Most students enter Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) poorly prepared to face the challenges and seize the opportunities of an American-style education grounded in the liberal arts owing to their inadequate preparation in grade school. NU-Q's mission is to produce graduates who will be leaders and innovators in the media industry and…

Higher education institutions today are increasingly considered to be "means," serving as suppliers for employers, not "ends" that address "wicked" problems. This disregards their role in the generational succession of civil societies. Massive open online courses can strengthen higher education institutions by working…

This article is critical of the implementation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) by institutions seeking the deep student learning often found in general education learning outcomes. Customized student interaction with an expert in the field is rendered impossible by the scale of mooc enrollment. Concerns are also raised about the economic…

General education is at the forefront of the challenges facing faculty and administrators as they develop initiatives to address the nationwide trend focused on college completion programs. Attempts to trim core requirements and shift courses to online environments could be one answer for providing greater course access, for improving enrollments,…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs ) are much less in the news today--but that does not mean that they are no longer important. Rather, their importance now derives from what they demonstrated about the fractured nature of college curricula. Almost all MOOCs were one-offs--a single instructor/performer and a well-bounded subject. MOOCs almost…

With the hope of inspiring readers to reimagine the centrality of general education in constituting young adult capacities to create and sustain collective self-governance, this essay describes two courses and one activity built around public problems. General education viewed as a human right as well as a shared responsibility can thus serve as a…

The component of the baccalaureate degree referred to as general education is at risk. General education is losing traction in the curriculum, as calls for graduate students on a faster time schedule and a desire to produce readily employable graduates head the list of higher education objectives. Little attention is paid to how students come to…

The assessment of general education is often approached through broad surveys or standardized instruments that fail to capture the learning goals most faculty members desire for this portion of the curriculum. The challenge in remedying this situation lies, first, in defining general education in meaningful ways that can be both articulated and…

We in higher education have allowed the balance of the private and public purposes of liberal education to become skewed in our angst over fully embracing a central role in restoring prosperity and preparing our increasingly diverse population for the evolving responsibility of mending our fraying democracy. As we consider how best to reshape…

An analysis of interviews, focus-group discussions, assessment instruments, and assignment prompts revealed that within general education, faculty assessed critical thinking as faceted using methods and criteria that varied epistemically across disciplines. Faculty approaches were misaligned with discipline-general institutional approaches.…

Planning is possibly the most important step of the assessment process. This article presents a four-tiered approach to designing and implementing a general education institutional assessment plan. Categorizing the measures you use to assess established learning outcomes helps you prioritize your general education assessment initiatives and keep…

Traditional approaches to civic engagement have been marginalized and have had little impact on the core curriculum. "Critical civic literacy" is an alternative curricular approach to civic engagement that explicitly moves departments, disciplines, and degree programs to examine issues of social responsibility and social justice from the…

The University of California-Merced's Core 1 has potential to foster genuine interdisciplinary thinking by asking students to conceptualize knowledge across fields of inquiry. Core 1 introduces students to the range of scholarly inquiry at the university all in the span of one semester-long, writing-intensive, integrated curriculum that…

At a time when schools are focusing heavily on high tech and engineering, general education is more important than ever. Wilson's book furnishes good ideas on how to bring about a curricular fusion between human studies and the sciences.

Human social evolution depends in part on using language persuasively to secure cooperation. Rhetoric emerged in the West over two thousand years ago as a deliberate cultural construction. Though often misunderstood today, rhetoric is fundamental in general education programs that teach students how knowledge is forged in agreement and applied.…