Implementing the NEET Ways of Thinking at MIT
- Conference
- Location
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Virtual On line
- Publication Date
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June 22, 2020
- Start Date
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June 22, 2020
- End Date
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June 26, 2021
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Multidisciplinary Engineering
- Page Count
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22
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--34785
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/34785
- Download Count
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990
Paper Authors
Edward F. Crawley Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor Ed Crawley is the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for engineering education of the NAE. He is the Founding President of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and. the Co-Director of NEET at MIT.
Mark Bathe Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor Bathe is a Full Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard, Co-Chair of the MIT New Engineering Education Transformation, and Chair of the MIT Committee on Student Life. Professor Bathe obtained his Doctoral Degree from MIT working in the Departments of Mechanical, Chemical, and Biological Engineering before moving to the University of Munich to carry out his postdoctoral research. He returned to MIT in 2009 to join the faculty in the Department of Biological Engineering, where he runs an interdisciplinary research group focused on the targeted delivery of therapeutic nucleic acids and vaccines, phenotypic profiling of neuronal circuits involved in psychiatric disease, and engineering nucleic acid materials for highly parallel molecular computing and massive data storage.
Rea Lavi
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
orcid.org/0000-0002-0788-7236
Rea Lavi is Lecturer and designer of curriculum and assessment at the School of Engineering in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. He received his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. His published papers and research interests concern the thinking skills required for complex problem-solving, and in particular systems thinking, creativity, and metacognition.
Amitava "Babi" Mitra Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Amitava “Babi” Mitra is the founding Executive Director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program at MIT. He is the founding Dean of Engineering, BML Munjal University, Gurgaon, India, and was the Senior Vice-President, Knowledge Solutions Business, NIIT, Inc., Executive Director, Academic Media Production Services, MIT, Chief, Distance Learning Programs Unit, BITS, Pilani, India, and founding member, Council of Governors, Pan-Himalayan Grassroots Development Foundation, Kumaon, India. He earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from BITS, Pilani, India; he was simultaneously a Visiting Engineer at the department of chemical engineering, MIT. His expertise and interest are in setting up and leading innovative ‘start-up’ educational initiatives; he has over twenty-five years’ experience in institution building, higher education, corporate e-learning, and distance education.
Abstract
Industrial and societal needs for engineering education have transformed in the past decades while traditional undergraduate engineering education has remained largely unchanged. In Fall 2016, the Dean, School of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chartered the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program with the aim of educating engineers to design and build the “new machines and systems” that will address major societal needs and challenges of the 21st century. NEET alumni will be prepared to work as entrepreneurs, innovators, makers, and discoverers, through learning and practicing the NEET Ways of Thinking: cognitive approaches that help students think, plan, and learn more effectively and efficiently on their own and within teams. Student enrollment in the program steadily increased from 28 in Fall 2017, through 52 in Fall 2018, to 83 in Fall 2019, making the program significantly larger than most new academic programs in the past, and larger than many majors. Starting in Fall 2018, NEET began to pilot the Ways of Thinking (WoT) through cross-school initiatives at MIT, where faculty and colleagues in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the School of Architecture + Planning began leading efforts jointly with engineering faculty to develop short modules. There were 25 such modules implemented starting Fall 2018, Spring 2019 and Fall 2019, specifically in Ethics, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Self-learning. We describe how those modules were developed and piloted, what were the lessons learned from their implementation, and implications for the future. One of the key findings is that the Ways of Thinking should be more integrated into the students’ project work in NEET. We conclude by describing our plans for further integration of the Ways of Thinking into NEET, including how their efficacy needs to be assessed through a rigorous process to optimally inform academic program design.
Crawley, E. F., & Bathe, M., & Lavi, R., & Mitra, A. B. (2020, June), Implementing the NEET Ways of Thinking at MIT Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34785
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