Cambridge and MIT learn from a 'culture clash'
When Gordon Brown, the UK finance minister, gave Cambridge University more than ￡60m ($108m) to set up a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wanted the two institutions to come up with better ways to work with industry.
What he might not have expected was an experiment in teaching methods that could change the way both American and British students learn science, potentially equipping graduates of UK universities with more of the skills employers say they currently lack.
A student exchange programme between the two institutions has uncovered a transatlantic culture clash in teaching and learning and is encouraging experimentation on both sides.
"It is an opportunity for Cambridge and MIT to tinker with their own system by borrowing from the other," says Suzanne Greenwald, educational adviser to the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI).
After feedback from the students on the programme, Cambridge is starting to wonder whether its prized one-to-one supervisions, in which students get a regular blast of personal attention from tutors, offer a sufficiently varied experience. MIT is interested in Cambridge's preference for "in-depth" and often solitary learning, and has begun a two-year review of teaching to respond to students' changing demands.
The British students have been enthusiastic about the challenges presented by MIT's continuously assessed, high-speed journey through the curriculum, with its emphasis on teamwork and problem-solving.
MIT undergraduates, transplanted from Boston to the English fens, have been intrigued by the Cambridge method, which amounts pretty much to leaving undergraduates to their own devices until they sit exams to test their accumulated knowledge and insight.
Both systems have become "monochrome" according to academics on the CMI programme, and the findings have been "provocative" in challenging the status quo.
Michelle Seitz, an MIT student who spent last year at Cambridge studying materials science and metallurgy, says the experience has given her "perspective".
"After sitting the tripos exams where everything you saw all year was fair game, having a test that covers three weeks of material is no longer as daunting."
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Ms Seitz found the individual supervisions at Cambridge a spur to writing more tightly and thinking more logically, and she enjoyed the greater flexibility offered by a system without continuous assessment. "I found that I had much greater control over the topics I studied, as well as a greater freedom to experiment, because each paper did not contribute to my final grade."
David Good, CMI's programme director for undergraduate education, says Cambridge students accustomed to this more independent way of learning have benefited from MIT's emphasis on meeting regular deadlines. "Keeping the clock ticking keeps you moving on," he says.
For Hayden Taylor, an engineering student at Cambridge, the time he spent at MIT last year has made him more excited about his chosen specialism - micro- electromechanical systems. This was, he says, partly because of the mix at MIT between graduates and undergraduates working as a research community with close links to companies.
Engineering courses at MIT, he says, "seem to be geared towards giving one skills that are ready to be applied in a job without much further training. The preference here [in Cambridge] is to stay conceptual, making problems arithmetically straightforward so that insight can be given a higher profile."
According to Dr Good, the difference is between the British ideal of asking students to develop their own "internal compass" for learning, and the US preference for an "external compass". The explicit demands of the MIT course made it easier for the Brits to adapt, he says. Cambridge was a more confusing environment, with its dedication to showing undergraduates the limits of knowledge: "Students are brought up to study things they can't do."
It is the emphasis on "real world" problems and on teamwork that could start to make UK undergraduates more useful to employers when lessons from the CMI experiment are applied to Cambridge courses later this year. Groups of about 20 students at each of the two universities will try a mixture of teaching styles at the beginning of the next academic year.
In Boston, for example, the mechanical engineering department wants to experiment with Cambridge-style supervisions, and a relaxation of the constant grading has even been suggested to try to encourage independent thinking.
Progress will be gradual and carefully assessed: "We can't mess with the students' courses willy-nilly," says Dr Good. But it is part of CMI's mission to pass on experience and recommendations from its work to the rest of the UK's higher education sector, so the benefits could be extensive. When the resources available to teach undergraduates have been in decline for years, adapting teaching methods to improve the student experience and reduce costly one-to-one tutorials in favour of group working could turn out to be crucial to all Britain's top institutions, Dr Good says.
One of the main lessons has been the enthusiasm of students on MIT courses for working with companies on real, paid, research projects.
"Most businesses say what they want us to turn out is not people with technical skills, which become obsolete quickly," says Dr Good. Instead they want students with experience of working across academic disciplines - or "transfunctionality".
After the review produced last December by Richard Lambert, former editor of the Financial Times, into how British universities can improve their links with business, the academics will want to look carefully, Dr Good says, at why experiences from the CMI project have been so successful in making students think about the world beyond academia.
The student exchange programme was very much an optional extra when the CMI collaboration was set up by the UK Treasury in 2000, according to Dr Good. But now powerful student feedback is starting to encourage reform. He cannot resist a metaphor drawn from the laboratory: "The students are like probes. You drop them in and they come back covered in data."
