Education, teaching, academics

MIT placed fifth in U.S. News & World Report’s 2018 best college rankings, reports CBS This Morning. 

MIT was named to the top four of The Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings teaching pillar, reports Linda Nordling for the Times Higher Education. Nordling notes that MIT, “draws on technology to prime its offering,” and, “uses data analysis to investigate how people learn and is feeding the insights into teaching practice.”

MIT tops Class Central’s list of the “Top 50 MOOCs of all Time, ”reports Class Central reporter Dhawal Shah. Several MITx MOOCs were featured on the list, including The Analytics Edge, Circuits and Electronics 1, Introduction to Biology, and Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python. 

Writing for The New York Times about educational technology, Prof. Cynthia Breazeal describes her research examining the importance of social cues in learning from technology. “If we want to use technology to help people learn, we have to provide information in the way the human mind evolved to receive it,” she explains. 

A study by MIT researchers found that after a law was passed in Louisiana allowing public-school teachers to contradict the scientific curriculum, students scored lower on the science section of the ACT, reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. The study also showed that, “at the same time, creationism-related search terms on Google became more common, relative to evolution-related terms.”

The Economist highlights a study by J-PAL researchers examining the effectiveness of certain educational technologies. The researchers found that, “in nearly all the 41 studies which compared pupils using adaptive software with peers who were taught by conventional means the software-assisted branch got higher scores.”

Mercury News reporter Jasmine Leyva highlights how students in Campbell, California are participating in the Zero Robotics program, which “aims to take students’ work to the moon and beyond, all while teaching students about space exploration, computer science and coding.” The Zero Robotics program is led by the MIT Space Systems Lab, Innovation Learning Center and Aurora Flight Sciences. 

Prof. Esther Duflo speaks with WBUR’s Fred Thys about MIT’s MicroMasters in development economics. Thys explains that the new MicroMasters program allows students, “to take rigorous courses online for credit, and if they perform well on exams, to apply for a master's degree program on campus.”

Boston Globe reporter Jeremy Fox writes about a new study by MIT researchers examining whether math games can be beneficial in helping children learn. The researchers found that, “children who played math games consistently showed a better grasp of the concepts…but that understanding did not appear to help in elementary school.”

President L. Rafael Reif speaks with Bloomberg TV about Greater Boston’s world-renowned leadership in education for a segment aired during the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. “I say to everybody, you can live anywhere you want, but when you’re young spend four years in the Greater Boston area,” says Reif. “It’s going to change your life.”

In a Guardian article about how technology can be used to help refugees, Tazeen Dhunna Ahmad highlights MIT’s Refugee ACTion Hub (ReACT). ReACT is aimed at finding, “digital learning opportunities for a lost generation of children who, as a result of forced displacement, are losing their education.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Melissa Korn writes that MIT has earned a No. 2 ranking in Times Higher Education’s list of universities with the best reputations. 

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, speaks with Goldie Blumenstyk of The Chronicle of Higher Education about edX’s commitment to expanding access to education. EdX is focused on maximizing, “the impact and the good that we can do to the world,” says Agarwal, adding that edX is working with universities to “reimagine education, both on university campuses and online.”

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, and Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a principal research scientist at LIDS, are featured on Fast Company’s 2017 list of the “Most Creative People in Business.” Agarwal is celebrated for “mastering online education,” and Veeramachaneni for developing a system that enables humans and AI to work together to detect possible security threats.

Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, discusses the effects of automated labor and the role of higher education with Steve Kolowich of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “We need an educational system now that excels at producing people to do the things that computers can’t do,” explains McAfee.