUDIBLE] wrote of Plato's Academus [SPEAKING LATIN], to seek the truth in the Groves of Academe. And certainly that is very, very characteristic of MIT, one of the preeminent research institutions.

So it is a community of scholars. It's also a community of students, those who come here and to other similar places to consume the knowledge, to take part in it, to enhance their own understanding. So a university is a place. It is a community. It is a gateway for many, many people.

At the outset in the early days, it was a gateway to the wealthier classes, those who had already made it but needed their gateway to the arts of culture and refinement that was befitting their station in society. In medieval Europe, it was a gateway to the church, which was the major institution that transcended national boundaries. Later, it became a gateway to polite society, for those who, again, were of the upper financial and social classes.

It's hard for us to imagine and understand, but only in about the past century and a half has it become a gateway to a different world. Not the world of culture and privilege, although it's still often is, but to the world of science and technology. This was a world that for many, many years was not considered to be a world fit for the gentleman.

One of the earliest engineering schools of all was the Ecole Polytechnique in France, which was established to assist the military to better prepare them for the science of warfare. MIT itself was the result in no small part of the rejection of the then prevailing university establishment of the idea that there was a place for science or technology in the cultured person.

The legend goes that Henry Cabot Lowell, who sponsored a series of lectures for the education of society at large who's made his fortune up in the Lowell Mills, was very interested in popular education, extending it. Himself a graduate of Harvard wanted Harvard to establish a school for the study of the practical arts, namely engineering, as engineering was then called. And the president of Harvard indicated that such was not a fit study for gentlemen.

Through Lowell's contacts with his various people he came in contact with, William Barton Rogers, a professor down in Virginia, and getting to like Rogers, talked with him and joined with him and assisted him in establishing what became the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of today. So the concept of what a university is has changed over the centuries. And only in the past century and a half has that concept included the idea of science and technology as proper and fit subjects for the university education.

One reading, which I think will summarize these concepts of the university-- not so much the last, not so much the university as a gateway to science, but certainly the concept of the university as the gateway to polite society. The university as a place and the university is a community. A brief reading, if you will bear with me. I think it's well worthwhile. And it comes from a non-academic of the last century, and an unusual writer but a wonderful, wonderful story.

The writer is Thomas Hardy. The story is Jude the Obscure. And to those of you who are familiar with it, it is the story of a young man who was of a great scholarly natural inclination, an orphan, who had set his sights on going to the university, the fictional Christminster, which we can all read as Oxford. And the story begins in chapter 1. I won't read you as much as a page, but I will jump from excerpts and piece it together to illustrate my thesis.

Chapter 1. The schoolmaster was leaving the village and everybody seemed sorry. Why do you go, sir, asked the boy. And that was Jude Frawley. That would be a long story. You wouldn't understand my reason, Jude. You will perhaps when you're older.

I think I should now, sir. Well, don't speak of this everywhere. You know what a university is, and a university degree. It is the necessary hallmark of a man who wants to do anything in teaching.

My scheme or dream is to be a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak. And if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the spot will afford me a better chance of carrying it out than I would have elsewhere.

The schoolmaster leaves. Jude is sorry, walking along the road, catches a glimpse of a distant town that, in fact, is Christminster. Its distant not only geographically, but it's distant also socially, economically, politically, by any measure you can think of, but he still dreams.

He comes across a group of men who are carrying a load, having come back from Christminster, and asks the gentleman, the men, if they can identify the place where it was. He wants to be sure that it's what he's thinking of. And they say, ah. Yes. 'Tis Christminster.

'Tis all learning there. Nothing but learning except religion, and that's learning, too. But I never could understand it. Yes.

'Tis a serious minded place. You know, I suppose they raise parsons there like they raise radishes in a bed. And though it do take, how many years, Bob? Five years, [INAUDIBLE] boy chap like you into a solemn preaching man with no corrupt passions.

They'll do it if it can be done, and polish him off like the workmen they be. And turn out with a long face and a black coat and waistcoat a religious collar and hat, same as they used to wear in the scriptures, so that his own mother wouldn't know him. But then, that's their business.

