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About Us

The MIT Jameel World Education Lab brings MIT strengths to educational innovators everywhere.

Education designed for everyone to thrive

Educators everywhere are being asked to do more: to reach more students, to upgrade learning, and to fuel the economy and serve the community in new ways. The MIT Jameel World Education Lab meets this imperative by working with educational innovators across the world. Together, we’re disrupting the status quo in education by creating practical new ideas that could transform learning at scale.

What We Do

The MIT Jameel World Education Lab works with educators across the world through a mix of ambitious projects for wide-scale transformation, innovative research efforts, and ongoing global interactions that we seed and support. Our dedicated community of staff, faculty, and leaders at our member organizations stays connected, explores new ideas, and shares their thinking through conversations, workshops, and MIT campus visits that we orchestrate throughout the year. Through this site, we share what we are learning with everyone.

Our work helps learners successfully bridge the transition from education to the workforce, cultivates innovations to connect learners and faculty to their ecosystems in new ways, and advances the practical value of a growing body of scholarly and real-world research, on learning science, instructional approaches, and educational technology. The MIT Jameel World Education Lab threads these three themes throughout our collaborations. We learn at every step of the way and share our insights with the world.

“Community Jameel and MIT created the Jameel World Education Lab in 2017 as a connection point, portal, and lab for co-creating new ideas. From the start, we’ve built active collaborations with institutions and individuals who are really trying to change education for the better. We scout the ecosystem, find great ideas and put them in front of all our members. The real value comes when we work together to figure out what is effective in each context and why. We see education, along with the ideas and knowledge it unleashes, as engines for human flourishing. If the Jameel World Education Lab can power that engine, we will have changed the world for the better.

– Anjali Sastry, MIT Jameel World Education Lab Faculty Director and Associate Dean for Open Learning at MIT
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Partnering to Transform Education

Higher Education

Higher education institutions in every setting share the same aim: to educate tomorrow’s workforce and to generate the ideas that society most needs. Many aspire to education and research that meets global standards. At the same time, communities everywhere are seeking opportunities that higher education can provide. Three questions drive our work: How to improve the quality and relevance of learning, the ability of a campus to generate impactful new ideas, and to serve the wider community in new ways?

The MIT Jameel World Education Lab is working to answer these questions. Higher education institutions can learn and benefit from our efforts in several ways:

  1. We invite you to tap into ideas and resources we gather, contextualize, develop, research and study. Explore our archive of past work and resources to learn more about our innovative projects designed to help tackle the hard problems in education around the world.
  2. Become a member and benefit from our annual cycle of engagements that are tailored to the distinctive needs and interests of our membership community. Take advantage of on-campus and online events, exclusive access to our varied–and growing–content library, and more. You’ll learn how we design innovations for local applicability and value, as well as the potential for global impact at scale.
  3. Consider a co-designed collaboration to generate and test new solutions to a pressing challenge facing your institution. With selected members, we draw on our wide-ranging experience to pinpoint opportunities with the maximum potential to change lives in the setting. Together, we can bring MIT’s strengths to bear to create educational innovations to impact learners near and far. Learn more about what the MIT Jameel World Education Lab has accomplished already with our previous partners.

MIT

None of our work would be possible without our access to a rich history of MIT-led innovations and our ongoing partnership with faculty drawn from all parts of the Institute. To embed and extend ideas deriving from MIT experience, every year dozens of the Institute’s professors, graduate students, research staff, and program leaders work with the Jameel World Education Lab to share knowledge and ideate together.

Our programs, workshops, and conferences feature MIT ideas; our projects, outreach, and conversations are powered by MIT experts.

Thanks to a founding gift from Community Jameel, every year we support an inspiring slate of MIT research studies designed to push the frontiers of educational innovation in Pre-K–12 schools, in universities and colleges, and in companies, nonprofits, and communities looking to advance their academic performance.

We invite all of MIT to connect with us. Join us in reaching educational innovators across the globe in ways that reveal new insights about the art and science of teaching, research, and impact.

Schools, Community Organizations, Nonprofits, and Companies

We collaborate with nonprofits that bring MIT-inspired training for emerging entrepreneurs in growing and underserved settings, with companies looking to provide on-ramps for talent to join their industry, and with organizations that support schools in modernizing curriculums and equipping students for the future.

Our Team

Meet the MIT Jameel World Education Lab team:

Anjali Sastry

Faculty Director, J-WEL
Associate Dean, MIT Open Learning
Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

sastry@mit.edu

Admir Masic

Faculty Director, ReACT

masic@mit.edu

Vijay Kumar

Senior Advisor to Vice President for Open Learning

vkumar@mit.edu

Kathleen Burke

Postdoctoral Associate, Global Engagement

mkfb38@mit.edu

Kirky DeLong

Associate Director, Special Projects

kirky@mit.edu

Tamfiri Dennis-Masi

Senior Administrative Assistant

tamfiri@mit.edu

Camila Massa

Program Coordinator, MIT Emerging Talent

cmassa@mit.edu

Megan Mitchell

Acting Director, J-WEL

Associate Director, Pathways for Talent

meganmit@mit.edu

Maria Segala

Data, Reporting, and Grants Administrator

msegala@mit.edu

Amy Taber

Coordinator for Programs

ataber@mit.edu

Carolyn Tiernan

Manager, Communications and Content

ctiernan@mit.edu

Claudia Urrea

Senior Associate Director, pK-12

calla@mit.edu

Gus Zahariadis

Events Coordinator

gusz@mit.edu

Three crucial questions guide our work:

Campus as Catalyst
How can we make the most of the spaces–physical, virtual, societal–that can connect educational institutions to their community, industry, and society?
Pathways for Talent
How can educational institutions help people of all ages find the pathway to learning and opportunity that works for them?
Architecting Learning
How can new insights from research and practice improve the design of learning experiences?