Funder: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Due Dates (Anticipated): October 2027 (Proposal deadline)
Funding Amounts: Planning grants: $10,000–$30,000; full proposals: $30,000–$150,000 (direct costs; one-year projects)
Summary: Supports transferable educational innovations in SHASS that address student challenges and improve pedagogy and curricula across MIT’s school.
Key Information: Project leads must hold a full-time SHASS faculty, academic instructional, or academic research appointment with more than one year of service.
Description
The Education Impact Fund, part of the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), supports transformative educational experiences and practices in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). It funds projects addressing clearly defined challenges students face during their MIT education and beyond. Work within individual subjects must develop ideas transferable across curricula and programs. Both new projects and extensions of existing initiatives are welcome.
The fund emphasizes evidence-based needs, innovative solutions, systemic impact, and evaluable outcomes. It especially welcomes creative responses to declining student collaboration and peer engagement, as well as projects meaningfully engaging with MIT’s report on AI use in teaching, learning, and research training. Possible areas include multidisciplinary learning, connections between SHASS and STEM, constructive discussion of controversial issues, student well-being, and innovative teaching formats.
