2-Keynote: What Will Remain After the Pandemic?
What Will Remain After the Pandemic?
Dr. Shigeru Miyagawa
Author
06/11/2021
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9
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Description
While we are all anxious to get back to teaching and working on campus, it is unlikely that we will go back completely to the pre-pandemic ways given the enormous disruption we are living through. I interviewed more than thirty MIT faculty members about teaching and working during the pandemic, and these interviews gave hints of what we might expect will remain once we begin teaching face-to-face again. While adoption of technology naturally played an important role, I found even more striking a fundamental shift in the faculty's attitude toward students and teaching. I believe that this will have a deep and lasting impact beyond the pandemic.
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- [00:00:04.400]It is my great pleasure to introduce
- [00:00:06.910]to you our keynote speaker, Dr. Shigeru Miyagawa,
- [00:00:12.621]a Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning.
- [00:00:15.790]Dr. Miyagawa is involved with many aspects
- [00:00:18.950]of digital learning at MIT.
- [00:00:21.610]He was on the original MIT Committee
- [00:00:23.990]that proposed OpenCourseWare and was the chair
- [00:00:28.030]of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee
- [00:00:32.390]from 2010 to 2013.
- [00:00:36.410]He is also Co-Director of Visualizing Cultures
- [00:00:39.860]with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, John W. Dower.
- [00:00:43.560]With John Dower, Andrew Gordon of Harvard
- [00:00:46.800]and Gennifer Weisenfeld of Duke,
- [00:00:48.780]he created Visualizing Japan,
- [00:00:51.690]a Harvard MIT MOOC offered by edX
- [00:00:54.853]that has attracted over 15,000 learners worldwide.
- [00:00:59.810]Visualizing Japan was a finalist
- [00:01:02.010]for the prestigious Japan Prize in 2015.
- [00:01:08.260]Between February, 2014 and February, 2019,
- [00:01:12.380]he served as Project Professor and Director
- [00:01:15.160]of Open Education for the University of Tokyo
- [00:01:18.490]as a joint appointment with MIT.
- [00:01:21.800]As a Professor of Linguistics,
- [00:01:23.970]he has published several books and over 60 articles.
- [00:01:27.080]He recently developed the Integration Hypothesis,
- [00:01:30.030]a theory of human language evolution featured
- [00:01:32.850]in the journals, frontiers in psychology and science.
- [00:01:36.800]We are honored to have Dr. Shigeru Miyagawa
- [00:01:41.210]here with us today, welcome.
- [00:01:49.076](mouse clicks)
- [00:01:51.940]Thank you so much, thank you.
- [00:01:56.340]It's quite an honor to be participating
- [00:02:00.500]in this wonderful event
- [00:02:02.820]and I'm honored that you invited me to be with you.
- [00:02:07.630]I'm only sorry that I cannot be in Nebraska.
- [00:02:12.290]I have never been to Nebraska
- [00:02:13.920]and so I was particularly excited.
- [00:02:17.110]I've known Nebraska ever since I was a kid
- [00:02:20.690]but for a different thing
- [00:02:24.520]than what we're talking about today.
- [00:02:26.140]I grew up in Alabama, part of the time
- [00:02:29.420]and of course I knew Nebraska as Cornhuskers
- [00:02:33.950]and my first job out of graduate school
- [00:02:37.260]was at Ohio State, a Buckeyes
- [00:02:39.620]and of course the Cornhuskers
- [00:02:41.700]and so I've known Nebraska from when I was a child
- [00:02:45.880]and so I've always been curious
- [00:02:48.620]about the state and the institution.
- [00:02:53.950]Whenever I go to a new university or a campus,
- [00:02:58.990]I always has to look at the football stadium
- [00:03:02.420]because that's sort of in my blood
- [00:03:05.380]and I'm sure you have
- [00:03:06.213]a very, very wonderful football stadium,
- [00:03:09.060]Ohio State did too and Alabama does too.
- [00:03:11.660]When I came to MIT in 1991,
- [00:03:14.070]I was asked to be shown the football stadium
- [00:03:16.690]and it was like a little league stadium.
- [00:03:18.500]So I wondered, what have I gotten myself into?
- [00:03:23.090]But I've been very lucky and fortunate
- [00:03:26.290]to have been able to work at MIT but I am so pleased
- [00:03:32.750]and I thank you, provost, Fritz
- [00:03:35.990]and Mary and Mark for your wonderful work
- [00:03:40.060]and I like to thank Michael Jolley for inviting me
- [00:03:44.210]and finding the article in Inside Higher Education,
- [00:03:47.100]I think that got your interested.
- [00:03:50.590]So let me with that share.
- [00:03:54.100]What I would like to do is to speak for,
- [00:03:58.090]not the entire time but speak for part of the time,
- [00:04:02.720]I'm hoping that we can have a conversation
- [00:04:05.750]for the rest of the time with those in the audience, okay.
- [00:04:10.120]So let me share my screen.
- [00:04:12.598](mouse clicks)
- [00:04:21.890]Okay.
- [00:04:27.810]So I'm going to be talking about,
- [00:04:30.140]what will remain after the pandemic?
- [00:04:32.310]It's something that many, many people are wondering about
- [00:04:36.570]and it's something that those of us at the MIT
- [00:04:40.040]in Open Learning have been thinking about a lot
- [00:04:43.760]and as part of thinking about it,
- [00:04:46.160]we of course look at what has happened during the pandemic
- [00:04:51.200]and to try to understand that first and foremost
- [00:04:56.170]and then to try to project out into the future
- [00:04:58.740]beyond the pandemic, when the masks can come off, okay.
- [00:05:04.440]But before I get into that, I just wanted
- [00:05:06.740]to mention something that Mary kindly mentioned
- [00:05:12.840]that I was part of OpenCourseWare team
- [00:05:18.700]and so I'd like to start
- [00:05:20.130]with my background in digital learning.
- [00:05:26.350]So I'm a Professor of Linguistics
- [00:05:27.870]and MIT hired me to teach about human language
- [00:05:33.400]but along the way, I had an opportunity
- [00:05:37.500]to engage in digital learning
- [00:05:41.140]and what happened was that in the year, 2000,
- [00:05:49.080]then president of MIT Charles Vest, convened
- [00:05:53.290]a small number of faculty members and he asked us to come up
- [00:05:59.510]with a strategy for eLearning for MIT, okay
- [00:06:04.600]and his point was that this was the year 2000,
- [00:06:08.070]everyone was doing eLearning, Stanford,
- [00:06:10.650]Chicago, Carnegie Mellon.
- [00:06:14.940]Everyone was doing eLearning, we weren't
- [00:06:17.010]and so he said that we are behind times
- [00:06:19.920]and so he wanted us, a small faculty contingent
- [00:06:24.940]to come up with eLearning strategy
- [00:06:28.460]and assumption going in was that
- [00:06:31.460]we would come up with an mit.com,
- [00:06:35.410]that is a revenue generating profit venture.
- [00:06:41.210]This was still in the dot-com era
- [00:06:44.140]for those of you who are familiar with that
- [00:06:48.940]and so we spent six months trying to come up
- [00:06:55.570]with a viable scheme for an mit.com.
- [00:07:00.750]We actually had a consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton
- [00:07:05.800]who was part of our team to help us
- [00:07:09.170]to build business models and test out the market
- [00:07:14.120]for MIT generated teaching material that we could sell.
- [00:07:21.700]After six months, we came to the conclusion
- [00:07:24.710]that doing mit.com was not a good idea, okay
- [00:07:29.290]for a number of reasons.
- [00:07:31.430]One was that this is a really hard business
- [00:07:34.370]to be in back in year 2000.
- [00:07:37.860]We created 20 different business models
- [00:07:41.710]and did a pretty rigorous market research
- [00:07:45.010]and our conclusion was that
- [00:07:47.490]it will be a pretty tough business venture
- [00:07:51.160]but even more importantly,
- [00:07:53.820]we felt that time teaching materials
- [00:07:58.190]that we produce at MIT to profit
- [00:08:02.700]was not the right thing to do at that point, okay
- [00:08:06.050]and so we decided to shelf the idea of mit.com
- [00:08:10.910]and this was at the last meeting
- [00:08:12.580]before we had to report to President Vest.
- [00:08:15.910]We had to come up with something
- [00:08:18.350]and so we sat around the table,
- [00:08:21.650]I still remember the moment when we said, well,
- [00:08:24.640]maybe we could turn this idea on his head, okay
- [00:08:30.220]and instead of trying to make money,
- [00:08:33.760]why don't we just give it away, give it away for free.
- [00:08:38.050]Anyone can access our teaching materials anytime.
- [00:08:42.130]There's no registration required and you can come in
- [00:08:47.160]and use our material to study, however you want.
- [00:08:52.150]We put a name to it, OpenCourseWare,
- [00:08:57.320]sort of modeling on open source software
- [00:09:02.220]and we proposed it to Present Vest
- [00:09:05.290]not knowing how he would react to it.
- [00:09:09.290]Very fortunately he liked it
- [00:09:12.187]and he went to raise funds for it
- [00:09:14.920]and eventually we ended up putting
- [00:09:19.370]our entire MIT course material on the web.