Jude continues his walk in silence, thinking about this. And this is the final paragraph. Jude continued his walk homeward alone, pondering so deeply that he felt timid.

He suddenly grew older. It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to, for some place which he could call admirable. Should he find that place in this city if he could go there? Would it be a spot in which without fear of farmers or hindrance or ridicule, he could watch and wait and set himself to some mighty undertaking like the men of old of whom he had heard?

The tree of knowledge grows there, he said to himself. It is a place the teachers of men spring from and go to. It is what you might call a castle, manned by scholarship and religion, he said to himself again. It is a city of light.

Such are the changing faces of the university and their importance to our culture. And these are some of the topics and others that we will address now in the question of, what is the university today? What is its place in society?

Our speakers are evenly divided between MIT and Harvard.

[LAUGHTER]

Two of the panelists from MIT, one from Harvard, and our moderator from Harvard.

[LAUGHTER]

I will leave the introduction of the panelists to our moderator, but I will introduce our moderator.

I'm very, very pleased to welcome David Warsh of the Boston Globe to moderate our panel today. David is an excellent columnist and a frequent writer on the topics of economics. He is a graduate of Harvard, has been a staff reporter with the Keene Evening Sentinel in New Hampshire, a reporter for the Pacific Stars and Stripes during his service days, a reporter for Newsweek Magazine, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, an associate editor of Forbes Magazine, and now a columnist for the Boston Globe.

He's the author-- excuse me-- of a number of books on economics, including The Idea of Economic Complexity published in 1984, Economic Principles, Masters, and Mavericks of Modern Economics published in 1993, and will shortly be coming out with his new work, The New Generation and the Old in Economics. Ladies and gentlemen, David Warsh.

[APPLAUSE]

WARSH: I hate it when I follow a litigator. And I really hate it when I follow a litigator who does dialect. So I'll exercise my authority to begin with by asking those of you who can to move towards the walls. Just take a second and slide down.

We've got enough people in the back that if we had a few more seats on the aisles, it would be a big help. Just two, three seats, easy. Easy.

So thank you. We're going to talk about Clicks and Mortar in education, the differences thereof. It's five years since the clicks mania got going. I date that to August of '95, the Netscape IPO. It was unbelievable by the standards of the time.

The stock was offered at $28. It went to $78 or $79 that day, and settled at the end of the day at $58. It raised two billion bucks like that in a single day, and people had never heard the like of it. They couldn't believe it. Sounds absolutely paltry now, it seems to me.

Some of the air went out of that bubble in the spring. But I take the mortar mania to have started sometime in the fall [INAUDIBLE] with the recognition that established businesses were going to be able to muscle in on this internet business much more easily than people had imagined at the beginning. I date that as much as anything to the auto companies joint venture with parts, but there were a number of things in the fall. And I think it's useful to keep in mind that things come down as well as go up as we talk about this.

I just kept a track of the stories that came across my desk last week in this area. I clipped an ad that said Barnes & Noble, the bookstore, was preparing to offer courses, a large array of courses, through the bookstore. I clipped an ad for Dow Jones University whose ad said, give a lifetime of powerful investing skills instead of a necktie. Online courses start at $49.

I got the catalog from Walden University, which you may think only appears in Doonesbury but in fact it exists in St. Paul. It offers a half a dozen PhDs. It's essentially a very successful old line correspondence course business that was bought 25 years ago by a guy who prepared a lot of the Pentagon distance learning. The manuals by which military personnel take courses and get certificates.

He's built it into a very prosperous little business. In each case, the doctoral degrees involve a partnership in-- I don't think it's [INAUDIBLE], but it's some engineering degree with Indiana University, requiring some period of residence. That came on Wednesday.

Thursday, the new copy of University Business came in the mail, and the interesting story in it was about how UMI-- who knows UMI? It was a Xerox [INAUDIBLE]. They have a copy of your dissertation on file. It's the old university microfilm in Ann Arbor.

And they were bought by Bell and Howell in 1986, and they became the research division, the information and learning division of Bell and Howell. And about three years ago they hired the guy who had been running LexisNexis, and guess what? He's about to spin them out from Bell and Howell as a freestanding business in a week with the auto parts business that they own in Cleveland as a side play.

