MIT Digital Learning Lab’s high school interns gain professional experience working on the backend of open online MITx courses. The program emerged after Mary Ellen Wiltrout, PhD '09, digital learning scientist at MIT Open Learning, connected with the executive director and founder of Empowr, a nonprofit that serves low-income communities by creating a school-to-career pipeline through software development skills.

Katherine Ouellette | MIT Open Learning

August 26, 2024

Switching programming languages is not as simple as switching word processors. Yet high schooler Thomas Esayas quickly adapted from Swift to Python during his 2023 internship with the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. One year later, Esayas returns to the Institute for a second internship and as a new undergraduate student.

“I felt thoroughly challenged and learned a lot of new skills,” says Esayas.

Through this remote opportunity, interns gain real-world coding experience and practice professional skills by collaborating on MIT’s open online courses. The four interns from Digital Learning Lab’s 2023 and 2024 cohorts also participate in Empowr, a four-year program for low-income high school students that teaches in-demand software development skills and helps them secure paid internships.

The Digital Learning Lab program emerged after Mary Ellen Wiltrout PhD ’09, digital learning scientist at MIT Open Learning, connected with Adrian Devezin, executive director and founder of Empowr, at a conference about making education more accessible and equitable.

“It was affirming to have someone else see what Empowr is trying to do,” says Devezin about the organization’s goal to strengthen the school-to-career pipeline. “Being able to collaborate was beautiful for me, and more importantly, to the students.”

Building technical skills and self-confidence

The Digital Learning Lab internship empowers students to build confidence in their technical abilities, career skills, and the college application process. Interns assist the lab’s digital learning scientists with their work developing and maintaining online MITx courses at Open Learning across multiple academic areas.

“I found myself always busy with something interesting to work on,” says Esayas.

The interactive open education resources that Esayas produced last summer are now being used in live courses. He also helped find and fix bugs on the platform that hosts the MITx courses.

The internship’s flexible design allows projects to be adapted based on the student’s personal progress and interests.

“The students became co-creators of their educational experiences,” says Wiltrout, noting this is beneficial from a pedagogical standpoint.

Devezin adds, “I definitely saw a big improvement in their problem-solving abilities. Having to switch their mindset to a new language, work in new frameworks, and work on teams solving real problems enhanced their ability to adapt to new situations.”

The students’ also strengthened their professional repertoire in areas such as collaboration, communication, and project management. The 2023 cohort, Devezin says, developed the initiative to help other students and take on leadership roles.

Now that Esayas has completed his 2024 internship, he says, “I’m glad that I got to collaborate with more people and work on more projects. Overall, I’m very happy I was able to return.”

Learning from both sides

Learning occurred for both students and educators alike. Wiltrout says that the Digital Learning Lab values the opportunity to see the interns’ growth day-to-day and week-to-week, since digital learning scientists rarely follow the trajectory of individual learners who are using the course materials they create. Having instant feedback informs how they can adjust their teaching approaches for various problems.

The positive impact of the Digital Learning Lab internship’s hands-on learning experiences has made Devezin rethink the way he teaches class moving forward, and “the problems I want them to be solving,” he says.

Now, Devezin tries to emulate the real-world experience of working on a project for his Empowr students. Instead of assigning coding exercises where he provides the exact methods to solve the problems, he started asking students to determine the correct approach on their own.

The fact that Wiltrout and Devezin are open to adapting their teaching methods based on student feedback is indicative of a key factor to the internship’s success — active participation in students’ growth. It was mutually beneficial for the students and the educators to have determined stakeholders at both Digital Learning Lab and Empowr.

“A lot of dedicated educators understand that there’s a lot of inequities in education, and we need to come together to solve them,” Devezin says.

The Digital Learning Lab internship shows how open source learning materials can make educational and professional opportunities more accessible. The 2024 cohort has been able to increase their annual household income by an average of 75%, a recent Empowr report revealed. Wiltrout says that the two new Empowr students seem more confident with coding and showed enthusiasm and dedication to their tasks as they also consider colleges.

Wiltrout and Devezin presented their takeaways from the internship’s first year at the 2024 Open edX conference.

“I think it’s important to try making sure that more people are aware of tools and resources that are out there,” Wiltrout says. “Then giving people opportunities where they may not have otherwise had that chance.”

Now, Devezin is thinking about how Empowr students can come full circle with their relationship to open educational materials. He’s asking, “How can I help my students contribute to the open source world to give back to others?”