Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and Philanthropy

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Opinion

Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and Philanthropy

12/31/2003

By Kenneth C. Green

Curriculum reform is no small undertaking. The process involves time, people, significant resources, and lots of good will. Assessment is also important, as are leadership and money.

A little over a decade ago the National Science Foundation launched an ambitious effort to reform undergraduate engineering education. The grant competition was constructed in a way that no single university could get any of the millions of dollars NSF had allocated for this project. Rather, the project specs required collaborative efforts. Institutions formed partnerships, initially to develop the proposals and, if funded by NSF, to work on developing a “new” curriculum for undergraduate engineering education.

Of course, given institutional and departmental egos, the partnership process was complex. For example, the rational observer might think that regional consortia—Big Ten campuses or universities in New England—could have found a way to collaborate on these projects. In theory California institutions—the University of California campuses, along with Caltech, the Cal State institutions, and USC—would have made an ideal consortium and could have prepared a very competitive proposal.

One would think. The final proposals reflected complex institutional alliances that crossed regions and time zones. The California universities aligned themselves with institutions elsewhere in the country: UC-Berkeley, UCLA, and USC were each involved in separate proposals.

I got to watch some of this up close and personal, as my research at the time included work on the talent pipeline in science and engineering. However, my research has moved in other directions over the past decade, so I don’t know what happened with the NSF undergraduate engineering projects. Given the millions that NSF and the winning bidders were going to spend on these initiatives, I would like to think these projects led to significant change.

The NSF undergraduate engineering initiative comes to mind in the context of MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative (www.ocw.mit.edu). Launched with much fanfare in 2001 during the waning months of the dot com era, OCW reflects MIT's thoughtful decision to pursue a different path. Then (as now) other institutions (and institutional officials) saw fortune in online education. MIT’s assessment was different: the public story is that after much study (and lots of courting from potential corporate partners) MIT officials were not convinced that there really was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of online education.

The OCW announcement, almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review some of the course materials, but not take the class.

And not just a few classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next few years. Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant progress towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500 MIT courses had been posted on the Web.