- [00:09:25.990]It's called OpenCourseWare, ocw.mit.edu.
- [00:09:30.600]You can go to it and you will find material
- [00:09:33.870]from 2,600 MIT courses,
- [00:09:39.830]both undergraduate and graduate
- [00:09:41.290]from all five schools, engineering, science,
- [00:09:44.560]architecture, humanities and business, okay
- [00:09:48.173]and something like 75% of tenure track faculty members
- [00:09:58.024]are contributing to OpenCourseWare.
- [00:10:00.930]You'll find that the material that we offer
- [00:10:04.360]on OpenCourseWare is licensed under Creative Commons.
- [00:10:09.570]So that you're free to not just view it but to download it,
- [00:10:15.370]you can copy it, you can distribute it, you can alter it.
- [00:10:19.810]You can incorporate it
- [00:10:21.180]into your own teaching materials, okay.
- [00:10:25.150]We'd like for you to do that
- [00:10:26.340]and so that's why we decided to offer it
- [00:10:29.650]under Creative Commons, which means that OpenCourseWare
- [00:10:32.549]at MIT is clearing copyright permission
- [00:10:36.510]from all of the publishers in order to make it possible
- [00:10:40.940]for us to offer it under Creative Commons.
- [00:10:46.390]Well, before the pandemic, we had 1 million unique users,
- [00:10:53.150]not kids, one million unique users
- [00:10:55.610]from something like 200 countries coming
- [00:10:58.560]in every month to use our teaching material.
- [00:11:03.370]During the pandemic, that number has doubled
- [00:11:06.620]or even more than doubled to over 2 million people coming
- [00:11:12.230]in every month to study with OpenCourseWare
- [00:11:16.620]and so it's been a wonderful experience for me
- [00:11:20.980]and it's been a wonderful experience for MIT.
- [00:11:25.536]MIT's mission, the institute mission, not the OCW,
- [00:11:30.790]MIT's mission is to generate
- [00:11:34.610]and to share our knowledge with the world
- [00:11:39.790]and bring it to bear on the great problems of the world.
- [00:11:45.140]Before OpenCourseWare, MIT fulfilled that mission primarily
- [00:11:50.670]with basic research, bringing knowledge coming
- [00:11:54.830]out of our basic research to bear
- [00:11:56.680]on the great problems of the world, and we have
- [00:11:59.610]but with OpenCourseWare, now we can fulfill that mission
- [00:12:03.760]of bringing our material to bear
- [00:12:07.770]on the great problems of the world in education as well.
- [00:12:14.220]We've reached out to hundreds of institutions
- [00:12:17.210]around the world and encouraged those institutions
- [00:12:21.170]to open up their curriculum to the world as well.
- [00:12:24.990]So you have OpenCourseWare now all over the world
- [00:12:28.067]and so this was the first big effort
- [00:12:32.970]in what is now called open education
- [00:12:36.520]where you offer material to the world for free.
- [00:12:41.600]Today, we have second generation
- [00:12:44.586]like Oakland Education 2.0 with the MOOCs,
- [00:12:48.870]the Massive Open Online Courses
- [00:12:53.860]and there are something like 10,000 of them now
- [00:12:57.700]and hundreds of millions of people
- [00:13:00.270]are learning from those MOOCS as well.
- [00:13:02.630]So you have OpenCourseWare, you have MOOCs,
- [00:13:05.490]there's this wonderful world
- [00:13:11.010]of open learning that has taken place
- [00:13:13.820]and during the pandemic, we've seen a huge uptick
- [00:13:19.460]in people using these open learning materials,
- [00:13:25.460]both OpenCourseWare and MOOCs, okay.
- [00:13:28.420]MOOCs which are offered by edX
- [00:13:30.530]which was created by MIT and Harvard,
- [00:13:33.200]Coursera, which came out of Stanford and others.
- [00:13:36.890]They have seen as much as 600% uptick
- [00:13:43.610]in the access to their courses.
- [00:13:46.710]So this is one way in which things are changing, okay.
- [00:13:53.770]People are now comfortable learning online
- [00:13:57.220]and they are finding these online materials
- [00:14:00.180]that have been there since the year 2001
- [00:14:03.590]for MIT OpenCourseWare and for MOOCs
- [00:14:06.530]since about seven years ago
- [00:14:10.750]and more and more people are finding these,
- [00:14:13.330]not just to learn for pleasure
- [00:14:17.010]but getting certifications, micro certifications
- [00:14:22.010]and even degrees online through these services
- [00:14:26.880]and I know that Nebraska has a very major program
- [00:14:32.830]in online education as well
- [00:14:34.740]and I know that today's program is part of that
- [00:14:38.620]and major land-grant state institutions
- [00:14:43.330]are at the core of higher education in this country.
- [00:14:48.490]It's the jewel of this country
- [00:14:51.040]and so I'm just so pleased
- [00:14:53.344]to be able to share some time with you, okay
- [00:14:57.932]and so that's how I got into the business
- [00:15:00.280]of digital education along
- [00:15:01.910]with being a Professor of Linguistics at MIT
- [00:15:06.119]and because OpenCourseWare has been such an important
- [00:15:11.220]and such a rewarding experience for all of us
- [00:15:14.960]who became involved, I decided to stay
- [00:15:17.740]with it along with my linguistics work
- [00:15:21.550]and now I'm a Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning
- [00:15:24.967]and so I'm very, very pleased
- [00:15:27.260]that I've had this chance and the opportunity,
- [00:15:32.610]really an honor to have had
- [00:15:34.930]a second sort of work stream
- [00:15:37.850]in my career having to do with digital learning
- [00:15:41.350]and I believe that the pandemic has shown
- [00:15:44.587]that digital learning and online learning
- [00:15:47.650]is going to be core to learning,
- [00:15:52.960]not just for this country but for the world, okay.
- [00:15:56.620]Okay, so let me then talk about the pandemic
- [00:16:01.460]and what we have done at MIT
- [00:16:03.980]and to try to project out beyond the pandemic
- [00:16:07.610]and what is going to stay beyond the pandemic, okay.
- [00:16:13.130]So on March 10th, 2020, over a year ago,
- [00:16:17.370]President Reif of MIT, announced
- [00:16:19.680]that courses are moving online, okay
- [00:16:22.310]and on March 30th, just a few weeks later
- [00:16:26.550]in the middle of the spring semester,
- [00:16:28.200]we began teaching 1,251 courses online.
- [00:16:34.140]This was a massive, massive effort.
- [00:16:38.550]It's not just MIT, everyone, I know you did that.
- [00:16:42.160]Everyone around the world had to do this
- [00:16:46.140]and so as Senior Associate Dean,
- [00:16:48.980]I was curious to see what this experience
- [00:16:51.850]was going to be like for the faculty, for the students
- [00:16:55.620]and so without really knowing what might come out of it,
- [00:17:03.490]I started to interview faculty, sort of on alert,
- [00:17:06.740]I started with people I knew well in the humanities
- [00:17:09.760]and then expanded that to science and business
- [00:17:15.740]and engineering people and architecture people
- [00:17:18.560]and so over a nine-month period, we interviewed,
- [00:17:22.790]I think close to 100 faculty members, okay
- [00:17:25.630]and so we were able to hit different points
- [00:17:28.180]as we engaged in online education.
- [00:17:33.670]This is an effort that I'm doing with Meghan Perdue
- [00:17:38.250]who is a Digital Learning Fellow
- [00:17:40.080]in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science.
- [00:17:42.930]At MIT, we have a large number
- [00:17:45.110]of these Digital Learning Fellows in our schools or colleges
- [00:17:52.160]as you call it in some institutions
- [00:17:55.720]and these Digital Learning Fellows assist
- [00:17:59.480]the faculty, support the faculty
- [00:18:02.060]in creating online digital learning materials,
- [00:18:07.000]creating MOOCs, trying to figure out how to deal with LMS.
- [00:18:13.160]We moved to Canvas in the fall, for example, the Canvas LMS
- [00:18:17.560]and so I asked Meghan to help me
- [00:18:19.690]with this project of interviewing faculty
- [00:18:22.270]and really trying to understand what was going on.
- [00:18:25.897]Meghan actually played an important role
- [00:18:28.220]in MIT going online.
- [00:18:30.100]I mentioned that President Reif, announced
- [00:18:34.650]on March 10th, 2020, that we are going to go online
- [00:18:40.320]but in fact, we had full warning, thanks to Meghan.
- [00:18:44.260]Meghan had noticed at the end of January, that schools
- [00:18:49.680]in Hong Kong were starting to go online because of COVID
- [00:18:54.590]and she convinced our senior administration
- [00:19:01.270]that MIT better start preparing just
- [00:19:05.100]in case we needed to go online, okay.
- [00:19:08.340]At that point, end of January, COVID was still something
- [00:19:13.840]that you sort of heard about but it's not something
- [00:19:17.660]that was part of our lives as it is today
- [00:19:21.370]and so the senior leadership at our school heard Meghan
- [00:19:28.810]and say, well, we don't know if this is going to be anything
- [00:19:33.610]that we need to worry about but just in case,
- [00:19:36.990]let's at least start preparing some workshops
- [00:19:40.810]that we could do with our faculty
- [00:19:42.780]in case they need to switch to an online format
- [00:19:47.120]and come March 10th, that reality hit
- [00:19:52.800]and we rolled out those workshops all over the campus.
