TIE Program Description

The Technology, Innovation, and Education (TIE) program prepares students to contribute to the thoughtful design, implementation, and assessment of technology-enhanced educational initiatives. Graduates of the program pursue careers in varied fields, including creating educational media, leading technology integration in both formal and informal learning settings, evaluating educational technologies and programs, formulating and analyzing policy, teaching with new technologies, and conducting research.

The program is grounded on the conviction that technologies can be tools to improve and transform learning, and that the study of these tools should be embedded in analysis of the educational purposes they serve and the contexts in which they are applied.

TIE courses address the design, implementation, and analysis of educational technologies:

• Courses on the design and development of educational technologies focus on design principles that support and enhance learning. TIE courses deal with a wide variety of tools and media, including text, hypermedia, modeling and simulation software, websites, multiuser virtual environments, collaborative learning tools, authoring shells, handheld devices, digital video, broadcast television, and webcasts.
• Courses on the transformation of education with new technologies focus on understanding how to manage multiple dimensions of change to improve education through technological innovation. Principles of organizational learning and systemic change, strategies for working with multiple stakeholders, and policies to promote educational opportunity and equity are analyzed in relation to the role of technology in transforming education.
• Courses on research, evaluation, and assessment enable students to analyze the process and effects of technology-enhanced innovation in a range of educational settings. Courses address assessment of initiatives and policies associated with new technologies in classrooms, school systems, higher education, and informal learning organizations. The emphasis is on learning how to formulate research designs and to collaborate with multiple interest groups in conducting research that is both rigorous and practical.

Many TIE students take advantage of the array of additional learning opportunities available throughout Harvard University and at MIT. To deepen their understanding of the connections between theory and practice, students often also undertake an internship in one of the many research projects, educational technology firms, or media production organizations in the Boston area.