-: It is my great pleasure to introduce
to you our keynote speaker, Dr. Shigeru Miyagawa,
a Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning.
Dr. Miyagawa is involved with many aspects
of digital learning at MIT.
He was on the original MIT Committee
that proposed OpenCourseWare and was the chair
of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee
from 2010 to 2013.
He is also Co-Director of Visualizing Cultures
with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, John W. Dower.
With John Dower, Andrew Gordon of Harvard
and Gennifer Weisenfeld of Duke,
he created Visualizing Japan,
a Harvard MIT MOOC offered by edX
that has attracted over 15,000 learners worldwide.
Visualizing Japan was a finalist
for the prestigious Japan Prize in 2015.
Between February, 2014 and February, 2019,
he served as Project Professor and Director
of Open Education for the University of Tokyo
as a joint appointment with MIT.
As a Professor of Linguistics,
he has published several books and over 60 articles.
He recently developed the Integration Hypothesis,
a theory of human language evolution featured
in the journals, frontiers in psychology and science.
We are honored to have Dr. Shigeru Miyagawa
here with us today, welcome.
(mouse clicks)
-: Thank you so much, thank you.
It's quite an honor to be participating
in this wonderful event
and I'm honored that you invited me to be with you.
I'm only sorry that I cannot be in Nebraska.
I have never been to Nebraska
and so I was particularly excited.
I've known Nebraska ever since I was a kid
but for a different thing
than what we're talking about today.
I grew up in Alabama, part of the time
and of course I knew Nebraska as Cornhuskers
and my first job out of graduate school
was at Ohio State, a Buckeyes
and of course the Cornhuskers
and so I've known Nebraska from when I was a child
and so I've always been curious
about the state and the institution.
Whenever I go to a new university or a campus,
I always has to look at the football stadium
because that's sort of in my blood
and I'm sure you have
a very, very wonderful football stadium,
Ohio State did too and Alabama does too.
When I came to MIT in 1991,
I was asked to be shown the football stadium
and it was like a little league stadium.
So I wondered, what have I gotten myself into?
But I've been very lucky and fortunate
to have been able to work at MIT but I am so pleased
and I thank you, provost, Fritz
and Mary and Mark for your wonderful work
and I like to thank Michael Jolley for inviting me
and finding the article in Inside Higher Education,
I think that got your interested.
So let me with that share.
What I would like to do is to speak for,
not the entire time but speak for part of the time,
I'm hoping that we can have a conversation
for the rest of the time with those in the audience, okay.
So let me share my screen.
(mouse clicks)
Okay.
So I'm going to be talking about,
what will remain after the pandemic?
It's something that many, many people are wondering about
and it's something that those of us at the MIT
in Open Learning have been thinking about a lot
and as part of thinking about it,
we of course look at what has happened during the pandemic
and to try to understand that first and foremost
and then to try to project out into the future
beyond the pandemic, when the masks can come off, okay.
But before I get into that, I just wanted
to mention something that Mary kindly mentioned
that I was part of OpenCourseWare team
and so I'd like to start
with my background in digital learning.
So I'm a Professor of Linguistics
and MIT hired me to teach about human language
but along the way, I had an opportunity
to engage in digital learning
and what happened was that in the year, 2000,
then president of MIT Charles Vest, convened
a small number of faculty members and he asked us to come up
with a strategy for eLearning for MIT, okay
and his point was that this was the year 2000,
everyone was doing eLearning, Stanford,
Chicago, Carnegie Mellon.
Everyone was doing eLearning, we weren't
and so he said that we are behind times
and so he wanted us, a small faculty contingent
to come up with eLearning strategy
and assumption going in was that
we would come up with an mit.com,
that is a revenue generating profit venture.
This was still in the dot-com era
for those of you who are familiar with that
and so we spent six months trying to come up
with a viable scheme for an mit.com.
We actually had a consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton
who was part of our team to help us
to build business models and test out the market
for MIT generated teaching material that we could sell.
After six months, we came to the conclusion
that doing mit.com was not a good idea, okay
for a number of reasons.
One was that this is a really hard business
to be in back in year 2000.
We created 20 different business models
and did a pretty rigorous market research
and our conclusion was that
it will be a pretty tough business venture
but even more importantly,
we felt that time teaching materials
that we produce at MIT to profit
was not the right thing to do at that point, okay
and so we decided to shelf the idea of mit.com
and this was at the last meeting
before we had to report to President Vest.
We had to come up with something
and so we sat around the table,
I still remember the moment when we said, well,
maybe we could turn this idea on his head, okay
and instead of trying to make money,
why don't we just give it away, give it away for free.
Anyone can access our teaching materials anytime.
There's no registration required and you can come in
and use our material to study, however you want.
We put a name to it, OpenCourseWare,
sort of modeling on open source software
and we proposed it to Present Vest
not knowing how he would react to it.
Very fortunately he liked it
and he went to raise funds for it
and eventually we ended up putting
our entire MIT course material on the web.
It's called OpenCourseWare, ocw.mit.edu.
You can go to it and you will find material
from 2,600 MIT courses,
both undergraduate and graduate
from all five schools, engineering, science,
architecture, humanities and business, okay
and something like 75% of tenure track faculty members
are contributing to OpenCourseWare.