- [00:20:00.240]Meghan in one week did something like 15 workshops
- [00:20:05.610]with faculty and other instructors.
- [00:20:08.290]So we were very fortunate that Meghan had noticed
- [00:20:12.600]what she did back in early January.
- [00:20:18.010]So some findings from those interviews,
- [00:20:20.770]I'll go into it more in detail
- [00:20:22.510]but just to give you a sort of a taste of things
- [00:20:25.610]that we found that were really surprising to us, sure.
- [00:20:32.890]Over and over again, what we found from the faculty
- [00:20:37.120]was this renewed focus on the practice of teaching, okay.
- [00:20:41.540]That surprised us.
- [00:20:43.640]We thought that we'd be hearing from the faculty
- [00:20:45.750]about their frustration with using the Zoom,
- [00:20:48.890]frustration with John, how do you get students
- [00:20:51.660]to pay attention in this kind of format
- [00:20:55.250]but more and more faculty members
- [00:20:58.880]as we started engaging on online teaching, wanted
- [00:21:04.180]to talk about their discovery
- [00:21:06.860]of teaching, practice of teaching.
- [00:21:12.260]One faculty member said it forced me to be more creative
- [00:21:17.071]and so we got curious about that.
- [00:21:18.540]Why our faculty all of a sudden interested
- [00:21:23.570]in the practice of teaching because of the pandemic?
- [00:21:27.970]And they started to tell us,
- [00:21:29.830]they made a great deal of sense
- [00:21:31.610]and what they said was that before in in-person teaching,
- [00:21:37.650]we knew or we thought we knew how to teach
- [00:21:40.300]because we were taught that way, okay.
- [00:21:43.522]We were taught that way.
- [00:21:44.355]We were teaching the way that we felt comfortable.
- [00:21:49.480]There were precursors, there were examples
- [00:21:51.720]that we were familiar with
- [00:21:54.150]but now all of that is taken away, we have to teach online.
- [00:21:59.420]There are no prior experience
- [00:22:03.160]that we have for teaching in this way, okay
- [00:22:06.350]and so now they had to teach
- [00:22:10.117]and they had to think from scratch
- [00:22:12.790]on how do you do this on this new platform
- [00:22:16.620]with Zoom and tablets and things?
- [00:22:21.300]So they had to really think
- [00:22:25.740]from zero on how you do this
- [00:22:29.060]and that led to lots of innovations,
- [00:22:33.080]lots of sort of reflecting of what teaching is
- [00:22:37.130]and I believe that this is going to be one
- [00:22:39.250]of the very positive impact
- [00:22:44.250]that teaching online is going to have
- [00:22:46.997]and it's going to carry over
- [00:22:49.220]when we go back to teaching in-person.
- [00:22:55.950]Something else that a lot of our faculty members mentioned,
- [00:22:59.730]why are we testing students in this way?
- [00:23:03.060]Mid-term, final exam, very high-stake,
- [00:23:07.010]high risk, high stress, ways of evaluating our students
- [00:23:14.100]and number of faculty members said, well,
- [00:23:16.480]it's because we've been doing it the same way for 50 years.
- [00:23:20.770]Okay, but now it's not the same anymore
- [00:23:23.750]and so we should stop and think
- [00:23:26.260]and a number of faculty members have devised ways
- [00:23:31.430]to evaluate students in ways
- [00:23:33.600]which are not these high-stakes, mid-term and final
- [00:23:38.830]but instead breaking it up into weekly smaller quizzes
- [00:23:46.310]over the remainder of the semester
- [00:23:48.820]that we're teaching online
- [00:23:51.391]and the students were very, very grateful for that.
- [00:23:56.880]Something else that MIT did for the first semester
- [00:23:59.290]where we went online is, okay, this semester,
- [00:24:03.360]that is spring semester, 2020, the grading system
- [00:24:06.950]is going to be pass, no record, pass, no record.
- [00:24:12.960]That means students can either pass the course.
- [00:24:16.650]Well, if they don't, then it will simply
- [00:24:18.910]be wiped off their record
- [00:24:23.650]and again, students were very grateful.
- [00:24:26.480]The faculty were very grateful
- [00:24:28.280]that they didn't have to be concerned so much
- [00:24:31.419]in evaluating students to the detail that we do
- [00:24:36.480]when we are grading on a regular letter grade scale.
- [00:24:42.360]Okay, so lots of ways to try to reduce the stress
- [00:24:46.940]and it came out of this, questioning,
- [00:24:49.730]why are we doing this in a way that we have?
- [00:24:52.240]It's because we've been doing it for 50 years.
- [00:24:55.180]So these are things that I think
- [00:24:58.530]are going to be really really impactful beyond the pandemic.
- [00:25:09.900]Some challenges, there're many, many challenges.
- [00:25:12.610]One faculty member mentioned
- [00:25:14.290]that attention is a scarce resource.
- [00:25:18.900]We hear people talk about ghost students.
- [00:25:23.000]Students who don't turn on their camera,
- [00:25:25.470]you call on them, they're not there.
- [00:25:28.510]You're not sure if they're asleep
- [00:25:30.240]or if they're somewhere else
- [00:25:33.220]and so attention is a scarce resource.
- [00:25:37.110]Lab classes, hands-on, experiment, building
- [00:25:41.350]and we have lots of those at MIT, lots of those.
- [00:25:45.260]Those classes were challenged, okay.
- [00:25:49.330]Teaching at home.
- [00:25:52.230]Teaching at home, in some ways it's sort of comfortable
- [00:25:57.750]but many people were challenged by it.
- [00:26:02.215]There're a lot of people who, not a lot,
- [00:26:05.370]but at least a small number of people
- [00:26:07.250]who said that these are mostly, junior faculty members
- [00:26:11.570]who wanted to live near the campus
- [00:26:13.750]but housing in Boston is very expensive
- [00:26:15.960]and so their apartments were not really set
- [00:26:20.030]to do online teaching.
- [00:26:22.430]Others, parents, single parents, single mothers
- [00:26:28.030]were challenged by teaching at the same time
- [00:26:30.700]that they had to take care of their kids.
- [00:26:34.170]MIT tried to help by providing for daycare,
- [00:26:41.030]I think earlier than any other facility, which helped a lot
- [00:26:44.640]but there's no question that teaching
- [00:26:48.040]from home was a real challenge in many ways, okay.
- [00:26:51.660]A number of people said,
- [00:26:53.340]it's exhausting to teach on Zoom
- [00:26:55.460]and I completely understand that, okay.
- [00:27:01.642]A lot of faculty members said
- [00:27:02.610]that they had to spend so much time preparing,
- [00:27:06.040]that they were not able to do any research during this time
- [00:27:10.983]and for an institution like MIT
- [00:27:13.170]which is a research institution,
- [00:27:16.240]that is a real challenge
- [00:27:18.610]and so in that way, a lot of people
- [00:27:20.940]are looking forward to getting back.
- [00:27:23.860]Preparation took much more time and effort.
- [00:27:26.630]In a survey, the faculty said that
- [00:27:29.143]it took about 1.5 times more on the average
- [00:27:35.790]to prepare for online teaching.
- [00:27:39.290]Some people said six times as much, okay.
- [00:27:42.110]So again, this really would cut into research time,
- [00:27:45.950]into family time and personal time
- [00:27:48.830]and so this is not something that is sustainable
- [00:27:52.380]and so in that way, people are anxious
- [00:27:56.320]to go back to in-person teaching
- [00:27:58.940]but there are things that we'll carry over,
- [00:28:03.700]thanks to all this effort that people made
- [00:28:05.930]and I'll talk about that.
- [00:28:10.850]At the end of spring semester, 2020,
- [00:28:14.300]there was a big survey that MIT,
- [00:28:17.120]the Office of Institutional Research did
- [00:28:21.250]for faculty and students.
- [00:28:24.351]And there was something interesting that came out.
- [00:28:26.070]So among the faculty, for extent
- [00:28:30.060]of student learning achieved during remote teaching,
- [00:28:34.420]78% said they were satisfied or very satisfied.
- [00:28:39.150]Among the students, 71% said general stress related
- [00:28:45.370]to COVID 19 made it difficult for me to learn, okay.
- [00:28:49.970]71% agreed or strongly agreed.
- [00:28:52.400]So there was a little bit of a disconnect
- [00:28:54.370]between the faculty perception
- [00:28:56.220]of how the teaching online went
- [00:28:58.760]and student perception of how their learning went.
- [00:29:02.970]This is understandable.
- [00:29:03.970]I think this happens also in in-person teaching,
- [00:29:06.870]this a bit of a disconnect but in online teaching,
- [00:29:12.900]it became really exacerbated, the gap, okay.
- [00:29:17.180]In fall semester, this gap became a little bit smaller
- [00:29:22.330]as the faculty became more used to teaching
- [00:29:25.140]and students particularly were maybe a little less stressed
- [00:29:29.940]with COVID and they were more used to learning online, okay
- [00:29:35.420]but there was this gap, which was interesting to us, okay.
