On the last day of the Summer Studio at Olin College of Engineering, four teams of faculty from around the world reflected on their experiences. They had spent the previous week pursuing a framework that would lead to engineering education improvements in their home countries. As the facilitator moved from table to table, it became clear the participants had succeeded in what they came to learn: how to apply what a start-up engineering college in Massachusetts did to transform engineering education. 

“We had heard of the Olin pedagogy, and it had many synergies to our own,” said Uday Roopavath, an assistant professor of bioscience and bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu. “Before coming to the Summer Studio, I had a vision of what I wanted to do with my students, but I wasn’t able to define it. Now I can.” 

For over two decades, Olin College of Engineering has not only practiced a groundbreaking way of teaching within its own institution but also shared its methods with the rest of higher education, both domestically and globally. The effort is more than just an example of best practice sharing. The theory is that by instigating changes within institutions, a cumulative effect will occur to alter the field of engineering education and the types of engineers it produces. 

“A big part of our mission is to transform engineering education,” said Olin President May Lee. “The Summer Studio is the flagship program for allowing us to do that, and it’s more important than ever. Olin provides the scaffolding for students to understand what it means to learn — not just take tests and get the right answer. This way of learning leads to a kind of agency within our students that is essential, particularly with the onset of A.I.” 

Lee’s commitment to Olin’s role in influencing engineering education comes from the fact she has seen it first-hand. When Lee was the chief strategy officer for institutional impact at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), her colleague there, Professor Shayla Armand, participated in one of the Olin summer programs and came back promoting an entirely new way of thinking about research and teaching. Before she left R.P.I. for Olin, Lee incorporated much of that transformation into R.P.I.’s current strategic plan. She then brought Armand to Olin as provost, and the two leaders continue working together to extend Olin’s impact on the field. 

May is the third president of Olin College, succeeding the five-year tenure of Gilda Barabino and the 21-year tenure of founding president, Richard Miller. The school was chartered in 1997 by the F. W. Olin Foundation with a directive for Miller to operationalize what the engineering community believed to be much-needed changes in how engineers had traditionally been trained. The prevailing sentiment was that a reliance on technical skills-based learning alone would not be sufficient to address the major changes brought on by a more integrated global economy and the launch of the internet. Engineers would need to have business and entrepreneurship skills, teamwork, creativity, and a broader understanding of the societal contexts of engineering. 

Olin was created to become a form of privately funded national laboratory for engineering education redesign. What the college lacked in size — the highly selective school enrolls about 400 students — it more than made up for in innovation. From the beginning, Miller and his team did things differently, rejecting a number of deeply held convictions in higher education, such as academic departments and tenured faculty. 

“We were given a rare opportunity — and responsibility — to rethink what it means to be educated in the 21st century and what it means to be an engineer,” Miller said. “The expectations were extremely high.” While the campus was still being built, 30 students spent the first year living in construction trailers and acting as partners in designing pedagogy.“ The student ‘partners,’ together with the founding faculty and leadership team, developed a new paradigm for engineering education based on human-centered design and intrinsic motivation,” Miller said. 

Olin students develop a sense of identity and agency early on, many acquiring patents and starting enterprises before they even graduate.

The concept of students as co-creators continues today. Olin is perhaps best known for its student-centered, project-based learning whereby students frequently work in teams, building real solutions to real-world problems. The faculty, who team-teach across disciplines, still apply human-centered engineering to their teaching — an approach that combines technical expertise with empathy, design thinking, communication, and an understanding of human needs. 

As a result, Olin students develop a sense of identity and agency early on, many acquiring patents and starting enterprises before they even graduate. Not surprisingly, they tend toward emerging technologies. Olin alumni Evan Morikawa and Andy Barry founded Generalist, the leading A.I. research and product driven company building general intelligence for the physical world, a.k.a. “robots.”  

