What if we could start all over again and design higher education from scratch? What would a university look like if there were no legacies from medieval knowledge traditions, Enlightenment epistemologies or taxonomies, or Industrial Age requirements, regulations, departments, majors, minors, distribution requirements, professional schools, or standardized assessment metrics, or contemporary problems ranging from defunding of public education to the burgeoning and ever increasing endowments of private universities? What kinds and forms of institutions of learning might we come up with? Or maybe we don’t need any institutions at all? And how could our imagined universities help to inform our activism about transforming the actual institutions we inhabit now?
Below the photo (of a student-generated two-day “FutureClass” at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona), you’ll find a template and a series of open-ended questions to get us started on imagining the university from scratch. #FutureEd Check the Google Doc for updates.
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Starting in January 2014, designing a university from scratch will be a project undertaken by tens of thousands of participants in a MOOC I’m teaching on “The History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education.” Here are some of the questions we’ll ask to get us started:
DESIGNING HIGHER EDUCATION FROM SCRATCH: An Evolving Template of Open-Ended Questions
Name of our [imagined, fictive, future] university:
Logo, mascot, or motto:
Drawing or napkin sketch of the university:
We specialize in:
Our mission is:
Location:
(Where would the school be located? Would it be in a building, online, take a whole city as its campus, or maybe the whole world?)
Our university is mobile through
Our students are mobile through
Our university is part of a network of
Our students are networked to one another through
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COSTS
Our tuition is
Our tuition is paid by
For students who cannot afford our tuition, we offer
We do/do not accept philanthropic gifts
We use/do not use state funds
We use/do not use corporate funding
We do/do not have trustees
Our (future) alums will have no role/a role in our future by———
STUDENTS
Our ideal students are:
We identify our ideal student by word-of-mouth from
We identify our ideal students by/not by test scores
We identify our ideal students by/not by GPA
We identify our ideal students by/not by an open competition
We identify our ideal students by
We contact our ideal students by
We advertise to our ideal students by
We recruit our key students by
We define diversity as
We ensure that diversity by
Our students are all in the age group of X to Y
Our pre-requisites for admission are:
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KNOWLEDGE
Our specialty is
We have courses in
We do not have courses, we have
Our courses take place in
You do not pass a course in a specific subject, content area, or skill until you
Our curriculum is arranged by :
We have/do not have required courses in:
We have/do not have distribution courses:
We have/do not have majors in:
Our major in X looks like:
We have/do not have minors in:
Our minor in X looks like:
No, we do not organize knowledge by majors and minors, we organize knowledge by:
An example of how we organize knowledge in X is
We offer/do not offer liberal arts or general education that looks like
We are specialist and follow the European and international model of only accepting students into a specialized area
The speciliazed areas we cover are
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LEARNING MATERIALS
We have/do not have textbooks that are
Besides textbooks, we use
Different courses use different kinds of books and other learning materials such as
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RESEARCH
Our students are/are not engaged in original research
The areas of original research are
Our students conduct original research in collaboration with
—————–
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PROGRESS AND PATHWAYS
Classes are/are not graded
Attendance (physical, virtual) is/is not expected/required
You pass a class by
You fail a class by
There is no such thing as passing/failing a course because
We know when you have succeeded at our university, when . . .:
We recognize achievement by this assessment system:
We do not recognize achievement but assume peers will by this system:
We do not recognize achievement but assume our students will recognize it themselves by:
We acknowledge exceptional mastery by
We do not acknowledge one student as more exceptional than another
We have requirements for graduation and they are
We award graduation certificates for
We do not award any graduation credentials because
We ensure civil, creative behavior by students by
We have/do not have a judiciary system run by
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TEACHERS
We chose our teachers by
We do not have any teachers because
We use peer mentoring and peer teaching because
We support peer-to-peer learning by
We use/do not use MOOCs or other online classes instead of classroom teachers
We have/do not have flipped classrooms because
We have all full-time teachers, who have benefits and job security, because
All our teachers are contingent/adjunct faculty because
Some of our teachers are contingent/adjunct faculty because
All of our teachers have tenure if they
None of our teachers have tenure because
All of our teachers have tenure with built in renewal requirements that are
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ADMINISTRATION
All of our administrators are former teachers
All of our administrators are current teachers
We have a team of professional administrators
We do not have administrators because
We do/do not have a professional non-teaching staff who run the physical plant of the university
We do/do not have a professional non-teaching staff who run admissions, recruitment and other functions
We do/do not have a professional non-teaching staff who care for the grounds (if we have grounds)
We do/do not have a professional non-teaching staff who design and manage technology
We do/do not have a professional non-teaching housekeeping staff
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FACILITIES, EVENTS, OPPORTUNITIES
We have/do not have residential living facilities
We have/do not have varsity sports teams
We have/do not have intramural sports
We do/do not have clubs, social events such as
We do/do not have outside lectures, speakers
We do/do not have performances
We have/do not have community engagement programs
We have/do not have undergraduate research experiences
We have/do not have fraternities and sororities
We have/do not have arts facilities
We have/do not have labs
We have/do not have computer and technology maker spaces
We do/do not give out tablets/iPads to all entering students
We do/do not have enterprise educational software
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FUTURE
Our students go on to be
Our students go on to professional schools in
Our students go on to graduate schools in
When students leave our institution, they are
———————–
ACTIVISM: BEYOND MODELS
We are using ideas generated from this exercise to make this real world innovation
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The photographs are of FutureClass, a two-day series of workshops, panels, exercises, and activities put on by five of my students in a tent outside the Museum of Modern Art as part of Mozilla’s Drumbeat Festival. Nov 3-5, 2010 http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/mozilla-drumbeat-festival-learning-freedom-and-web-barcelona-nov-3-5