And they're going to go into every kind of data bank business that you can imagine that you can build off of those dissertations. That a guy at LexisNexis could imagine.

I got a letter from a friend, Maurice Shepherd, who was a physics professor at Northeastern until he got bored of it. And he bought a bunch of PCs and networked them together, and found that he was very good at turning out course packs, on-demand textbooks drawn from a variety of sources, journal articles, and a chapter from one text and a chapter from another text. What he was really good at, of course, was not the networks but the permissions.

He's done a couple of joint ventures with copy shops and stuff. Next time the window opens, he's going to go back to the IPO market and try to become a big customs learning content provider.

And this morning I was down at the Harvard Business School, and I heard the dean, Kim Clark, talking about the office that they've opened on Sand Hill Road in Stanford up above the Stanford Business School. Where, for the moment, all they're doing is writing cases and keeping an eye on it. But it wouldn't take very much to put a classroom adjacent to the 75 faculty worked out there last year.

And what's really funny is above Sand Hill Road up in Portola Valley, Cal has been trying to establish a business school presence in Silicon Valley. So it's very easy to imagine a leapfrog game like that going forward.

Well, those were the things that came through a newspaper office. You don't have to know much to clip those. We have a panel that really knows something about this business.

And to them I want to just observe by way of caution that all those incidents, five or six that I mentioned, they all had to do not with education but with publishing. There were five or six different outfits that want to get-- maybe the latter I'll give you dispensation to, but there are five or six outfits that really want to get into the publishing business which is very lucrative.

But we're here really to talk about education, and I'm going to swipe through the panel twice. Merton Flemings is here because he's the co-director of the MIT Singapore alliance. Dick Larson is here because he's the director-- is that the right term-- of the Center for Advanced Learning Services here at MIT, which is the cockpit of all of MIT's distance learning operations which are extensive.

And Jonathan Winder is here because he's the vise president for education at Harvard Business School Publishing. Which if you don't know it, you should know is a behemoth of talented people that are trying to extend the HBS brand.

So we'll go back and talk about what they did before they got into this breaking way. Merton Fleming says that his 50th reunion will be next year, and he'll put on a red coat then. He's the class of '51 here at Tech, and he's a professor of material science as you know.

Was head of the department for 15 years during its big boost phase, and told me that it was the best job he'd ever had with the possible exception of fighting fires in Idaho. He's a member of the National Academy. He's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is the Harvard would be wing down here in town. And he's a guy of great distinction, and he wears a bow tie.

Dick Larson is professor of operations research, was president of the association, is also a member of the National Academy, and two weeks ago was giving testimony on the hill before the science committee on distance learning. I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing-- and I don't think he does-- that Congress should be holding hearings on distance learning. But it gives you some idea of what the stakes are. And it's reassuring that he should be there instead of somebody from Walden College or Walden University.

He also is a member of the National Academy, and he's founded a company. Mert, have you founded a company?

FLEMINGS: Didn't do very well.

WARSH: Instead, he's the Toyota professor. But Dick has a company that does queuing theory, and that's been a very fruitful business for people from Tech for many years. And the one thing that I can tell you that you can't possibly find out from yourself is that underneath the table, he's wearing cowboy boots.

[LAUGHTER]

Jonathan Winder-- Martin actually had-- the score here is Harvard two, MIT two, and Princeton one. Jonathan Winder went to Princeton as an undergraduate, and he moved out from there to a variety of enterprises culminating in a McKinsey partnership?

WINDER: Let's make it a partnership even if it wasn't.

WARSH: A very an invaluable partner at McKinsey. But he went on from there-- his real claim to distinction is that he went from there to the Mouse. He was with Disney. And his great claim to fame, I think, is that he was one of the ramrods of Euro Disney.

WINDER: [INAUDIBLE] now.

WARSH: Which he describes as Disney's Vietnam in France. But since has been turned around, I think, in general turned around certainly from the benchmark where it was headed. And that was sufficient claim to fame to get him called to Harvard where they say he's-- with an office, no less, in the Watertown arsenal where they've all moved. They're serious about this business.

