Compass: An Experiment in Collaboration

Compass: An Experiment in Collaboration

For our November Speaker Series, TLL invited professors Lily Tsai, Adam Albright, and Emily Richmond Pollock, and course coordinator Leela Fredlund to speak about the development, structure, and experience of teaching 21.01, Compass Class: Moral and Social Questions About the Human Condition, a.k.a. Love, Death, and Taxes, a team-taught, interdisciplinary undergraduate subject.

Details of the course are presented in the July 16, 2025, MIT News article: What do we owe each other? A new class teaches MIT students how to navigate a fast-changing world with a moral compass. Below are some insights the Compass team has gained from designing and piloting the course so far, along with additional revelations from the audience discussion.

In her opening remarks, Professor Tsai introduced her motivation and goals for the course. Upon stepping down as chair of the Faculty in 2023, she wanted to address some of the needs she had heard from students and faculty. She asked colleagues from every SHASS department to join an initial conversation with the prompt:

What should every MIT student know by the end of their time at MIT?

From this conversation came the idea that there is a growing need among science and engineering faculty and students for liberal arts education that can use a multidisciplinary set of lenses to address particular issues and answer big questions like:

• What do we value (and why)?
• What do we know (and how do we know it)?
• What do we owe each other (and what should we do about it)?

In order to create 21.01 Compass Course: Moral and Social Questions about the Human Condition, faculty from virtually every unit within SHASS and more than 20 departments, including STEMs, collaborated across disciplines. This interdisciplinary offering aims to provide students with the tools and frameworks from the humanities, arts, and social sciences to navigate “gray” real-world situations, which are often fuzzy, fluid, contextual, and ambiguous, rather than black and white.

Key Takeaways from Audience Discussion

Design

In addition to leveraging the expertise of a wide range of MIT faculty, Compass embraced a student-centered design approach.

• The course gave students roles as co-designers, with over 30 students representing 22 majors providing input.
• Compass also created a student advisory board and used undergraduate TAs (preferred over graduate TAs for understanding the MIT experience)
• The course implemented weekly exit tickets to enable students to suggest mid-stream course corrections. It also utilized pre- and post-semester surveys.
• Reading quizzes were added at the request of students to hold themselves accountable for prep work.

Format

A key goal was to model conversation, active listening, and deliberation across differences, focusing on understanding rather than winning debates. It was important that students and faculty had dedicated time in the classroom to engage with the course material, discuss, debate, and learn from one another.

• Compass is taught in a blended-learning (flipped classroom) format: lectures from faculty across disciplines are recorded and assigned as homework, while class time is dedicated to discussion and hands-on activities.
• Each week is framed as a question, with a focus on the process of breaking it down–why are we asking it, what gave rise to it? How might different disciplinary and personal perspectives cause different people to approach this question differently?
• Assignments and Assessments: Since Compass is a CI-H class (Communication-Intensive in the Humanities), it requires a prescribed amount of writing.
  • About half of the grade is based on engagement and participation.
  • Students create a grading contract for self-assessment, specifying their personal or intellectual goals, often in the domain of participation and preparation.
  • Essay assignments focus on synthesizing and applying information over multiple weeks.
  • The assignments are not considered “AI proof,” but the scaffolding, the focus on personal perspectives/experiences, and the emphasis on in-class communication work against over-reliance on generative AI.

Teaching

So far, over its two pilot semesters, Compass has had 8 teaching faculty, 12 lesson designers, and 33 additional faculty contributors who’ve provided input through meetings, one-on-one discussions, or their podcast series.

• This collaborative teaching experience was a key factor in making teaching this class so rewarding for the instructors.
• After teaching the Compass course, instructors were motivated to adopt new, evidence-based, active learning strategies, e.g., role-playing, think-pair-share, and small-group work, in their other subjects, including their graduate seminars.
• Collaborating with others with different expertise and teaching assumptions allowed instructors to more readily observe and implement new teaching approaches than when teaching in a single-instructor, single-discipline context.
• The class design means that each faculty member is an expert only occasionally; teaching outside that expertise fosters closer collaboration with students and models reasoning under uncertainty, which became a valuable part of the experience.

The instructors concluded with an invitation to anyone interested in contributing to the course as a co-designer, providing input, joining the teaching team, or taking a version of the class to reach out to them at compass-class@mit.edu. They hope that Compass can serve as a model for future multidisciplinary subjects at the Institute.