Building a Community for Educational Transformation in Higher Education

This Innovation to Practice, Work-In-Progress Paper discusses efforts toward building a community for educational transformation in Higher Education led by the department of Open Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MIT has a long history of implementing hands-on, science-based, problem-focused engineering education by working on authentic real-life problems. Within this context, sustainability has been and remains at the core of the MIT curriculum. In addition, Open Learning has a core mission to support educational transformation within the institution as well as around the world. In order for these goals to be fully achieved, institutional partnerships and global input are critical.In 2017 Open Learning, with support from Community Jameel, founded the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), a consortium of global members. Through J-WEL, MIT works with member organizations to promote excellence and transformation in education at MIT and worldwide. This paper focuses on the work taking place through one of three J-WEL subgroups, a collaborative focusing on higher education that is primarily composed of universities. By design, the J-WEL higher education collaborative members actively engage throughout the year via both online and in-person mechanisms.There are currently 20 higher education members who are working on 20 different goals regarding education transformation. Our future work includes building research partnerships between members through an innovation in education grant program, and assessing the outcomes of the collaboration facilitated by the consortium.