You'll find that the material that we offer
on OpenCourseWare is licensed under Creative Commons.
So that you're free to not just view it but to download it,
you can copy it, you can distribute it, you can alter it.
You can incorporate it
into your own teaching materials, okay.
We'd like for you to do that
and so that's why we decided to offer it
under Creative Commons, which means that OpenCourseWare
at MIT is clearing copyright permission
from all of the publishers in order to make it possible
for us to offer it under Creative Commons.
Well, before the pandemic, we had 1 million unique users,
not kids, one million unique users
from something like 200 countries coming
in every month to use our teaching material.
During the pandemic, that number has doubled
or even more than doubled to over 2 million people coming
in every month to study with OpenCourseWare
and so it's been a wonderful experience for me
and it's been a wonderful experience for MIT.
MIT's mission, the institute mission, not the OCW,
MIT's mission is to generate
and to share our knowledge with the world
and bring it to bear on the great problems of the world.
Before OpenCourseWare, MIT fulfilled that mission primarily
with basic research, bringing knowledge coming
out of our basic research to bear
on the great problems of the world, and we have
but with OpenCourseWare, now we can fulfill that mission
of bringing our material to bear
on the great problems of the world in education as well.
We've reached out to hundreds of institutions
around the world and encouraged those institutions
to open up their curriculum to the world as well.
So you have OpenCourseWare now all over the world
and so this was the first big effort
in what is now called open education
where you offer material to the world for free.
Today, we have second generation
like Oakland Education 2.0 with the MOOCs,
the Massive Open Online Courses
and there are something like 10,000 of them now
and hundreds of millions of people
are learning from those MOOCS as well.
So you have OpenCourseWare, you have MOOCs,
there's this wonderful world
of open learning that has taken place
and during the pandemic, we've seen a huge uptick
in people using these open learning materials,
both OpenCourseWare and MOOCs, okay.
MOOCs which are offered by edX
which was created by MIT and Harvard,
Coursera, which came out of Stanford and others.
They have seen as much as 600% uptick
in the access to their courses.
So this is one way in which things are changing, okay.
People are now comfortable learning online
and they are finding these online materials
that have been there since the year 2001
for MIT OpenCourseWare and for MOOCs
since about seven years ago
and more and more people are finding these,
not just to learn for pleasure
but getting certifications, micro certifications
and even degrees online through these services
and I know that Nebraska has a very major program
in online education as well
and I know that today's program is part of that
and major land-grant state institutions
are at the core of higher education in this country.
It's the jewel of this country
and so I'm just so pleased
to be able to share some time with you, okay
and so that's how I got into the business
of digital education along
with being a Professor of Linguistics at MIT
and because OpenCourseWare has been such an important
and such a rewarding experience for all of us
who became involved, I decided to stay
with it along with my linguistics work
and now I'm a Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning
and so I'm very, very pleased
that I've had this chance and the opportunity,
really an honor to have had
a second sort of work stream
in my career having to do with digital learning
and I believe that the pandemic has shown
that digital learning and online learning
is going to be core to learning,
not just for this country but for the world, okay.
Okay, so let me then talk about the pandemic
and what we have done at MIT
and to try to project out beyond the pandemic
and what is going to stay beyond the pandemic, okay.
So on March 10th, 2020, over a year ago,
President Reif of MIT, announced
that courses are moving online, okay
and on March 30th, just a few weeks later
in the middle of the spring semester,
we began teaching 1,251 courses online.
This was a massive, massive effort.
It's not just MIT, everyone, I know you did that.
Everyone around the world had to do this
and so as Senior Associate Dean,
I was curious to see what this experience
was going to be like for the faculty, for the students
and so without really knowing what might come out of it,
I started to interview faculty, sort of on alert,
I started with people I knew well in the humanities
and then expanded that to science and business
and engineering people and architecture people
and so over a nine-month period, we interviewed,
I think close to 100 faculty members, okay
and so we were able to hit different points
as we engaged in online education.
This is an effort that I'm doing with Meghan Perdue
who is a Digital Learning Fellow
in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science.
At MIT, we have a large number
of these Digital Learning Fellows in our schools or colleges
as you call it in some institutions
and these Digital Learning Fellows assist
the faculty, support the faculty
in creating online digital learning materials,
creating MOOCs, trying to figure out how to deal with LMS.
We moved to Canvas in the fall, for example, the Canvas LMS
and so I asked Meghan to help me
with this project of interviewing faculty
and really trying to understand what was going on.
Meghan actually played an important role
in MIT going online.
I mentioned that President Reif, announced
on March 10th, 2020, that we are going to go online
but in fact, we had full warning, thanks to Meghan.
Meghan had noticed at the end of January, that schools
in Hong Kong were starting to go online because of COVID
and she convinced our senior administration
that MIT better start preparing just
in case we needed to go online, okay.
At that point, end of January, COVID was still something
that you sort of heard about but it's not something
that was part of our lives as it is today
and so the senior leadership at our school heard Meghan
and say, well, we don't know if this is going to be anything
that we need to worry about but just in case,
let's at least start preparing some workshops
that we could do with our faculty
in case they need to switch to an online format
and come March 10th, that reality hit
and we rolled out those workshops all over the campus.