So having said that, we're going to run through the three panelists, beginning with Mert. Each will talk for 15 or 20 minutes, and then we're going to go directly to questions at the end of that. And I'll come back and call on you. So Merton.

[APPLAUSE]

FLEMINGS: Thank you, David. You know, I'm reminded following that introduction that, in fact, I did start a company now almost 25 years ago and a new technology. And that technology in the materials field is finally becoming of some practical importance. They're really producing things throughout the world, different companies are picking it up. And it took 25 years.

Allan Bufferd, who many of you know who is now treasurer of MIT and probably a couple of other titles, I'm not sure, began as a material scientist, as a metallurgist. But he got out of it pretty soon, went into finance, and did very well.

After that he said metallurgy is too slow. It takes too long. Finance is where I'm going to go, and he's done great things with it.

But in terms of speed of things, of course, this modern internet dwarfs even financial things. Of course, the finances are a big part of it, but the rate at which it's changing and the rate at which is going to change education is, of course, very, very great.

Now I'm here to talk about MIT's Singapore MIT alliance. And you will know that when MIT decides to try something new to move in a new direction, we often call it an experiment. It might be an experimental course for freshmen. It might be an experimental program, an experimental even method of governance around the university.

And that is one way to describe SMA. It's an experiment, and it's a very big experiment. It's $100 million, five year experiment. And what is it?

Well, you could describe it in a couple of different ways. It's certainly the largest worldwide experiment today in distance education and research. I think maybe even a better way to describe it is it's MIT's experiment in learning how to become a new kind of global university.

In one sense, we've been a global university at least since the Second World War with people coming from all over the world here. I'm sure many of you in this audience will have come from some other country to MIT. And I guess because you're here you've stayed here.

But that's different than us reaching out in some new and different way to other parts of the world. And this experiment is going to provide our faculty and our students with a view of the world that they wouldn't otherwise have. Of course, it's an experiment in using the internet for course work, for education.

And we're beaming as a part of this SMA-- we call it Singapore MIT Alliance-- we beam courses through Dick's operation every morning of the week during the semester and every night. And they receive it simultaneously in Singapore, of course, 12 hours later. So it's a little unique hours to be teaching, 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning and 7:00 or 8:00 at night, but it works. And by the way, we have in many of these courses that we're teaching, we'll have students at both ends, students in Singapore and students at MIT.

A part of SMA is research. We're giving-- it's all graduate education, so we're giving master's degrees and doctors degrees. There really are two basic paths, the traditional research path, such as we have at MIT and have had for many years, and then there's the one year professional master's path.

So on the research path the students do research, and each student has two thesis supervisors, one at MIT and one in Singapore. And they have meetings over the internet. So the research employees the internet, Internet2, as well as the formal teaching.

Of course, not everything is over the internet. Each of the faculty members involved from MIT goes to Singapore for about two weeks a year, two or three weeks a year, to meet face-to-face with people there. And they come here periodically.

So what is SMA? You can picture it, I think, as a virtual engineering college. It's virtual in the sense that we don't have our own buildings and our faculty are all part time at either MIT or at one of our two partners, NUS, National University of Singapore, or NTU, Nanyang Technological University. So it's virtual in that sense.

It's virtual in the sense that SMA doesn't give a degree, and it's not an MIT degree. The formal degree when they walk away with their masters or doctorate is issued either by NUS or NTU. But in most other respects, it's an independent, autonomous engineering college.

We admit our own students. We define our own curriculum. We pass or fail our own students. We develop our own research activities, and so forth.

We have five-- they're basically academic departments. We call them programs. By the way, you may know English is the central language in Singapore. If you walk along the street, you may hear more Chinese than you'll hear English, but English is the language of business and the language of education. And we teach in English.

Well, that, of course, you've got to decide which English, whether it's American English or British English. And the Singaporeans are moving very quickly towards American and American English. But somehow we call our programs, we end it with an MES.

But there are five of them. We've been gearing up slowly. We admitted our first class just a year ago, July 1. And in two of our five departments, so to speak, or our programs, one was advanced materials and the other was in advanced computing. Actually, high performance computing for engineering systems.