- [00:29:40.784]On the basis of these interviews that we conducted,
- [00:29:44.750]Meghan and I, wrote a couple articles,
- [00:29:49.030]one in Inside Higher Ed,
- [00:29:51.010]which Michael very fortunate for me found
- [00:29:54.840]and which got me to be able to speak with you today.
- [00:30:00.250]So Inside Higher Ed article, you can look it up.
- [00:30:03.460]Inside Higher Ed, miyagawaperdue, and it'll pop up.
- [00:30:08.510]We also wrote a little bit longer article
- [00:30:11.330]for the MIT Faculty Newsletter
- [00:30:13.150]which is also available online.
- [00:30:16.820]Again, you can look up, MIT Faculty Newsletter
- [00:30:20.530]Miyagawa and Perdue, and this will pop up.
- [00:30:24.400]We wrote another article which will appear
- [00:30:28.430]in Inside Higher Ed sometime this month
- [00:30:34.010]and the faculty newsletter
- [00:30:35.770]will also carry along a version of that.
- [00:30:38.530]It will contain a lot of the things
- [00:30:41.250]that I'm talking to you about today.
- [00:30:47.010]So in the fall semester, that is the second of 2020,
- [00:30:52.290]the second semester of online teaching,
- [00:30:55.500]the faculty became more used to teaching in this format
- [00:30:58.910]and as I interviewed the faculty,
- [00:31:02.350]there are some remarkable examples
- [00:31:04.690]of what the faculty did to make it possible to teach online.
- [00:31:10.140]Okay, I'll give you just a few, okay.
- [00:31:15.550]So mechanical engineering
- [00:31:18.130]which is the second largest major at MIT.
- [00:31:21.050]The first is computer science.
- [00:31:22.840]Computer science is about 40% of the student body now, huge
- [00:31:26.870]but after that mechanical engineering is quite large
- [00:31:30.820]and introduction to mechanical engineering has a component
- [00:31:35.980]of students building things and measuring things, okay
- [00:31:41.828]and in the spring semester, they were able to do that
- [00:31:47.440]because the first half was in-person.
- [00:31:50.120]It was the second half when we went online
- [00:31:53.510]but in the fall semester, we were online to begin with
- [00:31:56.810]and the faculty decided that
- [00:31:58.430]for introduction to mechanical engineering,
- [00:32:00.900]that they really really needed the students to build things
- [00:32:06.820]and to be able to measure things in a physical way
- [00:32:12.580]and so they went on this big shopping spree
- [00:32:21.360]from Amazon and all sorts of vendors.
- [00:32:24.250]They also built some parts with 3D printing
- [00:32:28.560]and put together these packages
- [00:32:30.830]that they actually sent out to the students.
- [00:32:33.990]There were 1,000 boxes.
- [00:32:37.660]You can see this professor in mechanical engineering here.
- [00:32:43.600]She built the packages in her basement.
- [00:32:47.810]She got her son to help out
- [00:32:50.720]and apparently there was a line of FedEx trucks
- [00:32:54.440]in front of her house, picking up the packages
- [00:32:57.710]and they were sent from Massachusetts to New York,
- [00:33:05.830]probably to Nebraska, to California, to Hawaii
- [00:33:09.770]to Hong Kong, to Ukraine, to China, all over the world, okay
- [00:33:15.707]and a lot of interesting things popped up.
- [00:33:18.750]The logistics was incredibly complex.
- [00:33:23.490]Fortunately they had on their team,
- [00:33:25.720]someone who used to do logistics
- [00:33:27.630]for a big transportation company
- [00:33:31.420]before he came to study at MIT
- [00:33:34.950]and so he was able to work out the logistics.
- [00:33:38.140]Some of the parts could not be sent
- [00:33:40.730]because of security reasons to some of the countries, okay
- [00:33:45.030]but for the most part, they were able to send them
- [00:33:47.920]and they got students to do hands-on
- [00:33:53.540]as if they were in class.
- [00:33:58.050]I mentioned that one of the scarce resources is attention
- [00:34:05.240]and in class teaching,
- [00:34:08.400]we assume that students pay attention.
- [00:34:10.380]Now, they may or may not, but we assume that
- [00:34:12.800]as soon as we walk into the classroom, okay
- [00:34:15.400]students are supposed to pay attention.
- [00:34:17.390]Okay, but in a online classroom,
- [00:34:18.324]you cannot assume that, okay.
- [00:34:22.000]This is one of the things that faculty discovered,
- [00:34:25.460]that once you go online, there's no prior experience
- [00:34:29.043]that you can base your teaching on.
- [00:34:31.810]So you have to really think from scratch on how you do this
- [00:34:36.250]and so this is Mike Short.
- [00:34:39.960]He is a Professor in Nuclear Engineering.
- [00:34:43.720]He devised this method called Lightboard
- [00:34:49.624]which is a very simple technology
- [00:34:51.920]that we have actually been using
- [00:34:53.980]to build MOOCs online courses
- [00:34:58.230]and what it is is very simple.
- [00:35:01.250]Well, you have a piece of glass in front of you,
- [00:35:05.320]between you and the camera
- [00:35:07.050]and you write on the glass and the camera is shooting you
- [00:35:11.850]and what you're writing on the glass at the same time
- [00:35:14.920]and the software will flip the image
- [00:35:19.530]so that you get a mirror image, oops, sorry,
- [00:35:29.720]you get a mirror image
- [00:35:31.990]and so you can actually read it.
- [00:35:33.740]It has this sort of funny effect
- [00:35:35.800]that right-handed faculty members become left-handed
- [00:35:39.640]and you can't see it here
- [00:35:41.330]but in this way, Professor Short
- [00:35:46.130]is able to look at the students directly while he's writing,
- [00:35:53.216]okay, unlike in the classroom, when he writes
- [00:35:55.555]on the Blackboard or the Whiteboard,
- [00:35:58.000]he turns his back on the students, right.
- [00:36:00.690]But in a online teaching class,
- [00:36:03.760]you cannot do that, okay, without looking kind of funny
- [00:36:09.070]and you lose students sort of eye contact.
- [00:36:12.620]In this way, he was able to maintain eye contact
- [00:36:15.480]throughout his teaching.
- [00:36:17.860]I asked Mike, so what are you going to do
- [00:36:20.820]when you go back to teaching in-person?
- [00:36:26.270]And he said, he is scared to go back,
- [00:36:28.150]now that he's experienced this.
- [00:36:32.260]Mike also, to get students attention and their interest,
- [00:36:39.770]he's a Nuclear Engineering Professor
- [00:36:42.970]and so he had his students
- [00:36:44.820]who are now all over the world, right.
- [00:36:46.840]They had to go back, send in their toenails
- [00:36:51.460]and he put them through a nuclear reactor at MIT
- [00:36:54.670]and to major radiation in each person.
- [00:36:58.140]We all have a certain amount of radiation
- [00:37:01.120]and so he showed students how much radiation they had
- [00:37:04.890]in their bodies and is sort of natural radiation
- [00:37:08.190]and sort of vary quite a bit
- [00:37:11.090]and so that was sort of an interesting idea that he had
- [00:37:15.190]and he was able to do it and make it interesting
- [00:37:18.690]because students are all over the world
- [00:37:20.570]and so he was getting different radiation readings
- [00:37:23.330]from students again, depending on where they were.
- [00:37:28.500]This is professor Andrew Lo of Sloan School of Business.
- [00:37:31.880]One of the most eminent professors we have.
- [00:37:35.200]At Business School, they really value teaching.
- [00:37:38.930]They really value teaching and we all do it at MIT
- [00:37:42.587]but at the Sloan school,
- [00:37:44.730]Sloan school students pay full ride.
- [00:37:47.210]I think their tuition is a little bit more expensive
- [00:37:50.010]and they don't really get fellowships like other students.
- [00:37:54.030]So they really put in effort into teaching
- [00:37:57.510]and when they had to go online,
- [00:38:00.030]they quickly looked to see how they could give
- [00:38:03.900]the highest possible quality teaching online
- [00:38:09.240]and Professor Andrew Lo with help of some colleagues,
- [00:38:14.940]I think from University of Tennessee
- [00:38:16.770]who happened to be visiting Sloan School
- [00:38:19.050]put together this incredibly elaborate system.
- [00:38:24.530]It's so incredible that
- [00:38:25.830]he in fact now does demonstrations around campus.
- [00:38:32.470]It's got like 60 moving parts.
- [00:38:34.360]It's a system that even MIT doesn't have.
- [00:38:37.590]Okay, interestingly, he gives workshops
- [00:38:41.370]to his Sloan School colleagues
- [00:38:44.020]and one of the colleagues that he gave workshop to
- [00:38:47.390]was someone that I happened to interview
- [00:38:50.540]as part of this interview process
- [00:38:52.920]and she looked at my camera and had my microphone
- [00:38:56.137]and she said, I just learned something
- [00:38:58.120]from Andy Lo's workshop.
- [00:39:00.860]You should get a new camera
- [00:39:01.967]and you should get a new microphone.