By the late 2010s, Olin was earning a global reputation as the producer of the new kind of engineer — one that creates solutions, not just products. In 2018, M.I.T., in its global state of the art in engineering education report, named Olin first among 10 universities cited as current global leaders in engineering. M.I.T., which came in second, used the Olin model when revising its own engineering curriculum. 

Learning by doing 

As satisfying as it may have been to be an example to the standard bearer down the street, having a superlative pedagogy was only the first metric of success in Olin’s founding mission. 

“If Olin only graduates good engineers than we have failed because we have not changed engineering education,” said Chris Lee, the interim dean of research and strategic partnerships at Olin. 

Dean Lee leads Olin’s efforts to share with the world what the college itself has built. This transfer of knowledge has taken many forms over the years. Since the college’s inception, visitors have come to campus to sit in on classes and converse with faculty and students, all hoping to see what the engineering education incubator was all about. Miller said that in his last 10 years at Olin, he hosted leaders of 800 universities from 65 countries who journeyed to Olin to see for themselves how the learning model works.

In 2009, Olin started the Collaboratory, which included more formal workshops for visitors who not only would observe Olin’s methods but could learn how to apply them to their own institutions. This eventually led to Olin’s residential summer program. Now called the Summer Studio, the on-campus program aims to help institutions accelerate their institutional initiatives related to teaching and learning. The Summer Studio is an intensive project-based professional development experience for the teams of educators that come to drive these projects forward. Teams of up to six participants pay $35,000 to attend. 

Participation in the Summer Studio has shifted over time from pre-Covid levels of 10 to 12 teams and over 80 participants to this year’s smaller group of four teams, all from outside the United States. In July, the campus hosted teams from Saudi Arabia, India, Bolivia, and Korea. Like Roopavath, most of the team members arrive with a specific problem they want to solve. But if they come looking for Olin’s secret sauce, Dean Lee tells them there isn’t one, or at least there isn’t one that could be universally applied. 

“We don’t give them the answers; we give them a process,” he said. “Every institution is different. You tell us what you want to do and what your culture is like, and we’ll adapt to it.” 

President Lee underscores the point.  “We would never be so presumptuous as to think that what we do ought to be copied exactly someplace else,” she said. “There are disciplinary and curricular considerations. Each institution has their own traditions, their own accreditation concerns; and there are, of course, size differences.”

The teams are each assigned two coaches, Olin faculty members, who meets with them before, during, and after the one-week engagement. During the week, the teams utilize design principles to work through an interactive loop of goal setting, constructive feedback, reflection, and re-engineering — just as they would in an Olin classroom. “We tell them at the very beginning: ‘You are going to experience what we do here. You are going to be the students,’” Dean Lee said.

“We tell them at the very beginning: ‘You are going to experience what we do here. You are going to be the students.’”

A primary educational framework they learn is called GAPA — goals, assessments, products and activities — which Olin uses with its students. At the Summer Studio, the process is introduced as a tool that can be applied to anything from a desire to increase attendance to redesigning first-year curriculum to starting an institution from scratch. “We tell them, ‘If this is your goal, what activities will you do? What products will you develop to show those activities are successful? How do you assess what you’ve done?’” Dean Lee said.

GAPA is only one of many takeaways of the Summer Studio. Educators from around the world share common goals, despite their different cultures and perspectives. Those that attend the Summer Studio are both receptive to new ideas and generous with their own body of knowledge. This makes for high-quality collegial relationships, even life-long friendships. 

For Olin College, the learning is bidirectional. “A critical piece of Olin’s DNA is that we are constantly learning,” President Lee said. “We are learning from the institutions who come as participants — observing how they might interpret what we say and listening with intention to their feedback. For me, that’s an important outcome of the Summer Studio.” 

With an opportunity to make her own mark on Olin, President Lee believes the Olin model, now well established, can be applied to a range of non-engineering institutions, from liberal arts colleges to state schools and historically Black colleges and universities — “all in service of extending our impact and transforming higher education.” 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.