![]() ![]() Measuring whether the curriculum really will lead to greater development of skills such as critical thinking could be tough, said Andrew Kelly, director for the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. “Basically, you have a bullshit detector Minerva is building for you,” Bonabeau said.Īfter the first year, students will select traditional majors - what Minerva calls “concentrations” - in fields such as economics, philosophy and computer science. Bonabeau will simultaneously train students in various foundational skills, such as negotiation and the ability to quickly summon counterexamples or check the plausibility of assumptions. The class will include statistics, mathematics and business - including topics such as financial statements. In a meeting last month, Kosslyn and Eric Bonabeau, dean of computational sciences, sat in front of a white board covered with colored Post-it notes to try to hone the formal analysis class that all freshmen will take. Minerva students will spend their first year taking four classes designed to teach communication, critical analysis, creative thinking and collaboration. Some of Minerva’s ideas are variations on policies that have largely fallen out of favor elsewhere, such as putting all first-year students through the same core classes instead of allowing electives. Minerva’s chairman, former Snapfish president Ben Nelson, believes the systematic development of skills such as critical thinking will do more to create leaders and innovators than the haphazard approach he believes characterizes traditional universities. The university has been developing its curriculum since hiring Kosslyn in March last year. Some financial assistance will be available for students, according to the school, but the university will not participate in the federal financial aid program. universities, the group Minerva already compares itself to. That compares to a price tag upwards of $50,000 a year at many other top U.S. Final grades for those first-year classes will not come until just before graduation, so the grades will reflect progress in those skills over the years.įor serving as guinea pigs, the first class of students will be rewarded with free tuition for all four years, although they will have to pay $19,000 annually for room and board. Before each class, students must complete assignments that will require vigorous participation during the online session, such as engaging in a debate, presenting their own work, or critiquing that of others, he said.Ĭourses will be recorded, in part so faculty can track and measure growth in rhetoric and other skills. “We are entirely focused on active learning,” said Kosslyn. “Technology can be used in a much more effective way in higher education than has previously been the case,” said Stephen Kosslyn, Minerva’s founding dean and the former dean of social sciences at Harvard.Įven though all classes will be held online, first-year students must live in a residence hall in San Francisco and take classes together in real time, deviating from the “anywhere, anytime” model prevalent in online education. Minerva says what it plans to do is different. ![]() Harvard, MIT and other leading universities offer their own courses online gratis in an initiative called EdX. ![]() Others with VC backing include Coursera, Udacity and 2U, which have raised $85 million, $20 million and $101 million, respectively. Minerva has raised $25 million from Benchmark, a leading venture-capital firm. ![]() The field nevertheless remains one of the hottest for startups. Last month, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education released a study showing that only about 4 percent of those who register for an online course at Penn complete it. In California, a high-profile program run by San Jose State University and startup Udacity was suspended after officials found that failure rates for online students were much higher than for traditional learners. The school launches just as studies are questioning the efficacy of Web teaching. The school is an alliance between Minerva Project, a venture-backed for-profit company, and Keck Graduate Institute, one of California’s Claremont colleges. Minerva Schools of KGI, a radically experimental university in San Francisco, is sifting through applications for its first class, starting this fall. SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Offering a twist on the learn-from-anywhere convenience of Internet classes, a new university is asking freshmen to take a large leap of faith. ![]()
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