- [00:39:03.950]So I benefited directly
- [00:39:06.820]from Professor Lo's workshops as well.
- [00:39:14.220]Less elaborate, but I think much more practical ways
- [00:39:19.830]of using technology and again, to keep students' attention
- [00:39:25.900]is something that this professor from economics did, Anna.
- [00:39:33.725]During the summer, she decided
- [00:39:35.630]after teaching in the spring online,
- [00:39:38.510]she decided to create short videos of economic principles
- [00:39:46.150]and instead of putting herself on a side of PowerPoint,
- [00:39:51.653]she built a little green room, a green background
- [00:39:56.910]and put herself in the PowerPoint, okay.
- [00:40:00.300]She has never really used technology much before
- [00:40:06.690]but she decided to do this
- [00:40:08.190]and she created something like 10
- [00:40:11.120]of these really, really well-made valuable videos
- [00:40:16.040]and she said during the summer,
- [00:40:18.090]she used her weekends and her research done.
- [00:40:21.940]So she didn't do any research during the summer
- [00:40:24.370]and now she uses the students, look at the videos.
- [00:40:31.820]Now before coming to class, they come to class
- [00:40:34.560]and instead of lecturing, she now has discussions
- [00:40:38.180]with the students.
- [00:40:39.090]Now she discovered the flip class
- [00:40:41.880]and she said that she is going to continue
- [00:40:44.220]to do this flip class
- [00:40:47.290]even after she goes back to teaching in-person
- [00:40:51.700]and so this is going to really improve her teaching, okay.
- [00:40:55.920]Instead of lecturing, lecturing, lecturing, or,
- [00:40:57.630]as we've done for 50 years or a hundred years,
- [00:41:02.470]we now have much more interactive way of teaching
- [00:41:05.740]thanks to this work that the faculty have put it in.
- [00:41:15.430]So what will remain post pandemic?
- [00:41:18.137]Now there are many, many positive things, okay.
- [00:41:20.900]So renewed focus on practice
- [00:41:22.420]of teaching as I talked about.
- [00:41:24.350]Just the idea of trying to maintain student attention,
- [00:41:27.960]that's been a real challenge for faculty.
- [00:41:31.630]So faculty came up with many, many ideas
- [00:41:34.250]including shorter lectures as we've seen,
- [00:41:39.170]use of asynchronous video to flip class, we've seen.
- [00:41:44.330]That Chat feature in the Zoom,
- [00:41:48.370]I'm sure many of you have it.
- [00:41:50.677]There're more faculty members across the institute
- [00:41:53.760]that have raved about the Chat feature.
- [00:41:58.830]When I first started to lecture on Chat
- [00:42:01.860]and I noticed that the students
- [00:42:04.160]were carrying on a conversation in the Chat,
- [00:42:08.050]I thought that was a little disconcerting.
- [00:42:13.510]I said, why aren't they paying attention to me?
- [00:42:16.030]But as I watched it unfold,
- [00:42:18.030]I realized that they were not only asking questions
- [00:42:21.700]about what I was saying,
- [00:42:23.190]but they were also encouraging others
- [00:42:25.280]to answer the questions.
- [00:42:26.900]So there was this parallel conversation that was going on.
- [00:42:32.790]I interviewed one very eminent biologist,
- [00:42:36.130]a senior person, world-class biologist
- [00:42:43.070]and he teaches with a couple other eminent biologists
- [00:42:47.410]and I asked him how he was doing with online teaching.
- [00:42:51.870]He went on for 20 minutes, a monologue
- [00:42:54.610]on the great feature of Chat.
- [00:42:57.540](laughs)
- [00:43:00.970]He was ready to nominate the person
- [00:43:03.270]who in Google, came up with Chat for the Nobel prize.
- [00:43:06.130]I think he in fact does serve on the nomination committee
- [00:43:10.370]and in fact, his colleague that he teaches
- [00:43:13.140]the Introduction to Biology is a Nobel Laureate
- [00:43:16.630]and he said, I'm going to ask Bob to use the Chat
- [00:43:19.940]when he teaches with me.
- [00:43:26.437]So here we are, Nobel Laureates
- [00:43:29.260]and others of equal stature talking about Chat.
- [00:43:35.000]Getting really excited about teaching,
- [00:43:37.820]something that did not happen before.
- [00:43:40.190]So this is going to change the way we teach
- [00:43:43.290]even after we go back.
- [00:43:49.400]Teaching the whole student.
- [00:43:50.860]This is something that we talk
- [00:43:53.130]about in the Inside Higher Ed article, that's coming up.
- [00:43:56.910]So in thinking about the future of MIT education,
- [00:44:00.600]we hope that MIT will provide a more holistic education,
- [00:44:04.040]with yet more focus on nurturing our students
- [00:44:07.090]in intellect and spirit, that is teaching a whole student
- [00:44:11.030]and when I saw that, I was, how do you do that?
- [00:44:13.490]Well, by teaching with Zoom,
- [00:44:17.620]we are actually looking often
- [00:44:19.460]into the student's living quarters.
- [00:44:21.360]We see how they live
- [00:44:22.900]and we often have to compete for their attention
- [00:44:26.530]with their family members or their pets.
- [00:44:29.210]Now you've seen dogs show up on your screens
- [00:44:32.260]and so you actually see how the students are living
- [00:44:34.280]and the struggles that have been posed on them, okay.
- [00:44:41.070]Wi-Fi that doesn't work well
- [00:44:43.110]or they have to take care of their siblings
- [00:44:45.350]and so I think that the faculty members being able
- [00:44:49.290]to look into the student's actual living quarters
- [00:44:54.920]is going to help us to teach students as a whole, okay.
- [00:45:00.370]This is going to be an impact that will carry over
- [00:45:07.580]and I think it's going to be
- [00:45:08.650]a very, very important impact, okay.
- [00:45:11.560]We are learning to teach students, not only academically
- [00:45:15.440]but also the whole person.
- [00:45:24.870]Governance, one very interesting impact
- [00:45:30.840]that the pandemic has had is
- [00:45:33.140]that attendance in meetings has really increased.
- [00:45:40.800]Going back to the idea of teaching,
- [00:45:43.850]one faculty member mentioned to me back in the spring
- [00:45:49.360]when we started to teach online that before the pandemic,
- [00:45:53.870]the department used to meet once a month
- [00:45:56.080]and it was not so well attended, the faculty meeting
- [00:45:58.920]but once the pandemic hit, they started to meet once a week.
- [00:46:02.780]Most of the faculty attended
- [00:46:04.640]and the discussion was almost invariably about teaching.
- [00:46:09.930]How do you use the Zoom with this feature?
- [00:46:11.960]How do you use the tablet to draw formulas?
- [00:46:17.960]We have a monthly Institute Faculty Meeting,
- [00:46:21.570]that is a institute faculty meeting as a whole.
- [00:46:25.410]Before the pandemic, it was not always well attended
- [00:46:29.050]and the chair of the faculty who I interviewed told me
- [00:46:34.560]that there are times when they weren't sure
- [00:46:37.470]if they will hit the quorum of 30 faculty members
- [00:46:41.570]until they started the meeting.
- [00:46:43.180]They've always got quorum but sometimes just barely.
- [00:46:47.480]But once the pandemic hit
- [00:46:49.170]and they started to meet on Zoom,
- [00:46:51.940]now at its peak, 170 faculty members were attending, okay.
- [00:46:57.550]Some of this is I think, just us wanting
- [00:46:59.640]to interact with our colleagues
- [00:47:01.740]but a lot of it is the convenience
- [00:47:03.820]of not having to get into your car
- [00:47:05.320]and then walk across campus,
- [00:47:08.250]170 faculty members at this peak.
- [00:47:11.270]Just as importantly, 125 non-faculty
- [00:47:16.150]such as researchers and staff attended, okay.
- [00:47:19.700]You don't see this in in-person institute faculty meetings
- [00:47:24.587]and this has really expanded the scope of governance, okay.
- [00:47:29.700]Although the non-faculty don't have speaking privileges
- [00:47:33.560]at the institute faculty meetings
- [00:47:35.490]because their faculty meetings,
- [00:47:36.940]they have the right to attend
- [00:47:39.340]and so they can see governance at its core
- [00:47:43.660]and so this is really important
- [00:47:45.840]that we are spreading governance beyond faculty
- [00:47:49.320]and even among the faculty,
- [00:47:50.880]more and more faculty are participating, okay.
- [00:47:56.051]Just as a final note, I've been talking of positive things
- [00:48:00.320]but there are things of concern as well.
- [00:48:03.770]As soon as the pandemic hit
- [00:48:06.360]and we went online, we discovered that problems in society
- [00:48:13.030]that were there to begin with, became exacerbated.
- [00:48:17.690]So when the New York Public School system went online,
- [00:48:22.350]they discovered that something like 10%
- [00:48:24.880]of the children did not have Wi-Fi or quiet place to live.
- [00:48:31.000]They didn't really have a home.
- [00:48:32.590]They were commuting from homeless shelters.
- [00:48:35.410]So these kids were dependent on schools,
- [00:48:38.570]not just for education but more basic needs like food, okay
- [00:48:43.640]and so the pandemic has really exacerbated
- [00:48:48.660]these societal problems.
