Active Learning

The process of learning should engage the imagination—both of students and of faculty. Active Learning Environments provide physical and virtual infrastructures to support the transformation of MIT courses into intense, personalized and highly collaborative activities. The key to transformative learning: more flexible modes in order to better stimulate discovery and improve understanding of core concepts.

Support for this takes the form of redesigning physical spaces to better enable project-based, studio-based, or other forms of active learning pedagogy.  It extends to the augmentation of learning spaces by making physical experiments accessible via the web (iLabs) and through to the creation of entirely virtual 3D spaces unconstrained by lived reality (virtual worlds like Second Life and Wonderland).

Some of the projects in this program area include:

• TEAL –Teachnology Enhanced Active Learning
• Labs – Remote control of laboratory equipment
• MIT Virtual Worlds – Second Life and the MIT Sim in Second Life
• Project-based learning
• Residence hall spaces
• Physical spaces, i.e.technology-enhanced classrooms