Meghan in one week did something like 15 workshops
with faculty and other instructors.
So we were very fortunate that Meghan had noticed
what she did back in early January.
So some findings from those interviews,
I'll go into it more in detail
but just to give you a sort of a taste of things
that we found that were really surprising to us, sure.
Over and over again, what we found from the faculty
was this renewed focus on the practice of teaching, okay.
That surprised us.
We thought that we'd be hearing from the faculty
about their frustration with using the Zoom,
frustration with John, how do you get students
to pay attention in this kind of format
but more and more faculty members
as we started engaging on online teaching, wanted
to talk about their discovery
of teaching, practice of teaching.
One faculty member said it forced me to be more creative
and so we got curious about that.
Why our faculty all of a sudden interested
in the practice of teaching because of the pandemic?
And they started to tell us,
they made a great deal of sense
and what they said was that before in in-person teaching,
we knew or we thought we knew how to teach
because we were taught that way, okay.
We were taught that way.
We were teaching the way that we felt comfortable.
There were precursors, there were examples
that we were familiar with
but now all of that is taken away, we have to teach online.
There are no prior experience
that we have for teaching in this way, okay
and so now they had to teach
and they had to think from scratch
on how do you do this on this new platform
with Zoom and tablets and things?
So they had to really think
from zero on how you do this
and that led to lots of innovations,
lots of sort of reflecting of what teaching is
and I believe that this is going to be one
of the very positive impact
that teaching online is going to have
and it's going to carry over
when we go back to teaching in-person.
Something else that a lot of our faculty members mentioned,
why are we testing students in this way?
Mid-term, final exam, very high-stake,
high risk, high stress, ways of evaluating our students
and number of faculty members said, well,
it's because we've been doing it the same way for 50 years.
Okay, but now it's not the same anymore
and so we should stop and think
and a number of faculty members have devised ways
to evaluate students in ways
which are not these high-stakes, mid-term and final
but instead breaking it up into weekly smaller quizzes
over the remainder of the semester
that we're teaching online
and the students were very, very grateful for that.
Something else that MIT did for the first semester
where we went online is, okay, this semester,
that is spring semester, 2020, the grading system
is going to be pass, no record, pass, no record.
That means students can either pass the course.
Well, if they don't, then it will simply
be wiped off their record
and again, students were very grateful.
The faculty were very grateful
that they didn't have to be concerned so much
in evaluating students to the detail that we do
when we are grading on a regular letter grade scale.
Okay, so lots of ways to try to reduce the stress
and it came out of this, questioning,
why are we doing this in a way that we have?
It's because we've been doing it for 50 years.
So these are things that I think
are going to be really really impactful beyond the pandemic.
Some challenges, there're many, many challenges.
One faculty member mentioned
that attention is a scarce resource.
We hear people talk about ghost students.
Students who don't turn on their camera,
you call on them, they're not there.
You're not sure if they're asleep
or if they're somewhere else
and so attention is a scarce resource.
Lab classes, hands-on, experiment, building
and we have lots of those at MIT, lots of those.
Those classes were challenged, okay.
Teaching at home.
Teaching at home, in some ways it's sort of comfortable
but many people were challenged by it.
There're a lot of people who, not a lot,
but at least a small number of people
who said that these are mostly, junior faculty members
who wanted to live near the campus
but housing in Boston is very expensive
and so their apartments were not really set
to do online teaching.
Others, parents, single parents, single mothers
were challenged by teaching at the same time
that they had to take care of their kids.
MIT tried to help by providing for daycare,
I think earlier than any other facility, which helped a lot
but there's no question that teaching
from home was a real challenge in many ways, okay.
A number of people said,
it's exhausting to teach on Zoom
and I completely understand that, okay.
A lot of faculty members said
that they had to spend so much time preparing,
that they were not able to do any research during this time
and for an institution like MIT
which is a research institution,
that is a real challenge
and so in that way, a lot of people
are looking forward to getting back.
Preparation took much more time and effort.
In a survey, the faculty said that
it took about 1.5 times more on the average
to prepare for online teaching.
Some people said six times as much, okay.
So again, this really would cut into research time,
into family time and personal time
and so this is not something that is sustainable
and so in that way, people are anxious
to go back to in-person teaching
but there are things that we'll carry over,
thanks to all this effort that people made
and I'll talk about that.
At the end of spring semester, 2020,
there was a big survey that MIT,
the Office of Institutional Research did
for faculty and students.
And there was something interesting that came out.
So among the faculty, for extent
of student learning achieved during remote teaching,
78% said they were satisfied or very satisfied.
Among the students, 71% said general stress related
to COVID 19 made it difficult for me to learn, okay.
71% agreed or strongly agreed.
So there was a little bit of a disconnect
between the faculty perception
of how the teaching online went
and student perception of how their learning went.
This is understandable.
I think this happens also in in-person teaching,
this a bit of a disconnect but in online teaching,
it became really exacerbated, the gap, okay.
In fall semester, this gap became a little bit smaller
as the faculty became more used to teaching
and students particularly were maybe a little less stressed
with COVID and they were more used to learning online, okay
but there was this gap, which was interesting to us, okay.
On the basis of these interviews that we conducted,
Meghan and I, wrote a couple articles,
one in Inside Higher Ed,
which Michael very fortunate for me found
and which got me to be able to speak with you today.
