Massachusetts Institute of Technology Provides Faculty and Students with Nonfinancial Incentives in the Form of IT Resources

CAMPUS Incentives in IT Yield Success at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology provides faculty and students with nonfinancial incentives in the form of IT resources

By Mary Hanson

t’s not unusual that a world- advantage of the institute’s resources. renowned institute of technology These include a strong — and strongly Ishould be stands to reason that supported — IT environment. you’ll be credited with a long history of technological innovation and con- Information Systems at MIT tribution to educational technology. Paying attention to the unique char- As John Curry, Executive Vice Presi- acteristics of an MIT education and dent at Massachusetts Institute of providing incentives for sustainable Technology (MIT), acknowledged, “It’s change are central to MIT’s IT efforts. in our name — we can’t help it!” According to Vijay Kumar, Assistant Information technology (IT) makes Provost and Director of Academic up a large part of the culture at MIT. The Computing, “The idea is not to just institute was founded on the principle say, ‘Here is a little stipend for you to of providing students with a strong sci- develop something.’ We’re also going entific and technical base on which to to put resources behind [the faculty creatively define and solve problems and students] in a substantial way so then applied to the real world. To that they can actually experiment with accomplish this, William Barton Rogers, their project or initiative.” MIT’s founder, pioneered the develop- Information Systems, MIT’s central ment of the teaching laboratory. IT organization, is a process-centered, The institute’s reputation attracts team-based organization structured top-notch faculty and researchers who, around three customer foci, called among other accomplishments, can practices, that include the Academic claim the invention of the World Wide Computing Practice, the Office Com- Web as well as the early implementa- puting Practice, and the Voice, Data, tion of a distributed client-server model and Image Networking Practice. Lead- (Project Athena) as a campus-wide net- ers of these practices advocate on worked computer system. Today, about behalf of customers to Information 10,000 students, both undergraduate Systems and on behalf of Information and graduate, and 1,500 teaching staff Systems to its customers, as well as populate the MIT campus, taking plan for the effective use of IT

40 EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY • Number 1 2001 resources. The responsibility for developing and operating these resources lies with five IT processes — Discovery, Delivery, Service, Support, and Integra- tion — supported by the Competency Group and the Administrative Busi- ness Services Team. You can access the Information Systems strategic plan on the Web at http://web.mit.edu/IS/org/ stratplan.html.

MIT’s Information Systems group Copyright 2001 E. Skoufos and BioWriters focuses its work around four themes: Two Athena Quickstations for e-mail, demonstrating MIT’s efficient use of space. quality, service, value, and leadership. These themes appear in the numerous initiatives, projects, production systems, and support services that make up the IT environment. To support this work, approximately four percent of MIT’s budget goes to IT. Supplemen- tary funding comes from foundations, individual gifts, and corporations. Curry maintains that simplicity and integration are two keys to maintain- ing the institute’s vision. He believes that the use of enterprise administrative systems developed to broad indus- trial standards permits placing the focus of development on institutional requirements rather than individual departments. A cross-organizational

platform lets users in multiple depart- Copyright 2001 E. Skoufos and BioWriters ments use virtually the same software, A machine room housing a few Athena workstations and several university servers. thus enabling ease of migration and interoperability among departments. It also provides an environment in which industry (with typically higher pay was being done to integrate new tech- IT staff can move from one department scales) and academia (with more lim- nology into the undergraduate educa- to another without having to retrain. ited budgets). However, Jeff Schiller, tional experience. Project Athena was In addition, since the platform is based Manager of Network Services at MIT so successful that by 1991 it ceased on SAP running on an Oracle database, and a network security expert, agreed being a special project with special the same team of developers can create with Kumar when he said that retain- funding and was adopted as MIT’s aca- and build services, and help support ing IT staff at MIT isn’t as difficult as demic computing infrastructure. and maintain cross-departmental func- recruiting and hiring: “MIT has a repu- Athena is structured so that a user tions and needs. tation of doing great things, and that may operate any workstation on cam- The IT Competency Group concen- really helps keep people around.” pus and still have access to a cus- trates on providing a well-qualified tomized environment and personal staff by addressing salary parity issues Doing Great Things — files. Each Athena workstation con- and skills development through train- Project Athena nects to MITnet, the campus-wide ing and continuing education for the In 1983, MIT established a five-year computer network, for access to shared IT faculty and staff. The group also program to explore diverse uses of services and software. The Athena envi- addresses the quality of leadership, computing and build the knowledge ronment and its clustered workstations work life, and organizational focus. base necessary for the long-term use of are available to faculty and students 24 Intense competition exists for recruit- computers in the MIT curriculum. The hours a day, 365 days of the year. ing and hiring IT people between faculty was concerned that too little Aside from e-mail and word process-

