Q&A with Vijay Kumar, Senior Advisor to the Vice President of Open Learning

March 2, 2023

Vijay Kumar provides leadership for sustainable, technology-enabled educational innovation at MIT. He is a member of both the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) advisory committee and Global Opportunity (GOI) advisory, an executive officer for MIT’s Council on Educational Technology, and a member of the steering committee for I-Campus, the MIT-Microsoft alliance.

In prior roles at MIT and other institutions, Vijay has been responsible for strategy development and the integration of information technology and media services into education. His research and advising work has included engagements with the Smithsonian, the India National Knowledge Commission, UNESCO, Open University of Catalonia, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Qatar Foundation International, and the Massachusetts STEM Council’s Network Operations Board.

Vijay has authored numerous articles in the area of educational innovations and technology strategy, and is a co-editor of a Carnegie Foundation book “Opening Up Education” (MIT Press, August 2008). In 2013, he was awarded an honorary professorship by Tianjin Open University. He was also named the Exxon Mobil Chair for Technology Enabled Learning at the University of Qatar, 2014. Vijay earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, and an EdD from the University of Massachusetts.

One of the main tenets of the Global Opportunity Initiative is upskilling for the future of work. Where do you see the most opportunity in that field?

In some sense, every hard product is getting converted into an intelligent soft service. And what are the implications of that for what we teach, what we learn, and the skills that we need to have? So that kind of digital centrality in jobs is something that we really have to consider in thinking about the future of work and “upgrading” our skills. But we also have to think about, what does the digital dimension of my current skill set look like? What are the “digital” expectations in terms of competencies for any job going to look like? And so that, I think, is one of the key opportunities for thinking about how we re-skill or upskill ourselves.

In terms of industries and domain areas,  nowadays  there is a lot of attention to health and the environment, right?  That is welcome! A look at how programs have evolved at MIT helps us understand  the influence of these shifts – For example when Computation came on the rise and then, subsequently, when life sciences came on the rise, you started seeing interdisciplinary programs like computational biology, computational linguistics.  Today  we’ve started thinking about how the things that we do are going to impact the general wellness of the planet, both in terms of the humans that are there as well as the environment in which we exist. And what are the implications in terms of how we target industry and jobs towards advancing this.

And the last dimension I’ll mention about the future of work is one of the things that we see – and this is very amply evident in our own jobs – is suddenly it’s not about just one institution, or a single person. Now we talk about the ecosystem. We talk about porosity and boundarylessness in our systems. We talk about the fact that it takes a village. And some of these things got very vividly exposed during COVID, the fact that you need to interact with other ecosystems in order to deliver the value that you care about, whether it is at home, working with other companies, or other industries. Even at MIT, for instance, we say, we care a lot about hands-on active learning. But you sort of think, well, we care about it but perhaps that particular dimension of our value can be better delivered somewhere else through an internship through industry partners, for example. So we start thinking about ecosystem collaborators in a big way. And one of the skills, I think, that we need to advance is the skill of recognizing and engaging with the ecosystem. That might translate to communication skills, relationships skills, empathy, and those competencies. But I think that is a very, very important area. 

Automation and AI have been in many headlines recently. How can workers actively prepare themselves for jobs that are harder to replace with robots and computers?

To answer that, we really have to understand what are the real competencies that we, as humans, have. What are the ingredients in how we approach tasks? And of course two come to mind: compassion and empathy. But even when I look at the abundance of information or the capabilities that AI and emerging technologies bring, there is something that we do as humans which becomes more and more necessary and pronounced, which is the ability to synthesize information and our sense-making abilities from the information that we synthesize.

Part of all this is also to think of ourselves as collaborators. So it’s not about humans in competition with this technology but in collaboration with this technology. And then we can think about what combinations of this technology and our human skills can help us get to the outcomes that we desire.  And this, I think, is the best way to prepare ourselves. To look at, what is the job? What are the outcomes needed? And which, over time, can be more effectively done by my partner, which is this technology in its evolution? 

I’m a chemical engineer who went into chemical engineering because of chemistry. So I like to differentiate between a mixture and a compound and not look at these as oil and water, but to see these things as two things that can really integrate well in order to help us come up with better solutions. 

Can you tell us a little about the work you’re doing in the Philippines? How can some of the lessons learned in Southeast Asia scale to other regions?  

It’s very interesting because the Philippines are a microcosm for the kinds of things that can happen in the region and elsewhere in the world. Our work has been in trying to advance STEM thinking and STEM education in the area and sort of encouraging them and engaging them in thinking proactively about the future of work and education. A part of that has been in support of advanced manufacturing, so a manifestation of the work is saying, look, STEM skills are future skills, what are the future skills required for manufacturing? We’re helping them think proactively about that. 

We also have to think about foundational skills beyond the 3Rs. It is about the kinds of literacies that we just talked about regarding AI and computation. We have to think about these new functional literacies, these new domains, content domains, as well as the fact that in order to thrive, we need to engage better with the full ecosystem. 

And in terms of STEM, a consistent message that I’ve tried to give in my engagement with the Philippines and the region is to say, look, we have to think about STEM as almost a proxy term, that STEM is beyond the domain competencies. It’s beyond thinking about technology or chemistry, biology, physics, and the other STEM subjects. It’s more around problem solving, around these enduring skills and enduring competencies. Problem solving, entrepreneurial tendencies, risk taking, these are the enduring STEM competencies.

What is the one skill that you’ve acquired through your career that you consider most important? 

Systems Thinking. There was a time when I was doing my master’s work,  I was doing a lot of Systems work. It was in Industrial Management but focusing on Operations Research and applications. At the time my advisor drilled systems thinking into my veins, right? So there was a time when everything that I wrote used to start with the title “a systems approach to” or “a systems thinking about”. It’s not just about information flowing as well. There is a dimension of systems thinking which is about openness, being open to other ideas, right? And openness and systems thinking are very, very connected. In the sense that, it’s being empathetic, right?

And empathy is, again, not sympathy. Empathy is being aware of your surroundings and the people surrounding you, your organizational surroundings, and responding to it, interacting with it. So the interconnectedness that systems thinking advances and this notion of empathy are deeply interconnected, right? 

That’s a very profound question you asked, because it did send me into a bit of an introspective spin. But I think that’s what I came out with, systems thinking and empathy, and having this openness to ideas.

What do you like most about working at MIT? 

It’s an incredible place, the people at MIT are quite something – obviously. But more important is the notion that nothing goes unchallenged at MIT, and it’s not mal-intended, it’s just that people are curious and always want to know more. We also always tend to look at the hardest problems. There’s a tendency to look over the horizon and say, what are the opportunities for the world ahead, and at the same time, what’s really going on under the hood over here? So this combination of looking over the horizon and looking under the hood is something I really, really love about working at MIT.

I must also mention because it’s so close to me, that Openness is in MIT’s DNA. And everywhere you look it’s there, whether it is sharing curriculum, practice, research, or our  OpenCourseWare program, there’s openness in a bidirectional way. So that is something I have  seen in my 27 years at MIT, which I cherish.

Finally, I’ll end with this – when it comes to innovation. There is constant innovation at MIT at every level, responding to the world’s challenges. People manifest all of this sharing, challenging, innovating – not just a few people, there is no sitting on the bench – everybody is a colleague, right? Everybody pitches in. Everybody is playing at that high level. That’s what makes it really exciting. Never a dull moment. Never a dull moment.

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