- [00:48:51.290]Just yesterday in the New York Times,
- [00:48:54.780]there was an article that expressed concern
- [00:48:58.420]about our education becoming tiered
- [00:49:02.080]and so as of March of this year,
- [00:49:06.491]80% of White children in this country
- [00:49:08.803]were back to being taught in-person,
- [00:49:12.637]it seemed like kind of a high percentage
- [00:49:15.370]but that's how I understood it
- [00:49:17.050]but just 50% of Black and Hispanic children
- [00:49:19.710]and 33% of Asian-American children.
- [00:49:22.460]So the article expressed a concern
- [00:49:25.440]and there are reasons why, for example Black
- [00:49:30.450]and Hispanic children were not attending it.
- [00:49:32.960]Some were helping with their family,
- [00:49:35.230]some were working, had started to work
- [00:49:38.050]and so there's a real concern
- [00:49:39.740]that this may lead to a tiered education, okay
- [00:49:43.017]and we have to make effort to make sure
- [00:49:46.640]that everyone is given equal opportunities, okay
- [00:49:52.770]and stop sharing them.
- [00:49:54.670]Okay, that's what I wanted to tell you
- [00:49:58.920]and so the pandemic has had many, many positive impacts
- [00:50:03.590]on education that I think will carry over
- [00:50:06.210]but there are some concerns as well
- [00:50:08.280]and so let me stop there
- [00:50:10.200]and I would love to have a conversation with you.
- [00:50:15.040]Dr. Miyagawa, we have had a couple of questions
- [00:50:17.780]that have come up in Chat.
- [00:50:19.360]So I thought I would share those with you
- [00:50:22.886]so that you could address those.
- [00:50:24.950]One of our participants, Mertonia Gesco asks,
- [00:50:28.900]Dr. Miyagawa, thanks for your presentation.
- [00:50:30.980]What is the single most important thing universities
- [00:50:33.630]should do moving forward to keep innovation
- [00:50:37.730]and effective practices moving forward?
- [00:50:43.390]That's interesting, that question came up
- [00:50:44.680]in a senior meeting just a couple of weeks ago.
- [00:50:50.720]There is a real tension right now,
- [00:50:53.920]a real tension between wanting to go back
- [00:50:57.040]to in-person as completely as possible
- [00:51:00.790]because we understand that business model.
- [00:51:03.860]Right now, we're losing money because of the pandemic
- [00:51:09.160]because our regular business model requires
- [00:51:12.810]that students are on campus.
- [00:51:14.360]They're living in residences, they're buying food.
- [00:51:17.780]We don't have to pay for all
- [00:51:19.210]of this online equipment to make it possible
- [00:51:25.290]and so there's an anxiousness on the part
- [00:51:28.840]of senior management to go back and also educationally.
- [00:51:33.620]I think there's no doubt that in-person education
- [00:51:37.680]is something that you can not replace
- [00:51:39.900]but at the same time, we are now seeing these innovations
- [00:51:46.286]by faculty and students who are also getting used
- [00:51:49.830]to being taught online, okay.
- [00:51:52.440]So the answer that I gave for that is the following.
- [00:51:59.830]When you go back to in-person, it better be good, okay.
- [00:52:04.993]Your in-person teaching, better be good
- [00:52:08.090]and the institutions have to support faculty
- [00:52:11.400]to provide the best possible education.
- [00:52:14.930]Okay, pre-pandemic was not enough.
- [00:52:17.400]Okay, we now see that we can teach online
- [00:52:21.080]and students see that we can teach online.
- [00:52:23.570]We're gonna ask students to take the time
- [00:52:25.730]and effort to come to the classroom, okay.
- [00:52:29.390]We better offer the very best education possible
- [00:52:34.210]for our students
- [00:52:35.870]and I think that this is the real challenge
- [00:52:39.220]that I'm putting in front of our senior management
- [00:52:43.860]at the institution, better be good.
- [00:52:48.010]That's my answer.
- [00:52:50.950]Thank you for that.
- [00:52:51.860]We've got another question from Michael Kozak.
- [00:52:56.500]Students will welcome us into their world
- [00:52:58.710]as we teach in remote and hybrid models.
- [00:53:01.620]Can you share your thoughts on personalizing education
- [00:53:05.400]and making content more student-centered?
- [00:53:08.370]What are your thoughts on individualized education?
- [00:53:12.720]One of the things that in interviewing faculty members
- [00:53:16.610]I found that was really really remarkable is precisely this.
- [00:53:23.690]Okay, we are finding ourselves
- [00:53:25.190]in this new environment of Zoom.
- [00:53:28.060]We don't really understand it.
- [00:53:29.750]It doesn't seem as good as in-person teaching
- [00:53:32.210]but let's make the best of it.
- [00:53:37.120]Okay, and so faculty members started
- [00:53:39.820]to think about exactly this notion that, okay,
- [00:53:44.800]we are in the students living quarters,
- [00:53:47.800]we are in their houses.
- [00:53:50.810]How can we take advantage of that?
- [00:53:53.179]Okay, one just beautiful example of that,
- [00:53:57.570]it was a French instructor at MIT who realized this
- [00:54:05.150]and she said, okay, I'm going to have students cook.
- [00:54:09.310]Okay, I'm going to give them recipes in French
- [00:54:14.310]and I'm going to have them cook
- [00:54:16.100]and then I'm going to have them share over Zoom
- [00:54:18.520]what they cooked to see if they're able
- [00:54:20.980]to follow the instructions in French
- [00:54:23.320]and they had just a wonderful, wonderful class.
- [00:54:28.180]Some students were able to do it well,
- [00:54:30.070]others saying I didn't come out well
- [00:54:32.330]and so I guess they didn't get as good a grade
- [00:54:35.260]on that little thing.
- [00:54:38.030]I think that in general, this idea that we are now looking,
- [00:54:44.530]we're peeking into the students' lives
- [00:54:48.000]is going to help us to understand that we have to teach,
- [00:54:53.420]not just to the students' academics slice of existence
- [00:54:57.380]but to their entire holistic being
- [00:55:01.150]and this will help us to personalize teaching just
- [00:55:04.920]in the way that this French teacher was able to do.
- [00:55:10.630]Thank you, John Dunning asks Dr. Miyagawa,
- [00:55:15.000]do you anticipate that willingness
- [00:55:16.840]to embrace change will wane
- [00:55:19.560]as the urgency of the pandemic fades?
- [00:55:22.370]And do you envision any strategies
- [00:55:24.440]for setting a reasonable and sustainable pace of innovation?
- [00:55:31.040]Innovation is very much part of our culture
- [00:55:35.200]and it's been true pre-pandemic.
- [00:55:39.750]The interesting thing that the pandemic has brought to us
- [00:55:44.220]is innovation in teaching in ways
- [00:55:46.650]that we've never experienced before, right.
- [00:55:50.520]It's sort of interesting that I saw more innovation
- [00:55:54.107]in land-grant institutions like Nebraska
- [00:55:59.300]where I was before Ohio State, okay
- [00:56:02.550]where I think there was more focus on teaching
- [00:56:06.940]than in some of these other sort
- [00:56:09.220]of schools like MIT and peer institutions
- [00:56:12.070]but with the pandemic,
- [00:56:15.390]we've all been forced to do innovation.
- [00:56:18.250]So the question is, can the institutions maintain this?
- [00:56:23.520]Can the institutions maintain this?
- [00:56:25.450]And I think we have to, we have to, as I said.
- [00:56:29.030]We got to provide the very best teaching
- [00:56:31.730]to our students now, students expect that, okay.
- [00:56:34.630]They know that they can learn online.
- [00:56:38.420]So if they're expected to,
- [00:56:42.320]if you look at another area of our society,
- [00:56:46.780]you look at offices, office buildings.
- [00:56:49.070]Office buildings are going to have
- [00:56:51.187]a fundamental change, right.
- [00:56:54.150]Just in the Boston area,
- [00:56:56.390]there's like a 16% an occupancy rate
- [00:57:01.340]and they're anticipating that 25% of the workforce
- [00:57:06.150]will be telecommuting at any given point
- [00:57:10.590]which means that the value of officers will go down.
- [00:57:16.130]So they, the real estate people
- [00:57:18.510]will have to come up with real reasons
- [00:57:20.270]for why people need to come and work physically, okay.
- [00:57:25.260]I mean that path's gonna change anyway
- [00:57:27.260]but I think the same is for higher education leadership.
- [00:57:33.100]Okay, how are we going to convince students
- [00:57:37.856]to take classes in-person
- [00:57:42.460]when they know that they can take classes online?
- [00:57:45.430]And I think it's going to take a lot
- [00:57:47.890]of innovation to make that happen
- [00:57:50.670]and I expect that innovation to come.
- [00:57:53.240]Now, not just from institutions like MIT
- [00:57:56.170]but from major educational institutions
- [00:58:01.010]like University of Nebraska
- [00:58:03.260]where you have real leadership in educational effort.
