Page 185 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
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168 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

all over the world. By bringing the world in, we can enrich learning,
exploration, and discovery by our students.
Information technology can also create learning communities across
time and distance. It can access, display, store, and manipulate unfath-
omable amounts of information, images, video, and sound. It can pro-
vide design tools and sophisticated simulations. And it can burn up a
lot of money. To reduce the amount of money, we can do what the
Internet and Web do best—create open environments and share re-
sources and intellectual property across institutions. The goal of MIT’s
OpenCourseWare initiative is to make the basic teaching materials for
2,000 MIT courses available on the Web to teachers and learners any-
where, at any time, free of charge. For example, my remarkable col-
league Jesus del Alamo is installing PCs in underresourced African uni-
versities, enabling students to log on and operate sophisticated and
expensive experimental equipment that is physically located at MIT.
Information technology in education is important, but it is merely
the paper and pencil of the twenty-first century. For engineering stu-
dents of 2020, it should be like the air they breathe—simply there to be
used, a means, not an end. But my secret desire, which I hope will play
out on the time scale of the next 16 years or so, is that cognitive neuro-
science will catch up with information technology and give us an un-
derstanding of the nature of experiential learning—a real science of
learning. Then we might see a quantum leap, a true transformation in
education.

IN THE MEANTIME . . .
In closing, I want to repeat something I said earlier. Making univer-
sities and engineering schools exciting, creative, adventurous, rigorous,
demanding, and empowering milieus is more important than specifying
curricular details. My primary advice for educating the engineer of 2020
is this. As you develop the concept of a new curriculum and new peda-
gogy, as you try to attract and interest students in nanoscale science,
large complex systems, product development, sustainability, and busi-
ness realities, don’t be tempted to crowd the humanities, arts, and social
sciences out of the curriculum. The integral role of these subjects in
U.S. engineering education differentiates us from much of the rest of
the world. I believe the humanities, arts, and social sciences are essential

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