The professional master's students of that program will already be graduating. And in July 21 we'll have our first graduation ceremony in Singapore. Meanwhile, we have admitted our students for next year, and we've geared up to one more program and that's manufacturing.

Those students will be arriving on campus in Singapore within a few weeks now, so we'll have three programs running next year. And at the moment we're formulating-- it takes a little time to get the coursework ready and so forth. We're formulating the final two programs, one in chemical engineering but with actually a biological and molecular emphasis, and then the fifth in computer science.

So these are the five programs. The collaboration will go for five years. Of course, could be continued if we decide to, and it's an exciting thing for all concerned.

One thing I'll just mention before moving on is that the faculty I've mentioned are part time with SMA and part time with one of the other institutions. In the case of MIT, each of these five programs has six FTEs. That is, well, I've got to define that.

It has six faculty members working half time so that a given faculty member will be teaching in the materials department, for example, and 50% of his or her activities will be in that department and 50% will be in SMA. Of course, you understand that we always manage to fit more than 100% in a year. In a week, I mean. So we have many interesting tensions.

The department heads aren't sure that they want our faculty to be doing too much in Singapore. And so we find some very interesting compromises where many of the things that we're able to do on this internet also overlap with things that benefit the individual departments. And it's worked out most successfully in that regard.

So at the end-- well, I should say, really, at the beginning of our first year-- that's last October. We had finished one summer of education. That's all. And most of that, we hadn't really geared up for the internet yet.

But we were all ready and we were practicing, ready to go, and we had a governing board meeting. That is, this independent institution is governed by a group of administrators from MIT and a group from Singapore. And that governing board met here early last fall, and we prepared a little video for them.

I'm sorry I don't have one more up to date, but I think this video will give you a little better idea of what it is that we're doing. If we could turn to the video.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- We have a vision for the Singapore MIT Alliance. It is a vision of a bold, new model for university collaboration. We aim to create world class academic programs in areas of strategic importance to Singapore and to the United States. We aim to form a new paradigm for distance collaboration in education, research, and technoprenuership.

SMA opened its doors on July 1, 1999 to its first class of 64 outstanding students, selected from an applicant pool of 500. After approximately a month of study in Singapore, most of these students came to MIT for a two and a half week period. The first two days, the pre-immersion period, exposed the students to technoprenuership activities at MIT with real examples of startups by MIT faculty and students. The remainder of this day, the immersion period, was spent continuing studies the students had begun in Singapore.

Not all was work. The students also got to see something of the broader life and culture of MIT and the Boston area, and also to engage in recreational activities, including an American barbecue, and a duck tour along Boston streets and waterways.

Following their stay at MIT, the students returned to Singapore to complete their summer term.

- SMA is a very pioneer program.

- Things are new here.

- It's a chance for me to do research.

- I guess the biggest impression I've had is actually the MIT spirit.

- The people here are very helpful.

- The faculty and the students--

- From MIT and Singapore.

- --they work together.

- Okay. So let us start. Can Singapore hear me?

- Yes.

- Beginning September 8th, we have held synchronous distance education classes, approximately four mornings and four evenings each week.

- Who is with me? Raise your hand. How about in Singapore?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Good morning.

- Good morning.

- Classes on the MIT campus are attended by regular MIT students. The classes are delivered synchronously, using video conferencing and application sharing over Internet2 connections.

How is this done? We transmit two streams to Singapore from our classroom on the MIT campus. One stream consists of all cameras in the classroom, including cameras showing the presenter, the students, the chalkboard, and the document camera. These images appear on a large screen in the classroom in Singapore. The other stream handles just the computer-generated images, such as PowerPoint slides, animations, simulations, and other software used by the faculty in the classroom.

- And in this case, this is the optimal solution.

- These images appear on a second large screen in the classroom in Singapore. The resulting collaborative class sessions are of the highest quality, since the remote participants in Singapore receive all computer-generated slides and graphics on a separate screen and at the same resolution as those presented locally at MIT.

Asynchronous delivery is achieved by using a hybrid of two of MIT's predominant web delivery platform systems. Faculty and teaching assistants prepare all course materials and upload them onto the SMA course website. This includes lecture notes, quizzes, and announcements. Students access uploaded course materials and digitized lectures in both asynchronous and synchronous formats.