So Inside Higher Ed article, you can look it up.
Inside Higher Ed, miyagawaperdue, and it'll pop up.
We also wrote a little bit longer article
for the MIT Faculty Newsletter
which is also available online.
Again, you can look up, MIT Faculty Newsletter
Miyagawa and Perdue, and this will pop up.
We wrote another article which will appear
in Inside Higher Ed sometime this month
and the faculty newsletter
will also carry along a version of that.
It will contain a lot of the things
that I'm talking to you about today.
So in the fall semester, that is the second of 2020,
the second semester of online teaching,
the faculty became more used to teaching in this format
and as I interviewed the faculty,
there are some remarkable examples
of what the faculty did to make it possible to teach online.
Okay, I'll give you just a few, okay.
So mechanical engineering
which is the second largest major at MIT.
The first is computer science.
Computer science is about 40% of the student body now, huge
but after that mechanical engineering is quite large
and introduction to mechanical engineering has a component
of students building things and measuring things, okay
and in the spring semester, they were able to do that
because the first half was in-person.
It was the second half when we went online
but in the fall semester, we were online to begin with
and the faculty decided that
for introduction to mechanical engineering,
that they really really needed the students to build things
and to be able to measure things in a physical way
and so they went on this big shopping spree
from Amazon and all sorts of vendors.
They also built some parts with 3D printing
and put together these packages
that they actually sent out to the students.
There were 1,000 boxes.
You can see this professor in mechanical engineering here.
She built the packages in her basement.
She got her son to help out
and apparently there was a line of FedEx trucks
in front of her house, picking up the packages
and they were sent from Massachusetts to New York,
probably to Nebraska, to California, to Hawaii
to Hong Kong, to Ukraine, to China, all over the world, okay
and a lot of interesting things popped up.
The logistics was incredibly complex.
Fortunately they had on their team,
someone who used to do logistics
for a big transportation company
before he came to study at MIT
and so he was able to work out the logistics.
Some of the parts could not be sent
because of security reasons to some of the countries, okay
but for the most part, they were able to send them
and they got students to do hands-on
as if they were in class.
I mentioned that one of the scarce resources is attention
and in class teaching,
we assume that students pay attention.
Now, they may or may not, but we assume that
as soon as we walk into the classroom, okay
students are supposed to pay attention.
Okay, but in a online classroom,
you cannot assume that, okay.
This is one of the things that faculty discovered,
that once you go online, there's no prior experience
that you can base your teaching on.
So you have to really think from scratch on how you do this
and so this is Mike Short.
He is a Professor in Nuclear Engineering.
He devised this method called Lightboard
which is a very simple technology
that we have actually been using
to build MOOCs online courses
and what it is is very simple.
Well, you have a piece of glass in front of you,
between you and the camera
and you write on the glass and the camera is shooting you
and what you're writing on the glass at the same time
and the software will flip the image
so that you get a mirror image, oops, sorry,
you get a mirror image
and so you can actually read it.
It has this sort of funny effect
that right-handed faculty members become left-handed
and you can't see it here
but in this way, Professor Short
is able to look at the students directly while he's writing,
okay, unlike in the classroom, when he writes
on the Blackboard or the Whiteboard,
he turns his back on the students, right.
But in a online teaching class,
you cannot do that, okay, without looking kind of funny
and you lose students sort of eye contact.
In this way, he was able to maintain eye contact
throughout his teaching.
I asked Mike, so what are you going to do
when you go back to teaching in-person?
And he said, he is scared to go back,
now that he's experienced this.
Mike also, to get students attention and their interest,
he's a Nuclear Engineering Professor
and so he had his students
who are now all over the world, right.
They had to go back, send in their toenails
and he put them through a nuclear reactor at MIT
and to major radiation in each person.
We all have a certain amount of radiation
and so he showed students how much radiation they had
in their bodies and is sort of natural radiation
and sort of vary quite a bit
and so that was sort of an interesting idea that he had
and he was able to do it and make it interesting
because students are all over the world
and so he was getting different radiation readings
from students again, depending on where they were.
This is professor Andrew Lo of Sloan School of Business.
One of the most eminent professors we have.
At Business School, they really value teaching.
They really value teaching and we all do it at MIT
but at the Sloan school,
Sloan school students pay full ride.
I think their tuition is a little bit more expensive
and they don't really get fellowships like other students.
So they really put in effort into teaching
and when they had to go online,
they quickly looked to see how they could give
the highest possible quality teaching online
and Professor Andrew Lo with help of some colleagues,
I think from University of Tennessee
who happened to be visiting Sloan School
put together this incredibly elaborate system.
It's so incredible that
he in fact now does demonstrations around campus.
It's got like 60 moving parts.
It's a system that even MIT doesn't have.
Okay, interestingly, he gives workshops
to his Sloan School colleagues
and one of the colleagues that he gave workshop to
was someone that I happened to interview
as part of this interview process
and she looked at my camera and had my microphone
and she said, I just learned something
from Andy Lo's workshop.
You should get a new camera
and you should get a new microphone.
So I benefited directly
from Professor Lo's workshops as well.
Less elaborate, but I think much more practical ways
of using technology and again, to keep students' attention
is something that this professor from economics did, Anna.
