Afterword: For the Sake of the World

We have a confession to make: this book is meant to recruit you. Even if Minerva exists for a thousand years, graduates some of the most influential leaders, thinkers, innovators, and transformational figures of the future, and becomes the most desirable university program in the world, we can easily have failed in our mission. As we have mentioned repeatedly in this book, we exist to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world. This mission is simply impossible for us to accomplish alone....

Global Outreach: Communicating a New Vision

Minerva’s outreach efforts must be different from those of other higher education institutions because we are not looking for just any student. Finding the one or two who might exist in any given school, or in any given city for that matter, is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. Yet, Minerva’s outreach efforts have been successful at reaching candidates in over 160 countries, who then take the time to apply for admission. In this chapter, we summarize how Minerva has been able to reach such a selective, yet geographically dispersed audience.

Empirical Analyses and Creative Thinking

Our world is facing unprecedented challenges that will require novel approaches and creative solutions. In our general education course on Empirical Analyses we introduce skills and concepts that cultivate a systematic and creative approach to evidence-based analyses and problem solving. The overarching goal is to instill in students a deep understanding of how evidence is used creatively to generate hypotheses, test hypotheses, draw conclusions, and recognize biases. We lead students to develop creative solutions and designs; we also stress the ability to critically evaluate empirical research. Effective thinkers must think both creatively and critically, generating ideas and options and evaluating them rigorously. Although we draw on examples and questions from the physical, life, and social sciences, the skills and concepts we introduce apply well beyond science to the problems, decisions and challenges of our daily lives.

Why We Need a New Kind of Higher Education

Minerva is a response to problems that beset higher education writ large. We focus in large part on the most significant problem, which centers on the value of higher education. We address this problem by teaching “practical knowledge,” which is knowledge the students can use to achieve their goals. Practical knowledge is rooted in critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication and effective interaction. We also have considered in depth how to teach this material effectively; all of our pedagogy is informed by the science of learning, which has led us to develop new forms of active learning. In addition, we have developed a software platform that supports our unique pedagogical and curricular model. This platform provides tools that not only facilitate teaching but also--and more importantly--enhance student learning. Furthermore, we believe that the future is increasingly international and thus our students learn to use practical knowledge in a global context. To achieve this, no one nationality is a majority—so students learn from each other—and students live and study together in up to seven different cities around the world. Finally, the Minerva talent agency supports our students from the beginning of their tenure through their post-graduate career, helping them succeed for many years to come.

Accreditation: Official Recognition of a New Vision of Higher Education

American accrediting agencies have been under increasing pressure from the government, employers, and other policy makers. These agencies are being asked to hold accredited educational institutions accountable for student learning outcomes, on-time retention and completion, and other key indicators of institutional and student success. At the same time, accreditors are often accused of stifling innovation in education with unnecessarily restrictive policies, bureaucratic and burdensome procedures, and a peer review process that is biased against new ideas and entrants into the sector. We faced these dynamics in seeking approval for Minerva to affiliate with the Keck Graduate Institute and to offer its programs in a delivery modality that had never been seen before. The process required us to build support for innovation while demonstrating the evidence-based foundation for our curriculum and teaching methods and to balance the new with generally accepted and traditional indicators of quality.

Experiential Learning: The City as a Campus and Human Network

At Minerva, we strive to develop global citizens—students who learn to understand and care for (1) themselves as individuals, (2) the collective (be it as a student body or team), (3) the broader society (city or country), and (4) the world. Within these four contexts, we strive to develop the “whole student” across intellect, character, and well-being. In this chapter we explore how Minerva facilitates the formation of global citizens through the student experience and experiential learning, integrating the curriculum through co-curriculars and extra-curriculars in our seven world cities.

Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning

When we initially created and refined the first-year Cornerstone courses at Minerva, we evolved a set of shared processes, conventions, and templates to support the process of developing lesson plans for active learning. After devoting two full years of curriculum design effort exclusively to these four courses, we faced the challenge of scaling our course development process to simultaneously design a much larger number of upper-division courses. In order to consistently and efficiently create extraordinary active learning experiences, we started to develop a software-based lesson plan authoring tool that would encapsulate and codify our previously-validated templates and processes. This tool, Course Builder, grew to also support the management and iterative improvement of our full curriculum. By the end of its first semester in use, the combined functionality of Course Builder and the Active Learning Forum allowed us to move beyond the need for a Learning Management System entirely. In this chapter, we introduce the Course Builder curriculum design system. We take a close look at how this technology allows us to collaboratively design, systematically coordinate, and iteratively improve on courses and lesson plans built specifically for active learning.

Teaching from Lesson Plans

A crucial aspect of the Minerva curriculum is the lesson plan, which is used to structure and guide every class session of the Cornerstone, Major Core and Concentration courses. This chapter describes how professors use these lesson plans and how they form the basis for dynamic, evolving class sessions while maintaining a high-level of structure and consistency over different sections of the same class. The lesson plans specify assigned readings and videos, exercises the students work through before class, quizzes at the beginning and end of class, carefully crafted sets of active learning activities, and more. The core of the lesson plans is the activities, which rely on problem solving, focused analyses in small breakout groups, polls together with discussions, role-playing scenarios, debates, Socratic relays where students take turns discussing a given topic, and many other interactive exercises. In all of this, the professor plays a central role, shaping the discussion, adapting to evolving circumstances, and providing expertise to ensure that students understand the class material. The professor keeps the class focused on the learning outcomes that are specified in the lesson plan and which inform every aspect of it. In every class, students must actively interact with the professor and with each other, which makes every session a dynamic and distinct teaching experience.

Unlearning to Learn

We have learned many lessons in the course of implementing the Minerva curriculum and pedagogy. One of the most striking lessons is how important it is for both faculty and students to be open to unlearning many previous assumptions and habits. For example, we have identified what we call the “illusion of learning”—which occurs when faculty and students believe that the more notes students take during a lecture, the more they have learned. Yet, the evidence is clear: Lectures are not an effective way to learn, and pale in comparison to active learning. Although active learning often takes more time than lectures and requires much more intellectual engagement from both faculty and students, it provides lasting benefits. Similarly, we have discovered that active learning requires a different view of what is an appropriate goal for in-class experiences–not information transmission and memorization but rather the internalization of skills, concepts and ways to use knowledge. In this chapter, we summarize many of the assumptions and habits that both faculty and students need to unlearn in order to learn effectively at Minerva.

Formal Analyses and Critical Thinking

What treatments should be used for prostate cancer? How likely are people to vote Democratic or Republican in the next U.S. presidential election? How should scarce resources be deployed to help feed the world? These are just a few of the questions that various segments of the populace face daily. Yet, most of us are unable to analyse the available data pertaining to these and other questions in a logical or quantitative fashion in order to make informed decisions. These issues shape how and what we teach in Formal Analyses. An engaged citizenry needs tools such as an understanding of how to identify and unravel logical fallacies, how statistics can both clarify and obfuscate issues and how tools such as risk analysis and game theory can aid in decision making. Our Formal Analyses course arms students with techniques such as logical thinking, formal representation of problems, algorithms and simulations, probability and statistics, and tools for effective decision-making to create discerning consumers of information.