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Tag: Curriculum

Taking Advantage of Course Duplication

I recently came across an interesting blogpost from a professor in the UK named Thomas Leeper (see here), talking about the way in which professors the world over spend so much time duplicating each others’ work in terms of developing curricula.  Some key excerpts: ” …the creation of new syllabi is something that appears to have been repeated for decades, if not centuries. And yet, it all seems rather laborious in light of the relatively modest variation in the final courses

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May 26, 2016 3 Comments

Innovation to Watch at the University of Sydney

Australian universities seem to do “Big Change” a lot better than universities elsewhere.  A few years ago, the University of Melbourne radically overhauled its entire curriculum in the space of about two years partly to create a more North American-like distinction between undergraduate and professional degrees and partly to reduce degree clutter by winnowing the number of different degrees from over a hundred to just six.  (For a refresher, I wrote about this back here). If you read press reports about

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April 7, 2016 4 Comments

Fuzzy Skills

About a month ago, Universities Canada held a meeting to talk up the Liberal Arts.  I wasn’t there, and can only go by what I saw on twitter and what I can glean from this University Affairs article which you can read here.  But if the conversation was actually anything like what the sub-head suggests it was (we need better stories!), I’m not impressed. At one level, “we need better stories” is always true.  Good communication is always worthwhile.  But if you claim

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April 6, 2016 1 Comment

STEM and STEAM: The “Two Cultures” and Academic Incentives

About a month ago, I wrote about whether institutions would adjust their program mix if it would help improve economic growth.  Nearly everyone that wrote me implicitly assumed that the “right” mix for economic growth implied a switch to a more STEM-heavy system, before going on to say something like “but what about the humanities?”  I found this kind of amusing, because I actually don’t automatically assume that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) degrees are where it’s at in

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June 9, 2015 6 Comments

The End of College? (Part 1)

Over the next couple of days, I want to talk a bit about a new book called The End of College, written by the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey.  It’s an important book not just because it’s been excerpted repeatedly in some major publications, or because the conclusions are correct (in my view: they’re not), but because it has an unerringly precise diagnosis of how higher education came to its present malaise, and the nature of the economic and institutional reasons that

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March 11, 2015 2 Comments

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