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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

OEIT - Office of Educational Innovation and Technology

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D Sheehan & L Sweeney

Learning Environments

OEIT maintains four physical Experimental Learning Environments (ELE) and a small pool of laptops for flexible deployment for innovative curricula.  These spaces are intended as incubators for testing new or different technologically enhanced pedagogical paradigms.  We host a suite of technologies, applications and tools in these physical spaces. Additionally, we work with collaborative tools and software environments which allow us to blend our ELE’s , with respect to time and space, into Virtual Learning Environments.

Each of these ELE's have features uniquely tuned towards different domains and learning styles while still maintaining pedagogical flexibility.   These spaces are intended to support educational innovation by providing spaces that can be flexibly configured, architecturally and technologically, to meet the needs of educational experiments.

26-139 New Media Center(MacAthena - OSX) is the only publicly available and reservable OSX-based teaching and learning computer cluster on MITs campus.  THe NMC provides the MIT community the tools necessary to produce multimedia projects, such as: digital video, photo scanning and manipulation, web authoring, and more.  The NMC is a "do-it-yourself" cluster of twelve 24" iMacs loaded with multimedia software.  This space is open 24/7, but is reservable for classes during the semester.

W31-301 (MacAthena - OSX, WinAthena - Win7) provides the only publicly available and reservable OSX and Windows-based teaching and learning computer cluster on MITs campus.  This space currently has 24 dual-boot workstations running OSX and Windows 7.  Applications in this cluster are focused towards Architectural and Engineering curricula.  ArcGIS and AutoCad are available on these machines.  This space is currently open only for scheduled classes and is reservable for classes during the semester.  Contact the us at elel-consult@mit.edu to reserve this space for  your class.

1-142 The Experimental Learning Environments Laboratory (EL2) (Athena - Ubuntu) is a multi-use facility to support curriculum and pedagogical innovations with its current focus primarily on Project-Based Learning courses.  This space is currently configured with computer-based microscopy and is designed to encourage collaborative group-based learning modes.  This space also houses OEIT Laboratory and Demonstration space for testing and disseminating classroom technologies.  Efforts are underway to render this space to be flexibly configured to support a variety of blended learning innovations.

4-035 (MacAthena - OSX) is a laboratory space (special reservations required) dedicated towards doing advanced digital photography, video and animation.  This encompasses laboratory space for physical experimentation and image capture and several workstations for advanced image manipulation and output in a variety of formats.

LabTops (discontinued)  - This is a reservable pool of flexibly configured laptops for tightly focused classroom experimentation.

• iOS Development Kits (TBD) - This is a small pool of laptops and iOS devices that can be reserved 

Educational Technology Explorations - Collection of teaching and learning resources that we have used and documented. 

Office of Educational Innovation and Technology
Building NE48-308, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Phone: (617) 252-1981; Fax: (617) 452-4044