S anjay Sarma argues that when it comes to technology, it’s easier to think big than to make small, incremental changes. So as the first-ever director of digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he’s aiming to change the culture of teaching there by pushing the lecture model into the margins and using technology to rethink the professor’s role.
Since taking the position, in 2012, Mr. Sarma and his office have made significant inroads. (He also has a new title: vice president for open learning.) Two-thirds of the university’s undergraduates have now taken a course that uses the interactive software that was developed for edX, the nonprofit spinoff of MIT that offers free MOOCs.
In some courses, professors use a “flipped classroom” approach, where students watch lecture videos and do online quizzes for homework so that classroom time can focus on discussion. In others, problem sets are delivered using the edX software, which can instantly grade complicated assignments such as coding exercises or drafts of circuit diagrams. That frees up time for professors and provides detailed data on student performance.
Mr. Sarma has even pushed for breaking up semester-long courses into shorter modules, so that students can take only the parts they need, essentially remixing the curriculum into a personalized-learning playlist.
In five years, Mr. Sarma predicts, college instruction will look much different than it does today, whether MIT takes the lead or not. “It’s going to happen,” he says. “What we are trying to do is establish the thoughtful way it ought to occur. We don’t want the horde to sort of invade and pillage the city.”
In making his case to audiences at MIT, which he does tirelessly, Mr. Sarma points to the institution’s history as an innovator in educational methods. “The founding principles of MIT were disruptive,” he told a campus workshop this year, noting that from the beginning, MIT focused more on student research and “learning by doing” than other institutions did.
And he reminds people that MIT pioneered the online publishing of teaching materials when it started its OpenCourseWare project, more than 10 years ago. That project, too, now falls under Mr. Sarma’s leadership.
“Sanjay’s really a master at reaching out to the community,” says his colleague John D.E. Gabrieli, a professor in the department of brain and cognitive science. “I think we’re competing with people running for office in the number of meetings we have.” As a result, there have been few of the usual grumblings when a university starts a major, top-down initiative.
Mr. Sarma is relatively new to ed tech. His primary area of research involves connecting all kinds of devices and sensors to the Internet, a booming area now referred to as the Internet of Things. He is also credited as a key developer of a tiny digital-tracking tag called the RFID chip, which has become ubiquitous in many large retail stores, in libraries, and in other institutions that need to keep track of huge inventories.
It’s worth noting that the RFID chip was once widely seen as a quixotic fantasy, and its adoption was far from certain. “The simple question was, Can you make a [digital] tag cost five cents, and can you put it on every damn thing?” he says of his early interest in the technology. He never doubted it would take off. In fact, he thought it would happen in about half the time it did.
“What I didn’t anticipate was culture change,” he says, noting that many traditional retailers were initially resistant. So he and some colleagues founded an industry-sponsored research lab at MIT called Auto-ID and made the case to group after group, even testifying before a congressional subcommittee. “We just had to get the flywheel going,” he says.
He now jokes that his enthusiasm for reforming digital teaching tools rivals that of religious converts toward their faith. Colleagues who do educational research say they often field messages from Mr. Sarma asking questions about their findings. (Sometimes he just needs advice to help his 13-year-old daughter with her homework.)
M r. Sarma, who is 47, grew up in India and attended the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, a highly selective engineering university often referred to as the MIT of India. He was not always an ideal student, he says. “I really struggled when learning theoretical stuff to understand how we would use it. There was this incessant desire to apply it.”
His early career as an engineer was spent on oil rigs, before he was lured back to college after seeing an American graduate school. “In the United States, there was an openness to questioning and saying, I don’t get this — even questioning the most basic things,” he says. “I found it emboldening.” He eventually earned a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.
When he first entered the classroom as a professor, Mr. Sarma felt “extremely sympathetic” to the impatience he saw in many of his own students. His focus on education started in 2012, when MIT created edX, the nonprofit MOOC platform that it founded jointly with Harvard University. His mission was to look into how the software and approaches developed by edX could be applied to courses on the campus.
In 2013, MIT’s president asked him to co-chair an institute-wide task force on the “Future of MIT Education,” which produced a 213-page report declaring that “higher education is at an inflection point.” Its sweeping recommendations included the rethinking of teaching practices, classroom designs, and common spaces, and experimenting with new kinds of microdegrees through its partnership with edX.
While Mr. Sarma believes that technology can improve teaching, he wants to base his interventions on research rather than hunches. This year he announced an effort called the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (the acronym is pronounced “mightily”), focused on conducting research into “the fundamental mechanisms of learning and how we can improve it.”
Mr. Gabrieli, who leads the effort, notes that focusing so much on educational research wasn’t an obvious idea. “Because there’s so much pressure to just produce things,” he says, “it’s almost a risky question to ask the other question of, How do we know this is better?”
Correction (4/12/2016, 3:21 p.m.): This article originally misstated Mr. Sarma’s current job title. It is vice president for open learning, not open education. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
