Description
Book SynopsisImagining the universities of the future. How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation todayMOOCs especiallyfocus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like. What if the university were designed around a curriculum of seven broad cognitive skills or as a series of global gap year experiences? What if, as a condition of matriculation, students had to major in three disparate subjects? What if the university plac
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: On Innovation in Higher Education
Part I. Organization
Chapter 1. Platform University
Chapter 2. Microcollege
Chapter 3. The Humanities Think Tank
Interlude. The University of Beauty
Part II. Apprenticeship
Chapter 4. Nomad University
Chapter 5. The Liberal Arts College
Interlude. Superager University
Part III. Technology
Chapter 6. Interface University
Chapter 7. The University of the Body
Interlude. Technology University
Part IV. Attributes
Chapter 8. The Institute for Advanced Play
Chapter 9. Polymath University
Chapter 10. Future University
Conclusion: Existential Crisis and Existential Possibilities
Notes
Bibliography
Index