During the summer, she decided
after teaching in the spring online,
she decided to create short videos of economic principles
and instead of putting herself on a side of PowerPoint,
she built a little green room, a green background
and put herself in the PowerPoint, okay.
She has never really used technology much before
but she decided to do this
and she created something like 10
of these really, really well-made valuable videos
and she said during the summer,
she used her weekends and her research done.
So she didn't do any research during the summer
and now she uses the students, look at the videos.
Now before coming to class, they come to class
and instead of lecturing, she now has discussions
with the students.
Now she discovered the flip class
and she said that she is going to continue
to do this flip class
even after she goes back to teaching in-person
and so this is going to really improve her teaching, okay.
Instead of lecturing, lecturing, lecturing, or,
as we've done for 50 years or a hundred years,
we now have much more interactive way of teaching
thanks to this work that the faculty have put it in.
So what will remain post pandemic?
Now there are many, many positive things, okay.
So renewed focus on practice
of teaching as I talked about.
Just the idea of trying to maintain student attention,
that's been a real challenge for faculty.
So faculty came up with many, many ideas
including shorter lectures as we've seen,
use of asynchronous video to flip class, we've seen.
That Chat feature in the Zoom,
I'm sure many of you have it.
There're more faculty members across the institute
that have raved about the Chat feature.
When I first started to lecture on Chat
and I noticed that the students
were carrying on a conversation in the Chat,
I thought that was a little disconcerting.
I said, why aren't they paying attention to me?
But as I watched it unfold,
I realized that they were not only asking questions
about what I was saying,
but they were also encouraging others
to answer the questions.
So there was this parallel conversation that was going on.
I interviewed one very eminent biologist,
a senior person, world-class biologist
and he teaches with a couple other eminent biologists
and I asked him how he was doing with online teaching.
He went on for 20 minutes, a monologue
on the great feature of Chat.
(laughs)
He was ready to nominate the person
who in Google, came up with Chat for the Nobel prize.
I think he in fact does serve on the nomination committee
and in fact, his colleague that he teaches
the Introduction to Biology is a Nobel Laureate
and he said, I'm going to ask Bob to use the Chat
when he teaches with me.
So here we are, Nobel Laureates
and others of equal stature talking about Chat.
Getting really excited about teaching,
something that did not happen before.
So this is going to change the way we teach
even after we go back.
Teaching the whole student.
This is something that we talk
about in the Inside Higher Ed article, that's coming up.
So in thinking about the future of MIT education,
we hope that MIT will provide a more holistic education,
with yet more focus on nurturing our students
in intellect and spirit, that is teaching a whole student
and when I saw that, I was, how do you do that?
Well, by teaching with Zoom,
we are actually looking often
into the student's living quarters.
We see how they live
and we often have to compete for their attention
with their family members or their pets.
Now you've seen dogs show up on your screens
and so you actually see how the students are living
and the struggles that have been posed on them, okay.
Wi-Fi that doesn't work well
or they have to take care of their siblings
and so I think that the faculty members being able
to look into the student's actual living quarters
is going to help us to teach students as a whole, okay.
This is going to be an impact that will carry over
and I think it's going to be
a very, very important impact, okay.
We are learning to teach students, not only academically
but also the whole person.
Governance, one very interesting impact
that the pandemic has had is
that attendance in meetings has really increased.
Going back to the idea of teaching,
one faculty member mentioned to me back in the spring
when we started to teach online that before the pandemic,
the department used to meet once a month
and it was not so well attended, the faculty meeting
but once the pandemic hit, they started to meet once a week.
Most of the faculty attended
and the discussion was almost invariably about teaching.
How do you use the Zoom with this feature?
How do you use the tablet to draw formulas?
We have a monthly Institute Faculty Meeting,
that is a institute faculty meeting as a whole.
Before the pandemic, it was not always well attended
and the chair of the faculty who I interviewed told me
that there are times when they weren't sure
if they will hit the quorum of 30 faculty members
until they started the meeting.
They've always got quorum but sometimes just barely.
But once the pandemic hit
and they started to meet on Zoom,
now at its peak, 170 faculty members were attending, okay.
Some of this is I think, just us wanting
to interact with our colleagues
but a lot of it is the convenience
of not having to get into your car
and then walk across campus,
170 faculty members at this peak.
Just as importantly, 125 non-faculty
such as researchers and staff attended, okay.
You don't see this in in-person institute faculty meetings
and this has really expanded the scope of governance, okay.
Although the non-faculty don't have speaking privileges
at the institute faculty meetings
because their faculty meetings,
they have the right to attend
and so they can see governance at its core
and so this is really important
that we are spreading governance beyond faculty
and even among the faculty,
more and more faculty are participating, okay.
Just as a final note, I've been talking of positive things
but there are things of concern as well.
As soon as the pandemic hit
and we went online, we discovered that problems in society
that were there to begin with, became exacerbated.
So when the New York Public School system went online,
they discovered that something like 10%
of the children did not have Wi-Fi or quiet place to live.
They didn't really have a home.
They were commuting from homeless shelters.
So these kids were dependent on schools,
not just for education but more basic needs like food, okay
and so the pandemic has really exacerbated
these societal problems.
