Way back in 2008 I and several colleagues put together a proposal for a new history course called “The Digital Past” (.pdf) that was designed to do two things — give undergraduate students an introduction to the theory and practice of digital history and to teach them information technology skills within the context of a…
Tag: General Education
Why The Apparatchiks Would Have Loved General Education
Yesterday I was having lunch in our student union when a staff member in our Provost’s office stopped by to say hello and to commiserate about the impending end of summer break. She mentioned that as part of our re-accreditation process we were about to launch another round of soul-searching about our general education curriculum….
The End of Western Civilization as We Know It (cont’d)
This is now the sixth post in my extended reflection on how the free economy poses important challenges for American higher education. Thus far I’ve written a lot about the academic aspects of what free means for those of us in post-secondary education, so today I want to turn to the economic aspects of the…
The End of Western Civilization as We Know It (cont’d)
Yesterday I suggested that we need to move to a competency-based approach to general education while providing the various introductory courses on our campuses for free to our students. What would that look like in reality? If we start thinking about the university (or college) as an aggregator and re-distributor of knowledge and skills (as…