About the Course

Success and happiness are what most of us chase for most of our lifetimes. Interestingly, however, little is taught in schools about how to achieve success beyond the academic measures.

Increasingly what is needed to succeed in one’s life and career goes beyond the academic achievements. For example, beyond the entry threshold of the required skills and IQs for a given job, emotional intelligence is found to be responsible for 80% of the success of individuals.

Employers are seeking individuals who are self aware and able to manage themselves and their relationships with others. This is seldom taught at schools and individuals are not even aware of thisfact. This course offers an opportunity to work in a structured manner to define, discover and achieve success in a fun way working together with other students.

This course is offered as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to enable as many people as possible to cultivate traits, skills and habits that will lead them to achieving success and happiness. The course is a simple start of a lifelong journey of self improvement and development. The course is designed and delivered collaboratively by Dr Mushtak Al-Atabi from Taylor’s University and Dr Jennifer DeBoer from MIT.

Course Structure

1. What is Success?

   Success is often defined achieving one’s goals. Pursuing meaningful goals results in a happy journey towards success. In this lecture we will, together, define success and how it links to happiness. We will try to define success beyond the normal academic and financial metrics.

2. Thinking, language and success
   Lau Tzu said, “Watch your thoughts they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”  This lecture will explore practical techniques based on brain research that will enable you to start a positive thought patterns through the selection of language resulting in a successful character.

3. Gratitude and brain rewiring
   The human brain is wired to respond to negative stimuli. While this is necessary for survival in a dangerous environment, the other side of the coin is that we often do not notice the positive things going in our lives. This can lead to many missed opportunities. The brain rewiring is a daily exercise that you do by reporting 5 things that you are grateful for online. Brain rewiring is fun, especially when dome online with other people.

4. Emotional intelligence and success
   Although IQ is important for success, research has shown that emotional intelligence is even more important for success and happiness. Emotional intelligence is in four domains, self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management. This section of the course will introduce the language that can be used to explore one’s self, leading to self awareness. This awareness is essential for the successful implementation of the self management techniques. We will also discuss how to achieve social awareness and use to that to successfully manage relationships.
   You will develop the language to daily describe your mental, spiritual, physical and relational state. This will be done online leading to more awareness and management ofboth self and relationships with others.

5. Abundance and Appreciative Enquiry
   This is an extension of the gratitude lecture. In this section will lay the scientific reasons for optimism and introduces the technique of Appreciative Enquiry that you can use to build on what is going on positively in your life to achieve your dreams by doing more of what is working well.

6. Communication for success
   To successfully communicate, we introduce herewith the SUCCESS model. Described by Chip and Dan Heath in their book “Made to Stick,” the model advises to make communication Simple, Unexpected, Credible, Concrete, Emotional, told with a Story. We added Simulation to the model to encourage the communicator to give something to the audience to play with.

7. Thinking techniques
   This section will produce different techniques to use our brains effectively to produce amazing ideas. Techniques such as brain networking and brainstorming will be introduced and practiced. Other ideation techniques such as random entry and trimming will be introduced as well.

8. Personal mission and goal setting
   We started by saying that success is about achieving goals. Here you will learn ho to set SMART goals for yourself. You will also work on crafting your own personal mission statement.

9. Finale

Dr Jennifer DeBoer

Jennifer DeBoer joined the MIT Teaching & Learning Laboratory as a postdoctoral associate for education research in May 2012.

She completed her doctoral work at Vanderbilt University in international education policy studies, where her dissertation, "The Role of Engineering Skills in Development," looked at the trajectory of engineering student formation and the ways in which engineering attainment and achievement are affected by school factors, parental and peer influences, infrastructure and physical resources, and the context in which educational tools are accessed. She received a National Science Foundation/American Educational Research Association dissertation award for one of her dissertation papers.

Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked with the Hole-in-the-Wall project, conducted independent research on engineering education in Tunisia, and interned in international education organizations in Washington DC. She completed her bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering and foreign languages and literatures at MIT in 2005.

Her research interests include the use of technology in education in low-income contexts and the structure of engineering training for local capacity building. She employs both quantitative and qualitative methods in her work.

She is involved extensively in international engineering education organizations. She served as the president and is the current Global Student Forum international chair for the Student Platform for Engineering Education Development (SPEED), which works to empower students around the globe to make improvements in engineering education systems themselves. She is currently on the executive committee of the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES) and the International Studies SIG in the American Education Research Association.

​Professor Dr Mushtak Al-Atabi

This module will be led by Professor Dr Mushtak Al-Atabi. Prof Al-Atabi is a Mechanical Engineer by training and currently is the Dean of the School of Engineering at Taylor’s University in Malaysia. He earned his PhD from the University of Sheffield in the UK and he is a Chartered Engineer and is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the UK. Prof Al-Atabi is a frequent speaker at international conferences and he delivered training and consultancy to corporates ranging from banks to energy companies.