Learning Philosophy at The Sloan School
By Ed Arnold
It’s fair to say that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) knows a thing or two about education and technology. Beyond its longstanding reputation for technical innovation, MIT has also taken the lead in the development and application of e-learning, including the unprecedented Open Courseware Project and the famous Media Lab. These innovations in e-learning extend far beyond its Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, linking MIT to other academic institutions and individuals all over the globe. The Sloan School in particular is a major player in the executive education space, running custom programs for firms like British Petroleum and Merrill Lynch.
So when the New England Learning Association (NELA) hosted a presentation featuring Alfred Essa, CIO of MIT Sloan’s School, there was a strong turnout. Essa described in detail two major technical innovations at MIT: DSpace and .LRN. DSpace, a joint project of MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, is an open-source digital repository created to capture, distribute, and preserve the intellectual output of MIT. Essa showed example of working papers available at the Sloan School and at other communities. MIT’s .LRN project is another open-source endeavor that uses powerful suite of Web applications and a portal framework to support online communities and collaboration. Aside from MIT, .LRN is used at other academic institutions, such as the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
One surprising revelation by Essa was that the Sloan School doesn’t have an explicit e-learning strategy. Rather, Sloan’s learning technology direction has evolved from a strong understanding of its traditional mission, “a high-touch, residential learning community,” tied to a strong experimental approach. To describe this philosophy, Essa used four interrelated themes:
Theme One: Infrastructure for innovation
First, Essa stressed the often overlooked value of beauty, or the “aesthetics of e-learning.” MIT’s architecture is an apt metaphor to describe its approach to developing learning technology infrastructure. On the MIT campus, one can find a variety of styles, ranging from classical “pillars and domes” through today’s funky deconstructionist projects, such as the Strata Center. Despite the vast differences in style, all the buildings share MIT’s core mission of supporting the residential learning community while also adding beauty.
Theme Two: 1000 flowers
At MIT, learning technology isn’t an end to itself, but part of a grander vision. The Open Courseware Project perhaps best exemplifies this, in which MIT intends to shares all its course materials and provide a window into the MIT experience to anyone in the world—for free. Consistent with this theme, both Dspace and .LRN are open source software. At first glance, it may appear that MIT is giving away the store, but the intent is to disseminate tools that will tie MIT to a much broader community. Essa expects a future and larger payback to come from the specific applications that run on Dspace and .LRN.
Theme Three: MIT as a learning community
Essa intends to use learning technology to build tighter bonds between three legs of the MIT community: research, teaching, and practice. The biggest opportunity is with Sloan’s alumni community. The technology will enable multiple touch-points for alumni to take or give back learning. Using another analogy, Essa likens the alumni relationship to “walking along the river (i.e., MIT).” Early in their careers, many graduates find themselves too busy to participate in alumni activities; they in a sense have drifted away from the river. But in mid-career, they may seek to return and retrain. Later in their careers, they may desire to play teaching or mentoring roles. Learning technology will allow these stakeholders to interact at various levels, and therefore enrich the entire community.
Theme Four: Changing the paradigm of management education
The current dominant teaching paradigm in most business schools is the business case study. From his work with BP and Merrill Lynch executive programs, Essa has seen great success with another paradigm: real-time problem solving. During the executive sessions, participants tackle real unsolved business problems from their organizations. They can leverage MIT’s resources and expertise and gain valuable experiential-based learning in the process. This approach is now used in the Sloan School’s First-Year Challenge program.
Not surprisingly, the Sloan School learning philosophy is innovative and grand, but can it apply to other non-academic organizations? Here is a set of recommendations that could apply to any organization’s learning strategy: