Open course ware

ANJALI SASTRY: Part of our challenge as teachers is to help make sure that we're embedding into their approach enough rigor, that we're looking at the data and the evidence and that it's being linked to the content we're teaching here. SARAH HANSEN: Today in the podcast, we're looking at a new kind of independent study. ANJALI SASTRY: Teaching this way is incredibly rewarding and also really scary. You'll often be invited into domains where you don't have the expertise, and it's quite hard to predict how a given session or conversation will go. SARAH HANSEN: Welcome to Chalk Radio, a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT. I'm your host, Sarah Hansen, from MIT OpenCourseWare. In this episode, we'll be talking about action learning and an exciting evolution of the independent study. The MIT Sloan School of Management has a tradition of involving MBA Fellows in collaborations with partners from around the globe. For years, these proje...

ANJALI SASTRY: I've been teaching at MIT since 2001. And I've taught all kinds of classes. But the innovation I'm excited to be talking about today is a new set of linked projects that I helped our mid-career executive students-- the Sloan Fellow MBAs-- on this past year. So I hung up my shingle and asked students who had a passion for linking technology with social impact in some way to come and talk to me. And I created with them a set of projects which allowed the students to really dig into areas that they came to MIT passionate about, but also to link it to their coursework and their degree program. SARAH HANSEN: Could you talk a little bit about some of the specific projects that students did? ANJALI SASTRY: The project students did ranged greatly but all had as a theme using what they were learning here and tapping into emerging or existing technology in new ways to find solutions to problems that face many. That's the social impact aspect of it. An...