The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University recently held an exercise to reimagine the undergraduate experience of the future. The goal was to pose provocative ideas about learning through questions like “what if your transcript displayed not the courses you have taken, but the skills and ideas you have put to work in the world?” Four key principles of the re-imagining were:
- The “open loop” university: Embracing lifelong learning, this concept reimagines the college experience as a series of “loops” over the course of a lifetime. No longer called “alumni,” returning students would loop back into Stanford for a mid-career refresh, while younger students might take a loop outside of Stanford to test what they are learning in an external environment.
- Paced education: In this model, the “class year” is replaced by adaptive learning. Students progress not through the freshman through senior years, but through personalized learning phases of varying lengths.
- The “axis flip”: This concept would organize the curriculum around skill competencies that could be used in many contexts over the course of a lifetime, rather than around traditional academic disciplines.
- Purpose learning: Under this model, students would declare a “mission” and couple their academic work with the deeper purpose fueling it.
Further information about the ideas can be found at 2025.stanford.edu.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/may/dschool-undergrad-reimagined-050514.html