剑桥麻省互相取经
英国财相戈登o布朗（Gordon Brown）拨款6000万英镑（合1.08亿美元）,让英国剑桥大学（Cambridge University）和美国麻省理工学院（MIT）建立合作伙伴关系，希望两校共同寻找与工业界合作的更好方式。
他未曾料到，两所院校在教学方法上也开展了实验，且有可能改变英美两国学生学习科学的方式，并帮助英国大学毕业生进一步掌握雇主所期盼的技能。
两校的学生交流活动暴露了两国教学上的文化冲突，鼓励双方展开新的探索。
"这个机遇让剑桥和麻省理工两校取长补短，互相借鉴，"剑桥－麻省理工学院（Cambridge-MIT Institute, CMI）教育顾问苏珊o格林瓦德（Suzanne Greenwald）表示。
剑桥实行的是一对一导师制，学员定期和导师见面接受教诲，这本属剑桥的一大自豪，但看过学生和课程反馈后，剑桥开始怀疑这一制度是否在经验的多样性上稍逊一筹。麻省理工则对剑桥的"深入"学习和独立探索产生了兴趣，开始为期两年的教学评估，以回应学生需求的变化。
麻省理工对其课程开展经常性评估，学生完成科目的速度快，教学中注重团队协作，注重解决问题。这些优势也引起了英国学生的热情关注。
麻省理工本科生离开波士顿来到英国剑桥，对剑桥的教学方法备感兴趣。平时，剑桥对本科生放任自流，最后通过考试来检验他们的知识积累和思维见识。
剑桥－麻省理工学院项目的教职人员表示，两国的教学方法已经"水乳交融"。试验的发现"发人深省"，鼓励人们挑战现状。
蜜雪儿o塞伊茨（Michelle Seitz）是麻省理工的学生，去年在剑桥学习材料科学和冶金。她说在剑桥的经历让她长了"头脑"。
"剑桥学士学位考试包括全年所学内容，包罗万象。经过这种考试，再去参加只包括三周内容的测验，觉得简直算不了什么。"
塞伊茨女士还发现剑桥的导师制让学生写作更严谨，思维更缜密。她还觉得，英国的教学体制不包括平时持续性评估的成分，灵活性高，她喜欢这样。"我觉得对所学内容有更大控制，也有更多自由尝试，因为平时的每篇论文并不算入最后总成绩。"
剑桥－麻省理工学院项目本科生教育主管戴维o古德（David Good）说，剑桥学生向来喜欢独立学习，而麻省理工则强调限期完成功课，这让剑桥学生获益不浅。"没有时间限定，就难以往前赶，"他说。
海顿o泰勒（Hayden Taylor）是剑桥的工程学生，去年在麻省理工呆了一年。这一经历让他对自己所学的微电子机械系统专业兴趣更加浓厚。他说，这部分原因是麻省理工的本科生和研究生共同协作，形成研究团体，且与企业紧密联系。
他说，麻省理工的工程课程"似乎更注重培养实用技能，这种技能可直接应用于工作中，无需进一步培训。这边（剑桥）则偏重理论，把问题按照数学方式简化，更强调认知。"
据古德博士的说法，英国的理想是让学生发展学习的"内在罗盘"，而美国则偏重发展学习的"外在罗盘"。他说，麻省理工课程要求明确，英国人比较容易改编过来。剑桥的环境则让人困惑，着重让本科生了解艰深前沿的知识："学生一直在学习他们做不了的事。"
剑桥－麻省理工学院项目让剑桥获益良多。今年，剑桥将把这些收获吸收到自己的课程中来，更强调"现实"问题，更强调团队协作。这种新的侧重能让英国本科生学到对雇主更有益的技能。在下一学年，两个学校各出20个学生继续交流，融合双方的教学风格。
比如，在波士顿，机械工程系希望尝试剑桥风格的导师制，还打算减少平时评分的做法，鼓励独立思考。
古德博士说，这种进步是渐进的，而且实施中会精心评估。"我们不能随心所欲地去搅乱学生的课程。"但剑桥－麻省理工学院项目的使命之一，是将项目的经验和成果向整个英国高等教育部门推广，进一步普及项目的收益。古德博士说，英国本科教育资源连年缩减，如能改变教学方法，改良学习体验，减少高成本的一对一导师制，改用团体学习方法，对英国所有的顶尖高校或许都很关键。
剑桥的学生们喜欢向麻省理工学生那样，为企业工作，参与真正的研究项目，而且接受报酬。这一发现是英国方面的主要收获之一。
"很多企业都说，他们希望我们培养的学生不仅具备技术性能力，因为技术过时很快，"古德博士说。相反，他们希望学生具有跨学科工作的经验，也就是希望他们具备"跨职能协作能力"。
去年12月，《金融时报》前总编辑理查德o兰伯特（Richard Lambert）曾发表过一篇评论，讨论英国大学如何加强和企业的联系。古德先生说，此后学术界会深入思考，为什么剑桥－麻省理工学院项目能够非常成功地启发学生思考学术以外的世界。
古德先生说，英国财政部于2000年设立剑桥－麻省理工学院合作项目时，学生交流在很大程度上是个可有可无的补充项目。孰料学生反馈非常热烈，这鼓励决策者开展教改。古德先生禁不住用实验室的话打了个比方："学生就像个探测器。把他们放下去，一回来的时候发觉他们载满了数据。"
