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Duke effort to reform undergrad curriculum dies

InsideHigherEd, here.

Duke University was trying to do something different with a proposed new undergraduate curriculum, emphasizing less what students should study than how. But the plan was perhaps a little too different, and it’s been tabled until the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences faculty can reach a greater degree of consensus. …

4 Comments

  1. dog 04/26/2017

    GenEd of course is in bad need of reform, but I don’t think any institution is actually willing to commit to this because it wall cause temporary re-adjustments.

    GenEd remains the higher ed legacy of post WW II and it doesn’t really even matter if most agree that is not very useful – it will persist and we will keep wasting faculty time (and nttf time) teaching largely useless courses.

    • NTTF 04/27/2017

      dog, are you insinuating that nttf are not faculty? Your comment about “wasting faculty time (and nttf time)” with “nttf” in parentheses sends a message. Why not just faculty?

      Also, what are the long-term costs of not committing to change and creating short-term, temporary adjustments?

      • dog 04/28/2017

        dog’s don’t insinuate – we don’t even know what that means.

        How about – waste teaching time (I don’t care who teaches these useless courses)

        How do I know what the long term costs of anything are; dogs know nothing about the long term, the only thing we care about is to where to dig next …

  2. Captain Nemo 04/26/2017

    I will venture some heresy here and risk being burned at the stake.

    The European “Matura”, “baccalauréat”, the “Abitur”, the “A-Level” have all offered the equivalent of what we consider to be gen ed in the first years of university.

    Alas, American secondary schools rarely provide such a program and such an exam.

    I do realize many will consider the process and the exams to be stultifying, but if done well they do allow universities to offer more coherent programs for their students.

    I am not optimistic that such a program will resonate well with many in the educations establishment but as someone who has seen the results of the various systems, I do believe that this solution has much to recommend it.

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