After 7 years, iCampus has come to a successful close. It was celebrated with a 2-day symposium, Learning without Barriers / Technology without Borders, in early December 2006, bringing together luminaries from government, academia, and industry. The MIT-Microsoft alliance has successfully done what it started out to do: it fostered barrier-less collaborations and exciting new technological developments aimed at improving education in higher learning institutions, first at home here at MIT, then globally, across borders, through its Outreach Initiative.

Thanks to all the faculty and student PI’s and your teams for working with the MIT/Microsoft Alliance in your iCampus research projects. Thanks to your efforts, the iCampus Alliance has proven to be a successful engagement both for MIT and for Microsoft.

The iCampus project commissioned the TLT Group to conduct an assessment of selected projects to determine what can be learned about the priorities for educational technology initiatives in the future, and about how the spread of such innovations can be more effectively supported. The results of this study are presented here in two forms:

• Executive Summary (PDF, 30 pgs, 536kb)
• Stephen C. Ehrmann, Steven W. Gilbert, and Flora McMartin, 2006, Factors Affecting the Adoption of Faculty-Developed Academic Software: A Study of Five iCampus Projects, TLT Group (PDF, 149 pgs., 2.1 MB)

For more information about the iCampus Assessment study, please contact iCampus.

Robin H. Ray, News Office Correspondent
December 8, 2006

Learning Without Barriers Symposium

The seven-year, $25 million iCampus partnership between MIT and Microsoft, which has borne fruit across the globe, was celebrated with a symposium at the Tang Center Dec. 1 and 2.

Called “Learning Without Barriers/Technology Without Borders: Celebrating the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Alliance,” the symposium brought together industry leaders, educators and government officials to discuss the progress that iCampus has facilitated in educational technology, to reflect on the challenges facing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, and to sample the remarkable initiatives that are being undertaken amid a climate of ever-accelerating technological change.
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