Fall 2023 was the first non-pandemic edition of iTeams in a while.
Through 5 pandemic editions, we reimagined iTeams. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be over. It worked, and you get the benefits. We reinvented the class time and again—we even taught outdoors!—and learned to leverage the online medium to improve our content, how it’s delivered, and how we use media to communicate more and better with students. Specifically, we now use in-person time for high-value conversations and teamwork.
To get a sense for how we translate our commitment to first-class education into action, take a look at “Education for Non-Robots,” the MIT Faculty Newsletter article Luis wrote during the pandemic. You’ll read a story of how he built from spare parts the most advanced, HD set-up for remote meetings you might imagine (it even enables summoning canned applause and joke zings when the occasion calls for them, and includes a portable forest).
Teaching without a lingering emergency feels oddly new to us, but we have a lot of experience setting up iTeams as a mastery experience (this is the 28th edition with Luis at the helm!). This semester, we’ll have three types of projects from which you can choose: some based on technologies currently in use, some based on problems for which you’ll find technologies, and some based on technologies languishing unused.
The class will remain fiercely multi-disciplinary. This year, we’ll also seek your help as we continue to make the class even better.
One more thing: since the first pandemic edition, the iTeams experience has gone global in many ways! Our ambition is to teach a global iTeams you can be part of after you graduate. We’ll share more about our plans to pilot several new components as the semester progresses; our most ambitious (delirious?) plan is to turn iTeams into an online role-playing game that leverages the digital twin—kind of like Dungeons and Dragons meets Ready Player One meets Arthur C. Clarke: You innovate as you play, so you don’t need magic. You can help us learn how that might even be possible. We hope you’ll seize the opportunity to influence a global iTeams and help us road-test the future.
