Here’s a B.A. and B.S. program that requires students to exercise initiative, personal discipline and intellectual self-sufficiency. It draws upon faculty experiments in classic higher education of the Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Major in Human Behavior at Peabody College in the early 1970s. In turn, that Human Behavior program drew inspiration from what students could elect to do at Oxford University and in contemporanious experimental adaptations of that election at Antioch and Reed colleges.
The School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Texas – Dallas offers interdisciplinary degree programs that afford students the opportunity to design their own individualized degree plans. This IS offer follows similar logic of the Great Books learning in the early days of the University of Chicago and P.J. Denning’s suggestion of the Great Principles of Computing.
It provides an interdisciplinary environment to support students to understand and integrate the liberal arts and sciences.
To support students, the school provides a unique structure:
1. An Internship Program that arranges professional work experience in diverse career settings.
2. The educational environment of General Studies to combine course work in unconventional or innovative combinations.
The Peabody HB program and its relatives provided platforms for observing students making choices to learn various content with a range of procedures. I’ve used these observations plus others to describe the New Era School Initiative (NESI) and its infrastructure a Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm (aLEAP).
Kudos, UT – Dallas faculty for encouraging undergraduates to learn out-of-the-box by relying on core ingredients of scholarship: initiative, personal discipline, and self-sufficiency. I wonder how you’re using Tablet and other mobile PCs with students and what data you have to describe their effect on learning efficiency?
Denning, P.J. Great Principles of Computing.
aLEAP, NESI, and other related posts under my blog labels at the bottom of this post.
Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Major in Human Behavior, Peabody College, early 1970s.
University of Texas – Dallas School of Interdisciplinary Studies (B.A. and B.S.)