Tag: Curriculum

Designing a University from Scratch (II)

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the Minerva model (you might want to refresh your memory by re-reading yesterday’s entry, as detailed in the book Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education, I wanted to get into a bit more detail about whether the Minerva curriculum is a foretaste of things to come, a weird one-off, or an evolutionary dead-end. Short answer: I certainly hope Minerva represents a new trend in curricula, but I see one big

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Designing a University from Scratch (I)

I’ve recently been reading a fascinating book entitled Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education which essentially is an operating manual for the Minerva Schools (if you have never heard of, or have forgotten Minerva, I did a write-up of it back in 2013). What everyone remembers about Minerva is the sizzle – students move across seven cities in four years (San Francisco for a year, followed by one term in each of Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Taipei and London) and all

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Degrees that Matter

One of the huge – and insufficiently studied – differences between North America and European higher education is the way programs are structured, at least as far as Arts and Sciences go. In most of Europe, entering a program in (say) history means you have to learn a set field of knowledge and skills.  By entering into a 90-credit program in a particular field, you have a fair idea of which courses you will be taking over the next three

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Two Approaches to Student Success

I’ve recently been doing a little bit of work recently on student success and I am struck by the fact that there are two very different approaches to student success, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are sitting on.  I’m not sure one is actually better than the other, but they speak to some very different conceptions of where student success happens within an institution. (To be clear, when I say “student success” I mostly mean “degree/program completion”.  I recognize that there

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Populists and Universities, Round Two

There is a lot of talk these days about populists and universities.  There are all kinds of thinkpieces about “universities and Trump”, “universities and Brexit”, etc.  Just the other day, Sir Peter Scott delivered a lecture on “Populism and the Academy” at OISE, saying that over the past twelve months it has sometimes felt like universities were “on the wrong side of history”. Speaking of history, one of the things that I find a bit odd about this whole discussion

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