HODGES: The basic goal of 12.000 is to provide freshman at
MIT with an opportunity to put together concepts and ideas that
they get in a more formal way, in particular in the science
core at MIT in their first year and put those in turn together
with social issues, fundamental social issues in
the context of big environmental problems.
The subject changes from year to year in terms of its theme.
We tend to focus on different areas at different times.
But, on the other hand, the overarching goal is to have
them think about how you approach really complicated
problems that require multiple perspectives and don't necessary
have any simple solutions. I mean most of the problems
that they tend to deal with, in the other subjects that they
take in the freshman year, have straightforward known
solutions. So it's like taking a problem
set, working on it and solving those problems in particular.
But most of the problems that really keep you awake at night
are not those kinds of problems. And so, as a consequence,
this puts us in a position that we can literally let them think
a little bit about what it is like to solve cutting-edge
problems that have no simple answers.
The course is structured in such a way that students get
grades based on their individual work.
They get grades based on teamwork.
And they get grades as an entire class.
And those are different components of the overall grade
for the class. The reason for that kind of
structure is that, in particular,
we are trying to emphasize team learning and teamwork in this
subject. And so, by setting up the grade
structure in such a way that a substantial proportion of the
grade, far more than half the grade actually depends on the
overall outcome for the class and the overall outcome for the
individual teams that make up the class.
It began, a number of years ago, as an experiment that was
supported by the d'arbeloff Fund here at MIT, really an
experiment in project-based, team-based learning
specifically directed at freshman.
And it was specifically supposed to be interdisciplinary
right from the get-go. So what has happened is it has
been used as a model over the years to try and think about how
one would run that kind of a subject for freshman in
particular. Because one of the big problems
that we all have with freshman education at MIT is the balance
between the incredible intellectual capacity of the
freshman who come in versus the amount of training that they
have and, therefore, their sophistication in looking
at problems. So lots of people would argue
that project-based learning is best done, for example,
in the junior year or the senior year or even in the
graduate years. But one of the things that we
found out from this class is that, even though students don't
necessarily have a lot of the formal training that forms the
foundation for high-level learning they have a tremendous
amount of creativity. And this really builds a
self-confidence in them to work on problems that normally they
would perceive as problems that are insolvable for them.
12.000 is not a formal subject within the departmental
curriculum of EAPS, although it can count as a
restrictive elective for students who are taking the
environmental science track within our departmental program.
However, it is really meant as an opportunity for freshman to
think very broadly about their own education and how they learn
things, how they put together solutions to these big
complicated problems. I think one of the highlights
of this class is the final presentation at the end of the
academic year, sorry, at the end of the
semester. And the rationale behind that
is that I wanted to give the students a sense that if they do
work well and if they come up with an effective solution to
one of these complicated problems that they will be paid
attention to. I mean this is part of building
this sense of empowerment among these students.
So the simplest way, the best way to do that is to
put them in a position where they are trying to explain their
solution to a bunch of people who are themselves deeply
immersed in that particular problem.
And they really have a knowledge of the issues that
surround any solution that particular problem.
So every year, for the final presentation,
I invite a panel of maybe five or six people who have special
knowledge of this particular area or have special knowledge
of the kinds of problems that are confronted by that
particular class. And one of the things that I
have found is that has been a tremendous motivator,
a far greater motivator than the grades that students would
get in this class, because there is no fear like
the fear of looking stupid in front of a bunch of people who
know what they are talking about.
We also do a live webcast of that final presentation for a
variety of reasons. We started doing it because we
wanted to have it for assessment purposes, not for what a
particular class does but for assessment for the subject as a
whole. By looking back at those from
year to year we can sort of see what seemed to have worked well
pedagogically, what didn't seem to have worked
well pedagogically, and we can get a sense of how
well the students are really learning the material that way,
I think more so than we could by, for example,
entrance and exit examples. With this kind of material it
is hard to devise those anyway, but we can do it well because I
always believe that the better you can articulate a problem the
more you understand it. I think one of the most
difficult things about teaching this subject is that you have to
stop being a professor and you have to let the students do the
work on their own. Throughout the years you find
that the students are going to stumble and they are going to
make mistakes and they do things really inefficiently in a
subject of this kind. If you create an environment
for learning but you don't actually hold the control stick
for the learning of the students then it is a little bit of a
scary thing. You believe every year,
I believe that the system is beginning to be chaotic and it
is not going to work very effectively.
And then at the end of every year, every semester that I
teach this class the students come out of it beautifully.
And I think that is a testimonial, not to anything
that I do, but a testimonial to their capacity to learn as a
group but also as individuals.