Education in the UK must be enhanced if we are to meet future economic challenges - and help the UK to stay competitive globally at a time when the workforces in developing economies are rapidly becoming more highly-skilled. Designing and delivering new educational programmes fit for the 21st century will require universities to share ideas and best practice, and garner input from industrial partners.

To this end, the Cambridge-MIT Institute has developed new curricula in areas of emerging technology, developed Degrees that increase the business skills of science graduates, and sponsored new e-learning approaches to teaching. These programmes aim to give students – particularly in science and engineering – the knowledge, self-confidence and skills to help them be more innovative in their working life. Furthermore, the results of these innovations in education have been studied and researched, enabling us to share vital lessons with other universities and academic institutions.

New Curricula for New Challenges

Biological engineering has the potential to become a fundamental discipline, capable of producing solutions to many real world problems. With the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s help, new interdisciplinary courses specially designed to meet the emerging need for graduates with a quantitative understanding of biological systems are being introduced at Cambridge University. A new course in Bioinformatics, drawing on a module taught at MIT, was introduced into the Engineering curriculum last year and will soon be available to all students studying the Natural Sciences. This interdisciplinary connectivity is also being developed by new staff and a new course, “Engineering for Life Sciences”, which will be available to students at Cambridge University from Autumn 2006.

Dr Keith Johnstone, from Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, is amongst those who want to see more new courses that bridge traditional disciplines to meet the needs of society, research and industry. Dr Johnstone says that introducing the Bioinformatics course has happened more quickly because of the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s support for the collaboration between academic staff at the two universities. “The exchange of knowledge, resources and expertise between MIT and Cambridge has accelerated the pace of innovation” he said.

Mastering Science and Enterprise

Six Masters-level programmes developed jointly by academic staff at MIT and Cambridge, have been introduced at the University of Cambridge to help equip engineers and scientists to contribute to industry and public service – particularly in areas of emerging technology (like BioScience, Nanotechnology and Computational Biology) where there is currently a skills shortage. Demand for these innovative courses is extremely strong. In just three years, the MPhil courses have generated over 350 alumni who now work in organisations ranging from private companies to the UK civil service and World Bank. Additionally, in two out of the last three years, teams of students from these programmes have won the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs competition before going on to launch their own companies commercially.

Students Exchange Knowledge

In 2000, the Cambridge-MIT Institute founded the first undergraduate Student Exchange between Cambridge University and MIT. Since then, 425 students have spent a full academic year at their partner institution. It’s not just the participating students that benefit from experiencing a different approach to teaching and learning. Both Cambridge and MIT are able to comparatively assess their approaches through a rigorous evaluation process where the students provide insights into the strengths of the educational provision at both universities. In addition to aiding the development of the exchange itself, student feedback and evaluation has proved invaluable to staff involved in developing other experimental projects linking the two universities.

Turning up the Heat

An example of innovation driven by the student exchange is WebLabs. A Cambridge student visiting MIT on the Cambridge-MIT exchange programme sparked the idea of a shareable network of laboratory equipment to be controlled remotely for teaching experiments in Cambridge. The Cambridge staff began by manipulating a heat-exchanger at MIT, and then secured major capital and staff resources from Siemens to develop their own shareable experimental facility. The use of the Weblabs for student exercises ensures that both Cambridge and MIT students gain valuable experience and knowledge on state-of-the-art industrial equipment. The students’ reception of this new teaching tool has been overwhelmingly positive. Cambridge University is now the UK node in the international iCampus network, and the facility is being used by other institutions in the UK such as Imperial College London, the University of Birmingham and the University of Newcastle, to name but a few.

Disk World

Students frequently face high costs when purchasing the software they require to complete their studies, so in 2003 the Cambridge-MIT Institute founded a project to provide Engineering students with a standard operating platform. The Multidisciplinary Design Project has now developed a CD-ROM disk that contains a comprehensive suite of engineering programmes, teaching materials, and an on-line catalogue of standard components for use in mechtronic projects. The disk runs on open-source software and can be copied and distributed freely. The team hope that this open-source approach will facilitate the adoption of this useful and powerful engineering platform by engineering students across the UK.

DSpace Delivers

Educational courses and research projects now generate vast quantities of data in digital format. However, unless the materials are preserved and properly archived, the original investment could be lost. To help institutions and organisations make the most of their digital outputs, the Cambridge-MIT Institute help develop DSpace - a groundbreaking future-proof digital archive that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes scholarly research material within a consortium of academic institutions. DSpace has already captured over 100,000 units of information from Cambridge University and MIT, and the system has now been adopted by 15 universities across the UK.