Number 1 2001 • EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY 41 ing, Athena is used for coursework and Internet access plus an assortment of individual uses. Since its inception, increasing numbers of faculty have President Charles M. Vest put course material into the Athena “Our greatest challenge is to bring to MIT the best students, the best fac- environment, varying from the sim- ulty, and the people and infrastructure to support them. And we must pro- ple, like posting the outline of a lec- vide the physical facilities and information infrastructure that enable them to ture and perhaps problems or solutions to those problems, to live, learn, and work within an effective and inspirational the more complex, such as the environment. Recruiting and retaining the very best fac- electrical engineering course ulty remains one of our greatest challenges. To do so, that has all the lectures online. we must be able to offer competitive salaries, state-of- According to James D. Bruce, the-art research and teaching facilities, and opportuni- Vice President for Information ties to work with the very best students. Systems, “There are very few subjects taught at MIT that do “We must clearly define our place in the changing not have some presence on the galaxy of educational institutions, activities, and Web.” alliances. There can be no doubt that emerging information technologies with enormous storage, bandwidth, Supporting IT and display capabilities will profoundly affect the way on Campus we all work, live, and learn. Institutions and groups of institutions will pro- MIT supports this Web-based teaching in various ways. For starters, the vide various educational services, from specific training and the updating of classrooms are all equipped with 10- skills to high-quality degree programs. MIT will define an appropriate bal- megabit Ethernet connections. By the ance between using these new capabilities to help educate those beyond our end of June 2001, every classroom on campus and bringing a wealth of information and interaction to those on campus will have wireless access. our campus.” Some classrooms, primarily lecture halls, have built-in Athena worksta- Excerpted from “MIT — The Path to Our Future,” tions and projectors. Additionally, http://web.mit.edu/president/communications/rpt97-98.html#vision some classrooms have large numbers of Ethernet jacks at the students’ seats, and some have Athena workstations at educational technology. The goal of ral phenomena. It’s anticipated that every seat. But the support doesn’t this initiative is to support research by within the next five years half of each stop with equipment provision. creating new technologies that will set fluid mechanics course will use materi- MIT’s Educational Media Creation the pace for university education. als from these modules and that the Center (EMCC) supports the produc- Both faculty and students from any project will create a paradigm for teach- tion of media and Web-based educa- department on campus may submit ing other interdepartmental courses in tional material for its academic and proposals — a total of 92 in the spring a similar way. You can find more infor- professional programs. This work of 2000. MITCET and MIT’s Commit- mation at http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/ ranges from drop-in consultations to tee on the Undergraduate Program projects/i-campus/index.html. the creation of innovative Web-based consider the proposals for funding. All courses and programs. of the projects evolve through ongo- Beyond Cambridge Stellar, an open architecture-based ing assessment, and the final products Once off the Cambridge campus, platform for online education at MIT, may differ from the initial visions. there’s plenty of opportunity for stu- lies at the center of the EMCC’s capa- One of the initiatives currently dents to learn — opportunity enabled bilities. In Stellar, MIT is trying to build funded by iCampus is a school-wide by the use of well planned and imple- a toolkit to lower the threshold modular program for fluid mechanics. mented IT. required for a faculty member to use The goal is to construct a School of the Web as an effective teaching tool. Engineering-wide collection of online MIT International Science and A more detailed description of the elements for teaching fluid mechanics Technology Initiatives EMCC and Stellar appears at http:// at the first-year graduate level. The cen- The MIT International Science and web.mit.edu/emcc/. tral element is a library of 3D visualiza- Technology Initiatives (MISTI) pro- Another collaborative effort designed tions, photographs, and audiovisual gram gives students and faculty the to support IT is Project iCampus, the materials that would give students opportunity for international learning MIT-Microsoft alliance for research in insight into physical behavior of natu- and collaboration. It has three goals: to

