This conference, sponsored by the AIA Committee on Architecture for Education, was held in Cambridge, MA, April 11-13, 2002.

Conference Sessions

Overview

Lifelong Learning—What Do We Expect?

The Campus as Classroom: Issues and Opportunities

Sustaining and Promoting an Educational Facilities Design

Keynote: Lifelong Learning on a 21st-Century Campus

Learning from Living

Technology: The Unifier in a Multidiscipline Educational Environment

Equity and Excellence-Making an Urban School System Work

Sustainability-Massachusetts Sustainable Schools Pilot Program

Planning at MIT

Tours at MIT

Dreyfus Chemistry Building

Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Distance Learning at MIT

TEAL Room (Technology Enabled Active Learning)

Albert and Barrie Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center

Simmons Hall Undergraduate Dormitory

Ray and Maria Stata Center

Keynote: Lifelong Learning on a 21st-Century Campus
Robert Brown, PhD, MIT Provost

MIT has three underlying principles that form its mission and shape its physical structure, said Robert Brown.

One principle is to provide a sustainable education (in the sense of having enough money to carry out experiments in education). An example is the TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning project) room, where everything is wired and instructors can walk through the room with a wireless microphone and have access to a table with a dedicated whiteboard.

Another principle is educational technology development for on campus and distance education. An example of this is technology is the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), Stellar, and D Space Web-based laboratories, platforms, and archival systems.

A third principle is collaborative institution-to-institution partnership and outreach such as the Singapore MIT Alliance, the Cambridge MIT Alliance, and OpenCoursework@MIT, which all provide synchronous education among distant cities.

Brown asserted that the global, distance-learning classroom is as good as the classical classroom. Surveys have shown that 90 percent of distance students believe they learned as much as if they were in an actual classroom.

Thanks to the Web, course content, like notes, examples, and simulations, will be ubiquitous.

"Instructors can't capture student attention by a one-way transfer of knowledge," he said. The optimal environments must be more flexible and interactive, noted Brown, and over time, new modes of learning will emerge.

The new global classroom will be equipped for synchronous and asynchronous delivery. Student spaces will be reconfigured. The instructor controls interaction with multiple distance classrooms. There will be interaction among distant and local students.

In the TEAL classroom, each circular table handles two groups of three students, all using laptops. This sociable space allows integration of demonstrations, lectures, and tutorials and can seat 99.

The Ray and Maria Stata Center, now in the midst of construction, incorporates many buildings. The Center is surrounded by double-loaded, single-corridor buildings from the 1950s and 1960s, so it too became an urban renewal project.

The Gaines Building and the Dreyfus Building are connected and include a daycare, a museum, and outdoor space, including a terrace that climbs up the back of the alumni pool. Another level up on the upper terrace is a communal outdoor space for owners of the building.

Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.