- [00:58:09.900]Thank you very much, Mark Budreau asks, Dr. Miyagawa,
- [00:58:15.160]it seems like going to a policy
- [00:58:16.960]of giving information away was a bold move
- [00:58:20.500]and would be fairly controversial at any institution.
- [00:58:24.480]Was that as easy as the president agreeing to this change?
- [00:58:28.390]Did you receive pushback from within MIT?
- [00:58:31.730]Have you received pushback from outside MIT?
- [00:58:35.475]And did this decision to make available information
- [00:58:38.190]for free to the world
- [00:58:39.790]make other institutions apprehensive or uncomfortable?
- [00:58:43.790]I'm curious what feedback you've received
- [00:58:45.810]both from within and outside MIT.
- [00:58:50.190]What a well articulated question.
- [00:58:53.290]That question has been asked of me for the last 20 years.
- [00:58:58.240]That was such a wonderfully worded question, thank you
- [00:59:02.820]and the answer's yes.
- [00:59:04.410]The answer is yes, we got pushed back from the get-go
- [00:59:09.880]and to be honest, our little committee
- [00:59:13.650]when we decided this was the only thing we could propose,
- [00:59:17.130]we weren't sure, we weren't sure
- [00:59:19.150]if it would be taken seriously
- [00:59:21.440]or if our little report,
- [00:59:22.506]will just simply be shelved and collect dust
- [00:59:28.140]and here, I think academic leadership
- [00:59:32.770]really, really showed its power.
- [00:59:37.730]We heard from our provost, Fritz
- [00:59:40.660]who clearly is a wonderful and effective leader.
- [00:59:46.660]We have all these leaders in academic institutions
- [00:59:50.210]but on a day-to-day basis, we don't see them.
- [00:59:53.230]We don't see them, right
- [00:59:54.940]and I think probably that's a good thing
- [00:59:56.680]because we are supposed to be institutions
- [00:59:59.650]of faculty governance but from time to time, leadership
- [01:00:04.670]shows it's neat and empower
- [01:00:08.580]and here was an instance where President Chuck Beth said,
- [01:00:14.110]this is the right thing to do.
- [01:00:17.820]Let's make it happen.
- [01:00:19.490]He went out and raised money.
- [01:00:21.390]He went all over campus and said,
- [01:00:24.000]we gotta do this, okay, we gotta do.
- [01:00:26.280]This is part of our mission
- [01:00:28.700]and he and other faculty leadership really spent,
- [01:00:33.170]we spent six months going
- [01:00:34.590]around convincing faculty and students.
- [01:00:38.270]Students said, why are you giving education away
- [01:00:42.660]when we are paying so much money?
- [01:00:44.860]Where it's their parents who are paying the money
- [01:00:47.210]or MIT since only like 20%
- [01:00:49.780]of MIT students pay full tuition, the rest at fellowships.
- [01:00:56.110]So there was a pushback
- [01:00:59.460]and other institutions who are trying to do dot-coms
- [01:01:03.300]were not happy with us, right.
- [01:01:05.900]Were not happy with us
- [01:01:10.530]but we felt that this was the right thing to do,
- [01:01:12.530]that the mission of higher education
- [01:01:15.920]is not just within the walls of our campus
- [01:01:20.460]but that we are here to educate first and foremost,
- [01:01:25.740]our students but then wherever we can,
- [01:01:26.738]beyond our four walls.
- [01:01:31.980]Just like we do with research.
- [01:01:33.170]When we do research we publish in publications
- [01:01:36.400]that have impact all over the world, okay.
- [01:01:39.170]We are saying that we can do that with education as well.
- [01:01:43.310]Thank you for that question.
- [01:01:45.718]Thank you, we'll shift gears here
- [01:01:48.150]a little bit, Purvin Metta asks,
- [01:01:51.350]Can you share details on the Chat tool that your faculty use
- [01:01:55.710]and then any other details
- [01:01:57.660]about how Anna built up the green room?
- [01:02:02.080]Ah, so the Chat feature is part of, well,
- [01:02:06.160]I think you're seeing it here as well.
- [01:02:08.370]It's just a simple Zoom Chat feature
- [01:02:11.900]in which participants can carry
- [01:02:13.790]on a conversation parallel to the presentation, right.
- [01:02:17.090]So if you use the Zoom, the Chat comes with it
- [01:02:21.118]and it's a matter of sort of mastering the usage of it.
- [01:02:24.080]As I said, it was a little bit disconcerting
- [01:02:26.910]at first, when I started to use the Chat back in May, 2020
- [01:02:33.700]when the participants were carrying on a conversation,
- [01:02:36.570]sort of, kind of ignoring me.
- [01:02:38.180]It seemed like they turned out
- [01:02:40.090]that they were paying even more attention
- [01:02:42.520]than if they were simply listening to me.
- [01:02:48.248]So everyone loves the Chat feature.
- [01:02:49.587]The real challenge now,
- [01:02:52.240]how are we going to replicate the Chat experience
- [01:02:55.700]when we go in-person?
- [01:02:57.350]Everyone is thinking about this,
- [01:02:58.840]it's really difficult to do.
- [01:03:00.480]It's really difficult to do
- [01:03:02.140]but it's the one feature that everyone agrees
- [01:03:06.480]is really effective.
- [01:03:09.010]Students who are shy
- [01:03:10.240]and who don't want to ask a question in in-person class,
- [01:03:14.200]they ask questions in the Chat, for example, okay.
- [01:03:19.260]The green room that Anna built
- [01:03:21.770]is something actually, I want to do very soon
- [01:03:26.210]and if you go through the web, as they explain to you,
- [01:03:32.370]you just need to come up with a green curtain.
- [01:03:36.530]I think no, you can buy software,
- [01:03:38.210]a greenroom software as well.
- [01:03:41.303]I wish I could tell you more.
- [01:03:43.210]I'm just now starting to look into it
- [01:03:44.780]because after interviewing Anna, I decided to do it myself
- [01:03:49.080]but I'm going to look into it myself.
- [01:03:52.550]If you find anything or if there's anyone here
- [01:03:56.520]who can share that knowledge with us, that'd be fantastic.
- [01:04:00.710]Thank you for that, Peggy Moore asks,
- [01:04:04.060]thank you very much for this look
- [01:04:05.230]into MIT's response to teaching during the pandemic.
- [01:04:08.860]What considerations or accommodation needs surfaced
- [01:04:12.710]during online teaching and learning for students or faculty?
- [01:04:20.350]Accommodations, okay, so one thing that we learned
- [01:04:27.290]is that for some fields like math, for example
- [01:04:32.860]I actually interviewed several math faculty members.
- [01:04:36.840]For math, being able to write mathematical formulas
- [01:04:42.210]on the board before the pandemic
- [01:04:44.630]was central to their education
- [01:04:47.507]and so now they had to learn to do that
- [01:04:51.330]as a faculty member, but also as students as well
- [01:04:54.510]and so they, first of all
- [01:04:57.230]made tablets available to all of the faculty
- [01:05:03.000]and also to students who didn't already have a tablet
- [01:05:06.730]so that along with the Zoom,
- [01:05:08.660]they could have a tablet to draw formulas on, okay.
- [01:05:15.610]Wi-Fi, there were students who did not have a Wi-Fi.
- [01:05:18.500]We sent pocket Wi-Fis to them
- [01:05:22.220]and you saw the mechanical engineering example
- [01:05:25.210]where they actually shipped out a whole box full
- [01:05:28.040]of goodies of experiments to do at home as well.
- [01:05:33.240]So all of these accommodations.
- [01:05:35.810]So also childcare, we opened up the childcare facility
- [01:05:41.800]in July, long before other like, MIT is still closed,
- [01:05:47.820]but we opened up the childcare facility realizing
- [01:05:52.240]that faculty and graduate students and other people
- [01:05:57.560]and teaching staff really needed that support as well.
- [01:06:02.330]Thank you, I just wanted to bring up some resources
- [01:06:07.590]in the Chat based upon your green screen question.
- [01:06:12.610]There's a link to a dunk.com
- [01:06:16.520]which is a resource for green screens.
- [01:06:19.590]UNL is also using one button studios and Lightboards.
- [01:06:23.630]So we've included a couple of links to that
- [01:06:26.080]and there's another application called MMHMM, M-M-H-M-M
- [01:06:31.470]which permits you to have a green screen for free.
- [01:06:36.620]I wanna move on to another question
- [01:06:39.180]and please forgive me if I mispronounced your name.
- [01:06:41.610]It's Sue Rasimi, culture of Lakota, asks,
- [01:06:46.820]thank you, Dr. Miyagawa for your presentation
- [01:06:49.070]and insights today, you mentioned asking faculty
- [01:06:52.230]on their perspectives of student learning.
- [01:06:54.770]I'm wondering, what did you consider
- [01:06:56.900]as learning and how did you measure it?
- [01:07:03.010]Good question, we did not do any formal measurement
- [01:07:06.810]as you're supposed to do
- [01:07:08.320]if you're doing this in any serious way,
- [01:07:12.120]if you're really trying
- [01:07:13.410]to measure educational effectiveness.
- [01:07:17.890]We simply wanted a very broad breaststroke
- [01:07:22.200]of attitudes and feelings among the faculty and students.