Just yesterday in the New York Times,
there was an article that expressed concern
about our education becoming tiered
and so as of March of this year,
80% of White children in this country
were back to being taught in-person,
it seemed like kind of a high percentage
but that's how I understood it
but just 50% of Black and Hispanic children
and 33% of Asian-American children.
So the article expressed a concern
and there are reasons why, for example Black
and Hispanic children were not attending it.
Some were helping with their family,
some were working, had started to work
and so there's a real concern
that this may lead to a tiered education, okay
and we have to make effort to make sure
that everyone is given equal opportunities, okay
and stop sharing them.
Okay, that's what I wanted to tell you
and so the pandemic has had many, many positive impacts
on education that I think will carry over
but there are some concerns as well
and so let me stop there
and I would love to have a conversation with you.
-: Dr. Miyagawa, we have had a couple of questions
that have come up in Chat.
So I thought I would share those with you
so that you could address those.
One of our participants, Mertonia Gesco asks,
Dr. Miyagawa, thanks for your presentation.
What is the single most important thing universities
should do moving forward to keep innovation
and effective practices moving forward?
-: That's interesting, that question came up
in a senior meeting just a couple of weeks ago.
There is a real tension right now,
a real tension between wanting to go back
to in-person as completely as possible
because we understand that business model.
Right now, we're losing money because of the pandemic
because our regular business model requires
that students are on campus.
They're living in residences, they're buying food.
We don't have to pay for all
of this online equipment to make it possible
and so there's an anxiousness on the part
of senior management to go back and also educationally.
I think there's no doubt that in-person education
is something that you can not replace
but at the same time, we are now seeing these innovations
by faculty and students who are also getting used
to being taught online, okay.
So the answer that I gave for that is the following.
When you go back to in-person, it better be good, okay.
Your in-person teaching, better be good
and the institutions have to support faculty
to provide the best possible education.
Okay, pre-pandemic was not enough.
Okay, we now see that we can teach online
and students see that we can teach online.
We're gonna ask students to take the time
and effort to come to the classroom, okay.
We better offer the very best education possible
for our students
and I think that this is the real challenge
that I'm putting in front of our senior management
at the institution, better be good.
That's my answer.
-: Thank you for that.
We've got another question from Michael Kozak.
Students will welcome us into their world
as we teach in remote and hybrid models.
Can you share your thoughts on personalizing education
and making content more student-centered?
What are your thoughts on individualized education?
-: One of the things that in interviewing faculty members
I found that was really really remarkable is precisely this.
Okay, we are finding ourselves
in this new environment of Zoom.
We don't really understand it.
It doesn't seem as good as in-person teaching
but let's make the best of it.
Okay, and so faculty members started
to think about exactly this notion that, okay,
we are in the students living quarters,
we are in their houses.
How can we take advantage of that?
Okay, one just beautiful example of that,
it was a French instructor at MIT who realized this
and she said, okay, I'm going to have students cook.
Okay, I'm going to give them recipes in French
and I'm going to have them cook
and then I'm going to have them share over Zoom
what they cooked to see if they're able
to follow the instructions in French
and they had just a wonderful, wonderful class.
Some students were able to do it well,
others saying I didn't come out well
and so I guess they didn't get as good a grade
on that little thing.
I think that in general, this idea that we are now looking,
we're peeking into the students' lives
is going to help us to understand that we have to teach,
not just to the students' academics slice of existence
but to their entire holistic being
and this will help us to personalize teaching just
in the way that this French teacher was able to do.
-: Thank you, John Dunning asks Dr. Miyagawa,
do you anticipate that willingness
to embrace change will wane
as the urgency of the pandemic fades?
And do you envision any strategies
for setting a reasonable and sustainable pace of innovation?
-: Innovation is very much part of our culture
and it's been true pre-pandemic.
The interesting thing that the pandemic has brought to us
is innovation in teaching in ways
that we've never experienced before, right.
It's sort of interesting that I saw more innovation
in land-grant institutions like Nebraska
where I was before Ohio State, okay
where I think there was more focus on teaching
than in some of these other sort
of schools like MIT and peer institutions
but with the pandemic,
we've all been forced to do innovation.
So the question is, can the institutions maintain this?
Can the institutions maintain this?
And I think we have to, we have to, as I said.
We got to provide the very best teaching
to our students now, students expect that, okay.
They know that they can learn online.
So if they're expected to,
if you look at another area of our society,
you look at offices, office buildings.
Office buildings are going to have
a fundamental change, right.
Just in the Boston area,
there's like a 16% an occupancy rate
and they're anticipating that 25% of the workforce
will be telecommuting at any given point
which means that the value of officers will go down.
So they, the real estate people
will have to come up with real reasons
for why people need to come and work physically, okay.
I mean that path's gonna change anyway
but I think the same is for higher education leadership.
Okay, how are we going to convince students
to take classes in-person
when they know that they can take classes online?
And I think it's going to take a lot
of innovation to make that happen
and I expect that innovation to come.
Now, not just from institutions like MIT
but from major educational institutions
like University of Nebraska
where you have real leadership in educational effort.
-: Thank you very much, Mark Budreau asks, Dr. Miyagawa,
it seems like going to a policy
of giving information away was a bold move
and would be fairly controversial at any institution.
Was that as easy as the president agreeing to this change?
