Morning all. We here at HESA Towers are launching a new publication series today, and we couldn’t be prouder. Written by my colleague Jonathan McQuarrie, it’s called Monitoring Trends in Academic Programming, it’s fabulous, and it’s available here.
The genesis of this project lies in the somewhat random calls we get from institutions every once in awhile to suggest ways of evaluating existing academic programs or to assist in designing new ones. It’s a tricky job to do, because some of what clients want is some mix of labour market analysis, student demand analysis and competitor analysis (i.e. how unique is this program, really?). The first two are doable in a relatively formulaic fashion – though to be honest there is as much art as science in the student demand because cannibalization rates from existing programs are nearly impossible to predict – but that third piece looking at how other institutions are arranging their academic offerings seemed to us to be an understudied and actually quite fascinating area. And since we were doing a lot of horizon-scanning on this for clients anyway, we decided to formalize it and turn at least part of it into a free publication for the Canadian post-secondary community. We’re not quite sure yet if it will be three or four times a year, but in any event, this will be a regular publication.
The idea is that each issue will take one broad field of study (e.g. business, science) and take a look at recent trends in the development of new programs, or a comparative look at how different institutions organize similar types of programs. Given the level of diversity of academic programming in Canada – let alone internationally – it seemed to us peculiar that this was not being monitored on a systematic basis. I guess the assumption is that people in a given field of study know what’s going on at other institutions in the same field of study and so no broader look is needed. But while that may be true at the level of research activity, it doesn’t actually seem to be true when it comes to undergraduate curricula. Hence the need for a publication like this one.
For the inaugural issue, Jonathan has spent part of the last few months scanning the country’s academic calendars for the most innovative examples of programming in Faculties of Arts (i.e. social sciences and humanities), which for various reasons seem to the ones institutions are most commonly interested in re-examining these days. In the end, they landed on three particular areas which seem to us to be generating increased levels of student interest in the last few years: multidisciplinary studies, mixing Indigenous and Community Learning, and Service Learning. We hope you find their work of interest.
Our core audience for this product is those of you in the business of creating or approving academic programs, and our hope is that it will spark some new ideas for how to design and deliver curriculum. We’ll be switching areas of programming with each issues (and doing our best to try to incorporate college-level programs as well, though we may leave some of that for a separate issue), and over the space of two years, we’ll try to hit all the major fields of study.
We’d really appreciate any feedback you have, both on this issue and on topics/ideas for future issues. And of course, if our Program Development Review service seems like something that might benefit your institution, please drop us a line at info@higheredstrategy.com. In the meantime: happy reading!
Tweet this post
Can you get a DOI for it?
The design is much better than the design for the State of Postsecondary Education in Canada 2019.
While as a “consumer” of university programming (as the parent of a current university student and a soon to be university student) our needs for evaluating and making programming decisions differ from those of the actual institutions themselves, we did take an in depth analysis approach to evaluating potential programs with our student when they were narrowing down their choice of schools. One the things I discovered as we started going through the process was that despite what appears to be a widely held belief that undergraduate programs are all the same regardless of school, there can actually be a fair bit of variability in course requirements and degree structure from one school to the next. We started our process with considering admissions requirements, geographic location, and campus size and “feel” etc. but then to further narrow the list we plotted out the specific program and degree requirements at each of schools our student was considering and compared them side by side. While the core programming for the major our student was targeting was relatively standard across all the schools being considered, the degree structure varied a fair bit. Some of the variability concerned:
– whether it was direct admit to major starting in the first year or if there was a general first year and then the major was declared
– if there was a general first year what were the requirements to declare the major
– were there separate general and honours degrees what were the differences and requirements
– were there specialized streams available and what were they
– whether or not there were breadth requirements and if so what were they
– the number and options for program electives
– the number of free electives
– what options for experiential learning/co-op/internship/study abroad existed and what were the requirements to be able to participate
We also looked at how much funding the schools attracted in the area of interest and what their specific areas of specialization were.
The answer to those questions eliminated a few initial schools from consideration and allowed our student to finalize their list of target schools. We are now starting to go through the same process with our second child.
Would your plan be ruined entirely if your student changed majors?