As technology rapidly propels society forward, MIT is rethinking how it prepares students to face the world and its greatest challenges. Generations of educators have shared knowledge at MIT by connecting lessons to practical applications, but what does the Institute’s motto “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”), referring to hands-on learning, look like in the future?
This was the guiding question of the annual Festival of Learning, co-hosted by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. MIT faculty, instructors, students, and staff engaged in meaningful discussions about teaching and learning as the Institute critically revisits its undergraduate academic program.
“Because the world is changing, we owe it to our students to reflect these realities in our academic experiences,” said Daniel E. Hastings, Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and then-interim vice chancellor. “It’s in our DNA to try new things at MIT.”
Fostering a greater sense of purpose
MIT emphasizes hands-on learning much like many engineering schools. What deeply concerned panelists like Susan Silbey, the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology, and Anthropology, is that students are not engaging in enough intellectual thinking via significant reading, textual interpretation, or involvement with uncertain questions.
Christopher Capozzola, senior associate dean for open learning, echoed this, saying, “We have designed a world in which [students] feel enormous pressure to maximize their career outcomes at the end” of their undergraduate education.
Students move in systems of explicit incentives, he said, such as grades and the General Institute Requirements, but also respond to unwritten incentives, like extracurriculars, internships, and prestige. “That’s our fault, not theirs,” Capozzola said, and identified this as an opportunity to improve the MIT curriculum.
How can educators encourage students to connect more with course material, instead of treating it as a means to an end? Adam Martin, professor of biology, always asks his students to challenge the status quo by incorporating test questions with data arguing against the models from the textbook.
“I want them to think,” Martin said. “I want them to challenge what we think is the frontier of the field.”
Considering context
One of the most significant topics of discussion was the importance of context in education. For example, class 7.102 (Introduction to Molecular Biology Techniques) uses story-based problem-solving to show students how the curriculum fits into real-world contexts.
The fictional premise driving 7.102 is that a child fell into the Charles River and caught an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection. To save the child, students must characterize the bacteria and identify phages that could kill it.
“It really shows the students not only basic techniques, but what it’s like to be in a team and in a discovery situation,” said Martin.
This hands-on approach — collecting water, isolating the phages within, and comparing to more reliable sources — unlocks students’ imaginations, Martin said. In an environment intentionally designed to give students room to fail, the narrative incentivizes students to persist with repeated experimentation.
But Silbey, who is also a professor of behavioral and policy sciences at MIT Sloan School of Management, has noticed the reluctance of students to engage with nontechnical contexts. Students, she concluded, “have minimal understanding of how the action of any individual becomes part of something larger, durable, consequential through invisible but powerful mechanisms of aggregation.”
Educators agreed that contextual understanding was equally important to a STEM curriculum as technical instruction. “Teaching and thinking at that interface between technology and society is really crucial for making technologists feel responsible for the things that they create and the things that they use,” added Capozzola.
Amitava Mitra, founding executive director of MIT New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), highlighted an example where students developed an effective technical solution to decarbonize homes in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Or so they thought.
“Once we saw what was on the ground and understood the context — the social model, the social processes — we realized we had no clue,” the students told Mitra.
One way MIT is trying to bridge these gaps is through the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing program. This curriculum integrates ethical considerations alongside computing courses to help students envision the social and moral consequences of their actions.
In one technical machinery lecture, Silbey’s students had trouble envisioning the negative impacts of autonomous vehicles. But after she shared the history of the regulation of dangerous products, she said many students became more open to examining potential ripple effects.
Creating interdisciplinary opportunities
The panelists viewed interdisciplinary education as critical preparation for the complexities of the real world.
“Whether it’s tackling climate change, creating sustainable infrastructure, creating cutting-edge technologies in life sciences or robotics, we need our engineers, social scientists, and scientists to work in teams cutting across disciplines to create solutions today,” said Mitra.
To expand opportunities for undergraduates to collaborate across academic departments and other campus units, NEET was launched in 2017. NEET is a project-based experiential learning curriculum that requires technical and social expertise. One student group, for example, is designing, building, and installing a solar-powered charging station at MIT Open Space. To introduce a project like this into MIT’s infrastructure, students must coordinate with a variety of Institute offices — such as Campus Planning, Engineering & Energy Management, and Insurance — and city groups, like the Cambridge Fire Department.
“It's an eye-opener for them,” said Mitra.
Capozzola noted how “para-curricular” activities like NEET, MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, MISTI, D-Lab, and others prove that effective hands-on education doesn’t have to be a formal credit-bearing program.
“Students put in enormous amounts of time and effort for things that shape them, that speak to their passion and this deep engagement,” Capozzola said. “This is a special area where I think MIT particularly excels.”
Moving forward together
In a panel featuring both MIT instructors and students, educators recognized that designing an effective curriculum requires balancing content across subjects or core topics while organizing materials on Canvas — MIT’s learning management system — in a way that’s intuitive for students. Instructors collaborated directly with students and staff via MIT’s Canvas Innovation Fund to make these improvements.
“There are things that the novice students see in what I’m teaching that I don’t see,” said Sean Robinson, lecturer in physics and associate director of the Helena Foundation Junior Laboratory. “Our class is aimed at taking people who think of themselves as physics students and getting them to think of themselves as physicists. I want junior colleagues.”
The biggest takeaway from student panelists was the importance of minimizing logistical struggles by structuring Canvas to guide students toward learning objectives. Cory Romanov ’24, technical instructor of physics, and McKenzie Dinesen, a senior in aerospace engineering and Russian and Eurasian studies, emphasized that explaining learning goals and organizing course content with clear deadlines were simple improvements that went a long way to enhance the student experience.
Emphasizing the benefit of feedback like this, Capozzola said, “It’s important to give people at MIT — students, staff, and others who are often closed out of conversations — a more democratic voice so that we can be a model for the university that we want to be in 25 years.”
As MIT continues to enhance its educational approach, the insights from the Festival of Learning highlight a crucial evolution in how students engage with knowledge. From rethinking course structures to integrating interdisciplinary and experiential learning, the panelists underscored the need for a curriculum that balances technical expertise with a deep understanding of social and ethical contexts.
“It’s important to equip students on the ‘mens’ side with the kinds of civic knowledge that they need to go out into the world,” said Capozzola, “but also the ‘manus,’ to be able to do the everyday work of getting your hands dirty and building democratic institutions.”