Did you receive pushback from within MIT?
Have you received pushback from outside MIT?
And did this decision to make available information
for free to the world
make other institutions apprehensive or uncomfortable?
I'm curious what feedback you've received
both from within and outside MIT.
-: What a well articulated question.
That question has been asked of me for the last 20 years.
That was such a wonderfully worded question, thank you
and the answer's yes.
The answer is yes, we got pushed back from the get-go
and to be honest, our little committee
when we decided this was the only thing we could propose,
we weren't sure, we weren't sure
if it would be taken seriously
or if our little report,
will just simply be shelved and collect dust
and here, I think academic leadership
really, really showed its power.
We heard from our provost, Fritz
who clearly is a wonderful and effective leader.
We have all these leaders in academic institutions
but on a day-to-day basis, we don't see them.
We don't see them, right
and I think probably that's a good thing
because we are supposed to be institutions
of faculty governance but from time to time, leadership
shows it's neat and empower
and here was an instance where President Chuck Beth said,
this is the right thing to do.
Let's make it happen.
He went out and raised money.
He went all over campus and said,
we gotta do this, okay, we gotta do.
This is part of our mission
and he and other faculty leadership really spent,
we spent six months going
around convincing faculty and students.
Students said, why are you giving education away
when we are paying so much money?
Where it's their parents who are paying the money
or MIT since only like 20%
of MIT students pay full tuition, the rest at fellowships.
So there was a pushback
and other institutions who are trying to do dot-coms
were not happy with us, right.
Were not happy with us
but we felt that this was the right thing to do,
that the mission of higher education
is not just within the walls of our campus
but that we are here to educate first and foremost,
our students but then wherever we can,
beyond our four walls.
Just like we do with research.
When we do research we publish in publications
that have impact all over the world, okay.
We are saying that we can do that with education as well.
Thank you for that question.
-: Thank you, we'll shift gears here
a little bit, Purvin Metta asks,
Can you share details on the Chat tool that your faculty use
and then any other details
about how Anna built up the green room?
-: Ah, so the Chat feature is part of, well,
I think you're seeing it here as well.
It's just a simple Zoom Chat feature
in which participants can carry
on a conversation parallel to the presentation, right.
So if you use the Zoom, the Chat comes with it
and it's a matter of sort of mastering the usage of it.
As I said, it was a little bit disconcerting
at first, when I started to use the Chat back in May, 2020
when the participants were carrying on a conversation,
sort of, kind of ignoring me.
It seemed like they turned out
that they were paying even more attention
than if they were simply listening to me.
So everyone loves the Chat feature.
The real challenge now,
how are we going to replicate the Chat experience
when we go in-person?
Everyone is thinking about this,
it's really difficult to do.
It's really difficult to do
but it's the one feature that everyone agrees
is really effective.
Students who are shy
and who don't want to ask a question in in-person class,
they ask questions in the Chat, for example, okay.
The green room that Anna built
is something actually, I want to do very soon
and if you go through the web, as they explain to you,
you just need to come up with a green curtain.
I think no, you can buy software,
a greenroom software as well.
I wish I could tell you more.
I'm just now starting to look into it
because after interviewing Anna, I decided to do it myself
but I'm going to look into it myself.
If you find anything or if there's anyone here
who can share that knowledge with us, that'd be fantastic.
-: Thank you for that, Peggy Moore asks,
thank you very much for this look
into MIT's response to teaching during the pandemic.
What considerations or accommodation needs surfaced
during online teaching and learning for students or faculty?
-: Accommodations, okay, so one thing that we learned
is that for some fields like math, for example
I actually interviewed several math faculty members.
For math, being able to write mathematical formulas
on the board before the pandemic
was central to their education
and so now they had to learn to do that
as a faculty member, but also as students as well
and so they, first of all
made tablets available to all of the faculty
and also to students who didn't already have a tablet
so that along with the Zoom,
they could have a tablet to draw formulas on, okay.
Wi-Fi, there were students who did not have a Wi-Fi.
We sent pocket Wi-Fis to them
and you saw the mechanical engineering example
where they actually shipped out a whole box full
of goodies of experiments to do at home as well.
So all of these accommodations.
So also childcare, we opened up the childcare facility
in July, long before other like, MIT is still closed,
but we opened up the childcare facility realizing
that faculty and graduate students and other people
and teaching staff really needed that support as well.
-: Thank you, I just wanted to bring up some resources
in the Chat based upon your green screen question.
There's a link to a dunk.com
which is a resource for green screens.
UNL is also using one button studios and Lightboards.
So we've included a couple of links to that
and there's another application called MMHMM, M-M-H-M-M
which permits you to have a green screen for free.
I wanna move on to another question
and please forgive me if I mispronounced your name.
It's Sue Rasimi, culture of Lakota, asks,
thank you, Dr. Miyagawa for your presentation
and insights today, you mentioned asking faculty
on their perspectives of student learning.
I'm wondering, what did you consider
as learning and how did you measure it?
-: Good question, we did not do any formal measurement
as you're supposed to do
if you're doing this in any serious way,
if you're really trying
to measure educational effectiveness.
We simply wanted a very broad breaststroke
of attitudes and feelings among the faculty and students.
So it was simply a general survey
of how do you think it went, kind of question.