The system offers threaded discussion groups, interactive posting boards that can be sorted by topic, respondent, and other criteria, and calendars that include a full range of course information, including links to specific subject matter for class preparation on any given day.

In addition to the courses being delivered to students in Singapore, 15 SMA students from the advanced materials program are on campus this fall, taking courses with regular MIT students. They are also beginning research collaborations with their MIT thesis co-supervisor.

What does the future hold for the SMA program? Faculty in both MIT and Singapore are working hard, gearing up for the next academic program to go online.

- Do we have some ideas on how to do it?

- Innovations in manufacturing systems technology will commence next July. Preparations are being laid for two remaining programs to come a year later.

- My plans are maybe go back home, Singapore, and work for a startup.

- Starting up my own business.

- SMA is a very, very wonderful program.

- We should bring the spirit back to our country.

- Through these bright young SMA students, and with our Singaporean colleagues, we seek to build a world-class alliance in engineering education and research in Singapore. Through special emphasis on technoprenuership, we will be strong team players in Singapore's T21 initiative. We aim to have a positive impact on all three universities which host us, not least MIT, through enhancing the reach and worldview of its faculty, and through this close association with two other outstanding faculty and student bodies halfway around the world.

[END PLAYBACK]

FLEMINGS: Well, let me just make a few final remarks on the way we view things now, where we're headed, how we feel about it. First of all, we're discovering a number of advantages we hadn't even thought very much about coming out of it. One of them is that our faculty who use all these modern PowerPoint slides and new approaches to education, other than the old blackboard that all of us were used to, are finding that the same kind of preparation, these same kind of materials can liven up the class that they teach here a great deal.

Secondly, we've been developing a number of cross departmental, interdepartmental subjects, bringing faculty together from a variety of different departments. I haven't had a chance to go into that. But those new subjects are going to impact our own education here.

We've had a number of, of course, already joint research publications even as well as some exciting ideas coming out of the collaborations that we've developed. And one company even about to be formed between our people here and there. We've been using up until now the distance education room in Dick Larson's shop, which he'll be talking about, but as we gear up that won't be nearly enough.

And so we're renovating other rooms, 1390 for those of you who might be from civil engineering. Probably 66110 before long and several others by the time we get done, both for SMA and for the similar alliance that we'll be developing with Cambridge University. We'll have four or five distance education rooms at-- well, several million dollars a piece is what they cost.

I could cite other advantages on the MIT side. Let me simply give you one example of how Singapore views this. The National University of Singapore, the main university, the most prestigious university, has just inaugurated its new president. A man named Fong Shih was inaugurated two days ago on June 1. And his speech that he gave was quite a marvelous document in where he wanted education and NUS to go in the future, and highlighted in that speech was the role that MIT is playing and that they're playing jointly with us.

So with that, thank you, and I turn the mic over to Dick Larson.

[APPLAUSE]

LARSON: Well, good afternoon, everybody. It's nice to see all of these red blazers here. I'm 15 years from that event myself. God willing, I'm looking forward to that.

But thank you so much for coming, those of you who are with red blazers. I'd like to give you a round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

I'm class of '65, so I also know it's the 35th anniversary for that, the 35th reunion for that class. And I see some friends here in the audience. So I'm going to ask, Chuck, you there? You hear me? Okay.

What was new on the campus at that time, and what would be being broadcast on it at this very hour if we were listening? This is to Chuck McCallum, the CEO of-- now retired from AT&T Lucent, Bell Labs. I can't remember which version of this was--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LARSON: This is Saturday. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Well, [INAUDIBLE]

LARSON: What was new on campus [INAUDIBLE]?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LARSON: It was our FM station, right?

AUDIENCE: Right, right. [INAUDIBLE]

LARSON: The FM Station. Does anyone recall what the original call letters were?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LARSON: You got it. Of course, we know where the WTBS currently is, in Atlanta, Georgia. It's in Atlanta, Georgia.

