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.
Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner speaks with Professors Regina Barzilay and Tommi Jaakkola about their Introduction to Machine Learning class. Jaakkola explains that the course connects “the more theoretical, algorithmic stuff students are learning to actual data and problems.”
President L. Rafael Reif speaks with Ellie Bothwell of Times Higher Education about MIT’s efforts to study how people learn and the future of education. Reif notes that at MIT, education is interdisciplinary and focused on bringing “knowledge from different areas…Problems are problems. You have to solve them with whatever knowledge you can get.”
In this video, WCVB Chronicle host Anthony Everett visits Prof. Neil Gershenfeld at the Center for Bits and Atoms to learn about the global network of Fab Labs. Everett explains that Gershenfeld sees Fab Labs as places of “collaboration and networking and mentoring where ideas can literally take form. Where you don’t borrow, but make what you want.”
Researchers at MIT and Stanford found that assuring online learners that they belong in a course increased persistence and course completion rates for people in less developed countries, writes Carl Straumsheim for Inside Higher Ed. The findings suggest that something “as simple as a one-time, 10-minute exercise can double persistence and completion rates” for at-risk learners.
Prof. John Leonard prepared a free video lesson explaining the science behind the Deflategate controversy, writes Adam Vaccaro for The Boston Globe. Vaccaro writes that Leonard explained he hopes the lesson will help students “understand the physics of air pressure and temperature by connecting them to a major event in popular culture.”
In an article about how employers can help encourage their workers to learn new skills, The Economist highlights how “MIT has launched an initiative to conduct interdisciplinary research into the mechanics of learning and to apply the conclusions to its own teaching, both online and offline.”
KQED reporter Queena Sook Kim highlights Code Next, a program created by researchers from the Media Lab and Google aimed at encouraging high school students to learn to code through the process of making. “Coding is also making, and it takes the same problem-solving skills as making stuff in real life,” Kim explains.
Anant Agarwal, president of edX, writes for The Huffington Post that MicroMasters programs, which provide new pathways to master’s degrees through online and on-campus courses, could help close the skills gap. Agarwal notes that MIT’s MicroMasters pilot in Supply Chain Management, “demonstrates the innovative power of MicroMasters to expand access to higher education at a truly massive scale.”
Richard Florida writes for The Atlantic’s CityLab site about Prof. Emeritus Peter Temin’s research examining how growing class and racial divisions in America are creating a dual economy. In the new, highly-segmented economy, “education, which was once a force for the homogenization of the labor force,” Temin argues, “has become a barrier reinforcing the dual economy.”