- [01:07:26.510]So it was simply a general survey
- [01:07:29.260]of how do you think it went, kind of question.
- [01:07:35.218]Do you agree with the statement
- [01:07:42.260]that I felt that my teaching went well?
- [01:07:46.710]Okay, disagree, strongly disagree, agree, strongly,
- [01:07:51.560]those kinds of very informal
- [01:07:56.997]and so if you're going to really understand
- [01:07:59.830]the educational value,
- [01:08:04.240]we do need to bring in educational tools into this
- [01:08:08.020]but it was helpful for us that there was this gap
- [01:08:12.380]between faculty perception of teaching
- [01:08:15.157]but the faculty thought that went really well
- [01:08:17.820]and the student perception, they were
- [01:08:21.727]under heavy stress from COVID
- [01:08:24.250]and so they had difficulty paying attention at times
- [01:08:29.100]and so that was helpful to us
- [01:08:30.930]and so we made adjustments once we learned that.
- [01:08:36.517]Great, thank you, let me check again.
- [01:08:42.880]Here we go, we've got a new question here
- [01:08:46.400]from Dr. Linda Love.
- [01:08:48.850]Dr. Miyagawa obviously the continuing development
- [01:08:51.780]of our faculty has never been more important.
- [01:08:54.750]What is MIT doing to prepare both in-person
- [01:08:57.610]and online teachers for the future?
- [01:09:00.230]What kind of investments
- [01:09:01.330]should we be anticipating for faculty?
- [01:09:04.090]Obviously, one workshop will not be the solution
- [01:09:06.250]for creating the future of our dreams.
- [01:09:08.990]Could you maybe talk about that a bit?
- [01:09:12.230]Sure, yeah, no, this is something
- [01:09:14.120]that is being discussed quite intensively right now
- [01:09:17.500]and in fact my unit, open learning is at
- [01:09:22.140]at the center of it
- [01:09:23.420]and so we are committed to providing faculty
- [01:09:30.447]with the needs that they have beyond the pandemic, right.
- [01:09:36.480]So Zoom will be available now
- [01:09:40.510]that the faculty are used to it.
- [01:09:42.160]One big investment we made, huge investment
- [01:09:45.860]is putting in a new LMS learning management system, Canvas,
- [01:09:54.130]it's sort of old news to most people
- [01:09:57.010]but we've been using our homegrown LMS
- [01:10:04.210]for the last 20 years.
- [01:10:06.090]It was great to begin with but it was showing its age
- [01:10:10.050]and we have been discussing, installing a new LMS
- [01:10:15.120]but usually when an institution installs
- [01:10:19.010]a new campus-wide change, it takes years
- [01:10:23.660]and committees and committees.
- [01:10:26.720]Harvard changed to Canvas several years ago.
- [01:10:30.290]They took years, years to make the conversion.
- [01:10:34.960]In the case of MIT, we had to do it
- [01:10:37.060]in one semester, literally once semester.
- [01:10:40.450]I have a slide that shows that
- [01:10:43.480]before the fall semester of 2020,
- [01:10:46.440]something like 5% of the courses were Canvas
- [01:10:52.290]and the remainder in the homegrown
- [01:10:55.210]and in the fall semester, we had literally switched.
- [01:10:58.820]It was a huge investment
- [01:11:01.320]and this, just the modernization of LMS
- [01:11:07.920]is going to have a big impact on teaching
- [01:11:11.205]and there are now more faculty using LMS
- [01:11:14.450]and all its features
- [01:11:16.060]and so I expect that we will, off just this Canvas,
- [01:11:21.370]we'll see more faculty innovation taking place in teaching.
- [01:11:27.570]Right, thank you, Akubra Beta asks another question,
- [01:11:31.100]is MIT exploring HyFlex teaching
- [01:11:33.710]for the fall when school reopens?
- [01:11:37.480]Ah, so HyFlex is actually a term
- [01:11:39.730]in this country as well.
- [01:11:40.563]I heard it in Japan just recently.
- [01:11:42.960]Okay, so if I understand, is HyFlex
- [01:11:46.204]like a hybrid model, is that correct?
- [01:11:52.080]Yeah, I believe that's the case, yes.
- [01:11:54.690]Yeah, so we need
- [01:12:01.700]to look into that possibility
- [01:12:04.070]because we now see that there are parts of our courses
- [01:12:08.560]that can be taught quite effectively online.
- [01:12:14.710]So the faculty members are saying that,
- [01:12:17.040]some of the things that they will never have
- [01:12:19.780]to do again once they go back to in-person
- [01:12:22.190]is doing makeup lectures
- [01:12:24.030]because they had to go to an international conference
- [01:12:27.100]and they had to miss some lectures
- [01:12:30.390]and now they can lecture from the hotel room, okay.
- [01:12:32.830]So that's a hybrid
- [01:12:37.963]and some students would like to be off campus
- [01:12:40.310]to do part of their research
- [01:12:42.010]and so there're students who are interested
- [01:12:43.970]in issues of water, right, and public health.
- [01:12:49.300]For that they could be in Africa or Southeast Asia or India.
- [01:12:55.470]Okay, for part of the semester
- [01:12:57.860]but they also don't want to miss out on the credit
- [01:13:02.090]'cause at MIT, you got to finish your degree in four years.
- [01:13:05.910]Otherwise there's a big financial burden
- [01:13:10.850]and so all of this things
- [01:13:11.748]that have become clear as advantages.
- [01:13:17.970]What is important for not just MIT
- [01:13:21.200]but for all institutions, is to come up
- [01:13:23.840]with a clear policy on how we do this, okay.
- [01:13:27.550]We can't have each faculty member making up
- [01:13:30.540]his or her policy of how do you teach online?
- [01:13:34.270]When do you teach on,
- [01:13:35.350]we have to come up with a clear policy
- [01:13:37.290]so that we are all comfortable.
- [01:13:38.930]We all understand were all on the same page
- [01:13:43.410]when it comes to HyFlex approach to teaching, okay
- [01:13:46.920]and this is, I think what every institution is now,
- [01:13:51.360]certainly at MIT, we are having intense conversations about
- [01:13:56.253]with regard to policy on
- [01:13:59.180]when you can teach offline or online.
- [01:14:04.610]I just wanted to mention, thankfully one
- [01:14:07.310]of our participants, Tanya Mean,
- [01:14:08.990]she's provided a link to what HyFlex refers to.
- [01:14:15.270]It's the ability for a student to decide
- [01:14:18.750]what mode they will participate in session by session
- [01:14:22.250]and so there's a link in the Chat to that particular model.
- [01:14:28.813]I'm not sure if you wanted to address that,
- [01:14:31.530]given that description.
- [01:14:34.840]So I think that's very much related to what I said.
- [01:14:39.410]We have to come up with a clear policy
- [01:14:41.950]of when you can have students participate online.
- [01:14:47.550]That assumes that we are going to keep
- [01:14:49.950]at least part of our courses online
- [01:14:52.510]and so that comes back to the more general policy
- [01:14:55.690]that we have to have for when do we do online?
- [01:15:01.320]When do we do in-person?
- [01:15:03.540]Okay, to do both is going to put a big stress on our system.
- [01:15:09.420]Right now it's pretty much, online or in-person, okay
- [01:15:15.190]but trying to do both is going to put a big stress
- [01:15:18.470]that is beyond the models that we are used to
- [01:15:22.970]and yet we know that there are advantages.
- [01:15:24.940]So we have to come up with a clear policy.
- [01:15:27.950]I hope that we will have a policy
- [01:15:30.940]that will make some of this HyFlex possible
- [01:15:35.830]but we'll have to see, we'll have to see.
- [01:15:39.220]We just have a couple of minutes left
- [01:15:40.751]and I'm gonna ask a, I think our final question.
- [01:15:45.260]You mentioned how faculty embraced alternative assessments
- [01:15:48.110]during the pandemic.
- [01:15:49.340]Do you believe that this will continue as colleges
- [01:15:52.420]and universities return to a new normal?
- [01:15:57.030]I do, I do, just as I believe that many faculty members
- [01:16:02.650]will no longer do these lengthy lectures
- [01:16:06.280]but instead to cut their lectures to 10 minutes
- [01:16:09.970]and then discussion, 10 minutes, discussion
- [01:16:13.320]and also asynchronous video
- [01:16:15.310]that they produce that students can view ahead of time
- [01:16:18.880]so that you can have more discussion in the classroom.
- [01:16:23.400]It's all part of the package
- [01:16:25.250]of more sort of active teaching throughout the semester
- [01:16:35.720]and that includes evaluation.
- [01:16:38.180]Instead of these high-stake, high-stress, mid-term, final,
- [01:16:46.790]we can have more smaller ways to evaluate
- [01:16:51.930]where you can actually see,
- [01:16:53.190]you can get more data, right.
- [01:16:54.550]You can get more data
- [01:16:56.320]and you can return that data to the students,
- [01:16:58.810]how they are doing on a weekly basis
- [01:17:01.050]as opposed to waiting until mid-term
- [01:17:04.760]to see how they are doing
- [01:17:07.210]and so, yes, I believe that this is going to be one
- [01:17:10.380]of their important outcomes of the pandemic.
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