Well, so welcome all of those of you who are at different reunions. I'm happy to say, too, MIT is very similar to-- I can guarantee this-- to Christminster. Those who get to stay here for five years and then graduate certainly graduate with quote "no corrupt passions" unquote.

So with that, if you believe that-- okay. What we're going to be talking about today is a continuation of what Mert was discussing with the very exciting and innovative SMA program. I've had the privilege to direct this Center for Advanced Educational Services, CAES, for five years. And this will be a little bit of a tour of what we've been up to, but also nationally/internationally what some of the current developments are.

And let's have a context for distance education. There are many virtual universities right now where you can get degrees, bachelors, masters, PhDs. We heard about Walden University out of Naples, Florida. You'd never know it's from Naples, Florida.

You can go to their website. That happens to be their snail mail address. But you can get the PhD from anywhere by corresponding with them.

There are many corporate universities, over 1,000 now, corporate universities. Not just a McDonald's Hamburger U. Some of these are quite serious, and you can also get degrees from them, particularly masters and PhD degrees, from some of these corporate universities.

In the private sector, Glenn [INAUDIBLE] here in the audience, and he and his son and others keep a record adding two or three companies per week to an Excel spreadsheet of for-profit companies who are providing various kinds of products and services in the educational sector. And then we have the internet, which allows the communication between places.

And if you don't believe The Economist when they said five years ago, distance is dead, look at what Mert Fleming's just showed you with Singapore. We bring the Singaporean students in their own MIT Cambridge based classrooms daily, routinely during the school year by videoconferencing, by television.

And how do we do that TV image? By the internet. Not by satellite, not by ISDN or something else. That's internet television, using the Internet2.

So from a university's point of view, we have huge risk and huge opportunities. I tend to be an optimist so I see these as huge opportunities. Others might see it as huge risks.

So just to give you an example, in some of these new things that are happening in higher education happened before the internet. So we can't blame the internet on things if these are a little bit innovative or upsetting.

Professor Tom Eagar at MIT, used to be department head in material science, he has a course on welding which is very, very popular. Used to be taught at 7:00 in the morning over breakfast. And some General Motors students who are continuing education students in Michigan really liked his course and registered for the course, and that is part of their activity.

So the students would come-- and the GM students, continuing education master's science students at GM, would combine Tom Eagar's course with others from RPI, Purdue, Columbia, and University of Arizona to get their master's degree from Purdue. So mix and match, and that's been going on now for seven years.

National Technological University-- by the way, who knows the largest private university in the country today? What it is? University of Phoenix. Do you know how many students they have?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LARSON: It's more like 85,000 right now. University of Phoenix distributed in many, many states, coming into Massachusetts right now. Has a distance learning component as well as on campus component, but these campuses are distributed around. It's growing at about 24% per year. Their distance learning part is growing at almost 50% per year.

A wholly owned subsidiary of the Apollo Group, NASDAQ symbol APOL. Has always made money every quarter. Okay. So that's interesting the way things are changing, isn't it?

Now National Technological University, which was born in about 1969 or so, the oldest satellite TV university before the internet. They're getting internet savvy now, but they still use satellite. They broadcast credit and not-for-credit courses from brick and mortar universities, including MIT on occasion.

They graduate about 160 master's students per year, and the average student has taken courses from seven different brick and mortar universities, perhaps including MIT. You might ask, well, do they learn? On average their grade point average on a four point scale as 0.3 higher than the corresponding brick and mortar student counterparts.

University learning networks-- I think SMA is an example of that. We're now expanding-- the idea is to expand the university off the campus and join like-minded folks in universities elsewhere. MIT's tie to Singapore is certainly an exemplar of that, and a leading edge exemplar.

We're about to get involved with the University of Cambridge in the UK and do a similar scale thing, but have different aspects to it, including junior year abroad for 50 of our students. So we're likely to have soon-- not this coming academic year but the one after that-- 50 MIT students spend junior year abroad at University of Cambridge and visa versa, 50 of them come here. We'll have some distance learning back and forth across the pond, as they say.

There is the MIT Singapore alliance. You saw all of that before. But it is, as Mert said, the world's largest point-to-point distance learning and research collaboration program that we're aware of, and the largest industrial strength use of Internet2.

