In this section, Prof. Lawrence Susskind describes the role that online tools play in recruiting visiting scholars and students to participate in the Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program, and how, among other things, online tools help MIT students prepare students to “interact with citizens and public officials in Malaysia.”
Social Marketing
Online tools are important in many ways to the success of the Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program (MSCP). We depend on social marketing to attract applications from the scholars. You can see that the MSCP website is a crucial device through which we seek to build our international network and video distribution. OCW support for distribution of the educational videos produced by the international scholars is the means by which we disseminate these key products.
Online Instruction
We . . . rely on online instruction for the MIT students preparing to participate in the IAP Practicum.
— Lawrence Susskind
We also rely on online instruction for the MIT students preparing to participate in the IAP Practicum. Specifically, the Practicum is preceded by a mandatory online tutorial that students are required to complete in the fall to prepare them to interact with citizens and public officials in Malaysia. Practicum students spend 5 or more hours a week during November and December in a guided self-study on Malaysian culture, history, politics, geography, planning and economics.
Multimedia Exhibition
Finally, we produced a major MIT multimedia exhibition last spring, Female Faces in Sustainable Places, that is now available online. The exhibition has just moved to Malaysia where it will open this fall in the National Photographic Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. We hope that Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and the Malaysian Ministry of Education will use the exhibition to provoke a national online dialogue about the role that women professionals can play in promoting sustainable city development in Malaysia.