Inside Higher Ed reporter Susan Greenberg highlights how MIT is participating in the Small Town and Rural Students (STARS) College Network, which “aims to build new pathways to college for students who might not otherwise recognize all their options.”
Senior lecturer Jason Jay speaks with Financial Times reporter Sarah Murray about the positive impact of online sustainability courses. “What it means to put a tax on carbon feels very different for wealthy communities in Northern Europe than it does for people in India,” says Jay. “A global community of learners can challenge things and bring in their own perspectives.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explore how generative artificial intelligence “presents a philosophical and practical challenge on a scale not experienced since the beginning of the Enlightenment.” Huttenlocher, Kissinger and Schmidt make the case that “parameters for AI’s responsible use need to be established, with variation based on the type of technology and the context of deployment.”
MIT has been named one of the best U.S. universities for physical science degrees, according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023. Times Higher Education highlights how MIT students in physics “take a range of core classes such as classical mechanics and quantum mechanics.”
Prof. Cynthia Breazeal discusses her work exploring how artificial intelligence can help students impacted by Covid, including refugees or children with disabilities, reports Ryan Heath for Politico. “We want to be super clear on what the role is of the robot versus the community, of which this robot is a part of. That's part of the ethical design thinking,” says Breazeal. “We don't want to have the robot overstep its responsibilities. All of our data that we collect is protected and encrypted.”
Prof. Joshua Angrist speaks with CNBC about how his research on schooling and education has helped shaped government policy. “We don’t make specific policy recommendations, but we do encourage policy makers to look at the evidence,” says Angrist. “Whenever there is something on the public docket that is related to education policy, we always encourage both voters and politicians to look at the evidence.”
Alumna Anurupa Ganguly SB ’07, MNG ’09 speaks with Forbes contributor Rod Berger about Prisms of Reality, a virtual reality platform she founded that provides math learning through movement, experience and discovery. “We envision a dramatic re-engagement of our students with their education,” says Ganguly. “Our students, many for the first time, will find a profound sense of purpose in their math learning and their lives.”
Chiamaka Agbasi-Porter, the K-12 STEM outreach coordinator for Lincoln Lab, speaks with CBS Boston about her mission to help inspire young people to pursue STEM interests through the Lincoln Laboratory Radar Introduction for Student Engineers (LLRISE) program. “I think of it as a community,” said Agbasi-Porter, “we are a village that is helping our kids advance and move forward in their careers.”
GBH’s Basic Black host Callie Crossley speaks with Lecturer Malia Lazu,about how issues surrounding Covid-19, voting rights, economic downturn, police brutality, education, climate change and politics will impact communities of color in the coming year. “What I see is a democracy fighting itself,” says Lazu. "People in power, republicans or democrats, being bought into the idea of democracy more than the people in the democracy.”
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spotlights Prof. David Autor’s research exploring the state of men in the U.S., including the growing gender gaps in educational attainment and the labor market.
A new report by MIT and Harvard researchers outlines a set of strategies for improving schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic, including focusing on core lessons, sparking joy and strengthening bonds between teachers and students, reports Naomi Martin for The Boston Globe.
Wired reporter Elizabeth notes how the ScratchJr programming language, which was developed to help teach children how to code, is being used as part of an effort to teach young children the basics of computer programming.
Writing for the Financial Times about financial training, Jonathan Moules spotlights the Sloan School of Management’s 18-month Master of Finance degree program. “This allows students an extra term to take additional courses and gain additional practical experience with a summer internship,” explains Heidi Pickett, assistant dean for the Master of Finance program.
Financial Times reporter Laura Noonan spotlights how the Sloan School developed programming aimed at increasing gender parity in the finance industry. “There is a part for academic institutions in terms of making sure women feel empowered to ask for a seat at the table,” says Heidi Pickett of the Master of Finance program.
During a Times Higher Ed summit, Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa, senior associate dean for open learning, emphasized the importance of integrating attention to ethical implications into AI education, reports Paul Baskin. “My plan is to educate a new generation of young people who will have intuition behind computational thinking,” says Miyagawa.