Electronic cross registration. For many, many years, Harvard, MIT, and Wellesley have shared the courtesy of cross registration for their students. And I think this is mutual respect and geographical proximity.

And so typically I might have students cross registered at Harvard, or I have some Harvard students in some of my classes. But now the need for geographical proximity to do that is dead. You can electronically cross register using the internet, and that's happening more and more.

And there are websites-- if any of you are interested I can give them to you. You can see hundreds of courses on the web. So local monopolies supported by geography are vanishing.

One could speculate there could be an entrepreneur who might have $100 million, or maybe $200 or $300, who might want to buy 500 acres in Costa Rica or some other pleasant warm place, and build a campus and lots of facilities. Athletic and teaching and learning. Invite lots of mentors down there, including recently retired folks. Maybe professors on sabbatical from brick and mortar universities, and a lot of musicians and artists and poets.

And also put up a sign saying, this is an Ivy League plus, Ivy plus place. It's going to be just as hard to get into as Harvard, MIT, or Princeton, or Stanford. And you come here, and your learning will even be better than any of those places, because you can take your classes from best in class.

There'll be no regular faculty here. There'll be lots of adult mentors to transition you between age 18 and 22 to become independently operated adult, but the classes you take will be from all those Ivy plus universities over Internet2. And there you go.

This is just pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this announced within the next five years. Somebody might try this.

Another focus, though, is that people get confused between distance learning and what we call technology-enabled education. Technology-enabled education, I think, is more interesting and also benefits the on campus students as much as the off campus students.

And basically technology-enabled education is creating learning environments for our students that couldn't be created before because of the technology that's around. So one of the things is that if-- this is one of my favorite little drawings. In 1837 the first steam engine to go on tracks in the United States went 13 miles between Albany, New York and Schenectady. It's called the Dewitt Clinton.

This is it. An exact replica of it exists in Dearborn, Michigan today. I actually touched it a few months ago. I was out there in the Ford Museum.

And so they had the steam engine. They had the tracks, but nobody had given any thought to, well, I think we have to tow something here. We have this thing called railroad cars, but nobody had designed them so the only thing they could think of was stage coaches.

So they took these stage coaches. They took the horses away and put the wheels on so they said they'd be rigid. They'd stay on them. And in a sense, that's what we're doing now in a lot of distance learning.

We're taking the chalk and talk, passive listening lectures mode that's been the primary mode of teaching and learning in universities for centuries, and putting it onto this 21st century technology. So you might call it 12th century teaching in the 21st century technological environment.

And so there's a lot of centuries to catch up, and a lot of things we can do differently now. And that's very exciting applied research, and MIT is involved in that a lot of different ways.

And so the words on the left are the words that we thought of when we were taught, when we went through MIT. And the words on the right are new words, which is a learner focused, active learning, asynchronous which is all synchronous learning, accomplishing a goal rather than teaching the students material, these sorts of things. And there's lots of experimentation in this past year.

MIT has virtually exploded with this with the d'Arbeloff funds and the iCampus funds from the Microsoft alliance. And there are many faculty around now who are doing very, very innovative, interesting things in this area.

We're also interested in that area applied to lifelong learning. And particularly for this audience, looking to our alumni to see what the alumni would like to have from MIT in terms of lifelong connection to MIT, perhaps using the internet as the primary connecting vehicle. The research I was talking about is basically, how do you match pedagogy and technology so you can get a specific knowledge domain?

It can be calculus. It could be Shakespeare, whatever it is, into a best learning environment for whatever group you're talking about. If it's alumni, if it's college undergraduates, if it's K-12. And this matching a pedagogy with technology to deliver a certain knowledge domain to a certain set of learners is an active, very, very fast growing active research enterprise here at MIT, and bringing in a lot of disciplines that you wouldn't think might apply there, including my own discipline of operations research.

Now one of the areas where we're doing some really innovative stuff is in Shakespeare. You wouldn't believe this, but Professor Peter Donaldson has an online video archive, an imaging archive, allowing the students at MIT to learn Shakespeare in this way. If I had more time, I would explain more details. But we can do that after, if you'd like.