February 2001 — Features
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Evaluating Distance Education Across Twelve Time Zones
On the evening of September 9, 1999, the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) launched the first of nine new, highly collaborative engineering subjects for the fall semester. By the end of the first year, 17 new subjects would be offered to the first class of SMA students. Over the next three years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) plan to develop and offer five interdisciplinary graduate engineering degree programs. The goals for SMA are high: to create highly visible, world class graduate education and research programs in areas of strategic importance to Singapore and the United States, and to form a new paradigm for distance collaboration in education, research, and "technopreneurship."
SMA is a unique and ambitious program for many reasons, one of which is that it brings graduate students from opposite sides of the globe together in one virtual classroom by crossing 12 time zones through an Internet2 connection. Through research and development from the MIT Center for Advanced Educational Services, the NUS Centre for Instructional Technology and the NTU Centre for Educational Development, the SMA program blends the use of state-of-the-art asynchronous and synchronous technology to create a dynamic, virtual learning environment.
SMA has been many years in the making. In the mid-1990s, the government of Singapore invited an MIT assessment team to review the engineering programs at their two universities. In November 1998, the Singapore-MIT Alliance was signed as the result of key recommendations from that team. The SMA program is co-directed by Professor Merton C. Flemings (MIT) and Professor Hang Chang Chieh (NUS), with Deputy Directors Professor Anthony T. Patera (MIT) and Professor Chua Soo Jin (NUS). It includes MIT, NUS and NTU faculty from the disciplines of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, and Management. The first two programs, Advanced Materials and High Performance Computation for Engineered Systems, began in July 1999. The third program, Innovation in Manufacturing Systems and Technology, began in July 2000, and the final two programs, Chemical Engineering and Computer Science, will begin in July 2001.
Each SMA program has M.S. and Ph.D. tracks. Students accepted into the program receive degrees from NUS and NTU. Although courses are delivered asynchronously and synchronously over the Internet, an important feature of this program is "summer immersion." In July, many MIT faculty members travel to Singapore to meet their new students and, along with the Singaporean faculty, begin teaching an intensive pre-curriculum. SMA master's students then accompany their SMA faculty advisors to MIT for two weeks in August to continue their instruction and work in their MIT faculty advisors' labs. Ph.D. students follow in the fall and work in their MIT advisors' labs for the entire semester. It is this combination of both face-to-face time and Web-based content delivery that makes this distance learning program a unique hybrid of brick-and-mortar and virtual classrooms.