42 EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY • Number 1 2001 create new resources on campus for and then testing the wing’s perfor- cational Networking. According to international learning and offer mance against the theory in a wind Schiller, the use of these certificates is internships in foreign companies and tunnel. Today, the practical aspects of more easily scalable to multiple insti- laboratories; to support faculty collab- wing design can be demonstrated and tutions than other technologies. Digi- orations abroad; and to work with for- understood in the span of a single tal certificates verify both the authen- eign organizations and governments afternoon through the use of a virtual ticity of the sender of an electronic in exploring the possibilities for inter- laboratory on the computer. He message and the integrity of that mes- national industry, education, and pointed out, “Just think of the power sage, telling the recipient that it has research. Operating through regional that [students] get in developing an not been altered. The service elimi- programs, MISTI is now in its 19th year understanding of a simple phe- nates the need for each institution to and offers programs in Japan, China, nomenon just from being able to establish secure relationships with Germany, Italy, India, and France. observe and make changes to the con- every other institution on a case-by- About 150 students participate per trolling parameters in a virtual labora- case basis. This service is being devel- year in the MISTI internship programs. tory that’s on the screen.” oped at MIT as one of three pilot institutions, along with Georgia Institute of Singapore-MIT Alliance Living Large Technology and Princeton University. The Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA, on Such a large collection of IT must Overall, MIT’s IT environment gives the Web at http://web.mit.edu/SMA/ pose a challenge to maintain. Accord- members of the institute’s community about/index.htm) is a collaboration ing to Schiller, one way of overcoming access to a grand assortment of infor- among the National University of Sin- that challenge is to treat the network mation resources. The libraries, while gapore, Nanyang Technological Univer- as a utility: “The requirements of net- not officially part of Information Sys- sity, and MIT that began in November working technology are more strenu- tems, also provide IT resources. 1998 to promote global engineering ous [than they were 10 years ago]. Peo- Aside from numerous book volumes education and research. The primary ple want more bits, faster bits, [and] and serial titles, the libraries contain goal of SMA is to create a world-class more interesting applications, which more than 50 databases available center for graduate education and require more bits. Our strategy is to be through the MIT network. Through research in engineering that features able to meet that need.” Athena the libraries provide a service the most technologically advanced dis- The goal of Information Systems as called Online with Libraries that helps tance learning facilities available. an operational organization is to pro- with research, supplies quick factual The curriculum is delivered using vide a zero-congestion network. information, provides information PictureTel videoconferencing hard- Schiller stated, “We don’t want to about library services and collections, ware over Internet2-type advanced have people saying that we don’t have and imparts technical help with networking connections. Two streams enough bandwidth. It’s a challenge to library research tools. Bruce meets are transmitted to Singapore from stay ahead of that curve replacing with the Director of the MIT Libraries classrooms on the MIT campus. equipment and wiring infrastructure.” regularly to make sure that the needs Stream one, the camera/video stream, Besides keeping the equipment and of the institute’s community are being includes all cameras in the classroom, wiring infrastructure up-to-date, addressed, and the Information Sys- covering the presenter, students, another way that MIT attempts to tems staff work with library staff on a chalkboard or whiteboard, and docu- overcome congestion problems is number of projects. ment camera. Stream two, the com- through Internet2, a project that The driving force behind MIT’s puter stream, includes all computer- allows faster communication between excellence in IT is based in meeting the generated images, such as PowerPoint universities, as with the SMA. institute’s needs, not in competition slides, animations, simulations, and Security also constitutes a serious with the rest of the academic world. As other software used by the faculty in issue at MIT. To keep hackers and Bruce explained, “We tend to just do the classroom. unwanted security problems from our stuff and often don’t worry about The remote virtual labs let students interrupting the IT systems, Schiller whether we are recognized. We just in Singapore collaborate with students and his collaborators created Kerberos continue along. You know you’re on the Cambridge campus. The fac- (http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/), doing a great job when other people ulty at MIT is excited about the poten- a network authentication protocol look to you for new technology and tial of virtual lab use. Bruce suggested designed to provide strong authentica- when they come to you for collabora- the challenge of understanding air- tion for client-server applications. tions.” From every perspective, that flow over an airplane’s wing as an In addition to Kerberos, MIT is par- appears to happen a lot at MIT. e example. Up until the mid-1980s, stu- ticipating in a new top-level Certificate dents would spend an entire semester Authority Service that will be offered Mary Hanson ([email protected]) studying the theories involved in to institutions of higher learning by founded and runs BioWriters in Lexington, aerodynamics, building a model wing, the Corporation for Research and Edu- Massachusetts.

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