Page 184 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

EDUCATING ENGINEERS FOR 2020 AND BEYOND 167

ally can’t predict in detail what students will end up needing. And I am
so old fashioned that I still believe great lectures are wonderful teaching
and learning experiences. So humor me, and don’t give up entirely on
masterfully conceived, well delivered lectures. They still have their place
. . . at least they better have, because at MIT we just built a magnificent,
whacky, inspirational, and expensive building designed by Frank Gehry,
and—by golly—it has classrooms and lecture halls in it (among other
things). But even I admit that there is truth in what my extraordinary
friend Murray Gel-Mann likes to say, “We need to move from the sage
on the stage to the guide on the side.” Studio teaching, team projects,
open-ended problem solving, experiential learning, engagement in re-
search, and the philosophy of CDIO (conceive/design/implement/op-
erate) should be integral elements of engineering education.
Now for what has changed. Two obvious things have changed—we
now have information technology, and we have the MTV generation.
So the idea is to provide deep learning through instant gratification. It
sounds oxymoronic to me . . . but it seems to be happening! Actually,
our Frank Gehry building is about something like that.
Of course, I have to say something about the role of information
technology in educating the engineer of 2020. But before I do, I want
to tell you a true story. A few years ago, two dedicated MIT alums, Alex
and Britt d’Arbeloff, gave us a very generous endowment, the d’Arbeloff
Fund for Excellence in Education, which was inspired by Alex’s desire to
understand and capitalize on the role of information technology in
teaching and learning on a residential campus. We celebrated the estab-
lishment of the fund with an intense, day-long, highly interactive fo-
rum on teaching that brought together a large number of our most
innovative and talented teachers and a wide range of students.
At the end of that very exciting day, we all looked at each other and
realized that nobody had actually talked about computers. Even though
information technology is a powerful reality, an indispensable, rapidly
developing, empowering tool, computers do not contain the essence of
teaching and learning. These are deeply human activities. So we have to
keep our means and ends straight.
In the first instance, the Internet, World Wide Web, and computers
can do two things for engineering schools. First, they can send informa-
tion outward, beyond the campus boundary. And second, they can bring
the external world to the campus. By sending information out, we can
teach, or better yet, provide teaching materials to teachers and learners

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