Do you agree with the statement
that I felt that my teaching went well?
Okay, disagree, strongly disagree, agree, strongly,
those kinds of very informal
and so if you're going to really understand
the educational value,
we do need to bring in educational tools into this
but it was helpful for us that there was this gap
between faculty perception of teaching
but the faculty thought that went really well
and the student perception, they were
under heavy stress from COVID
and so they had difficulty paying attention at times
and so that was helpful to us
and so we made adjustments once we learned that.
-: Great, thank you, let me check again.
Here we go, we've got a new question here
from Dr. Linda Love.
Dr. Miyagawa obviously the continuing development
of our faculty has never been more important.
What is MIT doing to prepare both in-person
and online teachers for the future?
What kind of investments
should we be anticipating for faculty?
Obviously, one workshop will not be the solution
for creating the future of our dreams.
Could you maybe talk about that a bit?
-: Sure, yeah, no, this is something
that is being discussed quite intensively right now
and in fact my unit, open learning is at
at the center of it
and so we are committed to providing faculty
with the needs that they have beyond the pandemic, right.
So Zoom will be available now
that the faculty are used to it.
One big investment we made, huge investment
is putting in a new LMS learning management system, Canvas,
it's sort of old news to most people
but we've been using our homegrown LMS
for the last 20 years.
It was great to begin with but it was showing its age
and we have been discussing, installing a new LMS
but usually when an institution installs
a new campus-wide change, it takes years
and committees and committees.
Harvard changed to Canvas several years ago.
They took years, years to make the conversion.
In the case of MIT, we had to do it
in one semester, literally once semester.
I have a slide that shows that
before the fall semester of 2020,
something like 5% of the courses were Canvas
and the remainder in the homegrown
and in the fall semester, we had literally switched.
It was a huge investment
and this, just the modernization of LMS
is going to have a big impact on teaching
and there are now more faculty using LMS
and all its features
and so I expect that we will, off just this Canvas,
we'll see more faculty innovation taking place in teaching.
-: Right, thank you, Akubra Beta asks another question,
is MIT exploring HyFlex teaching
for the fall when school reopens?
-: Ah, so HyFlex is actually a term
in this country as well.
I heard it in Japan just recently.
Okay, so if I understand, is HyFlex
like a hybrid model, is that correct?
-: Yeah, I believe that's the case, yes.
-: Yeah, so we need
to look into that possibility
because we now see that there are parts of our courses
that can be taught quite effectively online.
So the faculty members are saying that,
some of the things that they will never have
to do again once they go back to in-person
is doing makeup lectures
because they had to go to an international conference
and they had to miss some lectures
and now they can lecture from the hotel room, okay.
So that's a hybrid
and some students would like to be off campus
to do part of their research
and so there're students who are interested
in issues of water, right, and public health.
For that they could be in Africa or Southeast Asia or India.
Okay, for part of the semester
but they also don't want to miss out on the credit
'cause at MIT, you got to finish your degree in four years.
Otherwise there's a big financial burden
and so all of this things
that have become clear as advantages.
What is important for not just MIT
but for all institutions, is to come up
with a clear policy on how we do this, okay.
We can't have each faculty member making up
his or her policy of how do you teach online?
When do you teach on,
we have to come up with a clear policy
so that we are all comfortable.
We all understand were all on the same page
when it comes to HyFlex approach to teaching, okay
and this is, I think what every institution is now,
certainly at MIT, we are having intense conversations about
with regard to policy on
when you can teach offline or online.
-: I just wanted to mention, thankfully one
of our participants, Tanya Mean,
she's provided a link to what HyFlex refers to.
It's the ability for a student to decide
what mode they will participate in session by session
and so there's a link in the Chat to that particular model.
I'm not sure if you wanted to address that,
given that description.
-: So I think that's very much related to what I said.
We have to come up with a clear policy
of when you can have students participate online.
That assumes that we are going to keep
at least part of our courses online
and so that comes back to the more general policy
that we have to have for when do we do online?
When do we do in-person?
Okay, to do both is going to put a big stress on our system.
Right now it's pretty much, online or in-person, okay
but trying to do both is going to put a big stress
that is beyond the models that we are used to
and yet we know that there are advantages.
So we have to come up with a clear policy.
I hope that we will have a policy
that will make some of this HyFlex possible
but we'll have to see, we'll have to see.
-: We just have a couple of minutes left
and I'm gonna ask a, I think our final question.
You mentioned how faculty embraced alternative assessments
during the pandemic.
Do you believe that this will continue as colleges
and universities return to a new normal?
-: I do, I do, just as I believe that many faculty members
will no longer do these lengthy lectures
but instead to cut their lectures to 10 minutes
and then discussion, 10 minutes, discussion
and also asynchronous video
that they produce that students can view ahead of time
so that you can have more discussion in the classroom.
It's all part of the package
of more sort of active teaching throughout the semester
and that includes evaluation.
Instead of these high-stake, high-stress, mid-term, final,
we can have more smaller ways to evaluate
where you can actually see,
you can get more data, right.
You can get more data
and you can return that data to the students,
how they are doing on a weekly basis
as opposed to waiting until mid-term
to see how they are doing
and so, yes, I believe that this is going to be one
of their important outcomes of the pandemic.