Disrupting General Education

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) is holding another “institute” next summer on “General Education and Assessment.”  All the usual caveats associated with anything in higher education that uses the word “assessment” apply, but it’s almost certainly the sort of thing that some folks at some institutions will think is a great way to spend $8,000 or so.  Don’t say we were not warned!

That said, the following document was attached to the web page describing the program, apparently a handout from last year’s institute.  It includes some crisply written scenarios for provoking discussion about gen ed.  The ideas mentioned capture the broad diversity of American higher  education institutions well.  They might be too broad to be optimally useful for a given institution, but could provide a model for cooking up some that would be.

Author: Dan Ryan

I've been an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com, a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. My current mission is to figure out how to reorganize higher education and exploit technology so that we can teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily. View all posts by Dan Ryan