What if degrees were predominantly project-based?
I’m doing away with exams. I never did have them in my entrepreneurship classes, but for my career skills class I felt they were necessary: we simply cover too wide a range of information on too many topics to not put some sort of conventional measure of retention into the mix. But I’m over that. It is, after all, a career skills class. But depending on what their goals & objectives are, they might not need the same skills or use them in the same way. What they all need, however, is to understand how to take the raw tools we discuss in class and apply them to their own dreams and goals. SO: What if…degrees were predominantly project-based? What if, rather than teaching everyone the same skills and evaluating them the same way, we engaged in intensive identification and ongoing evaluation of passions, gifts, dreams and goals, and devised projects designed to equip and empower students to achieve them? Projects early in the undergraduate experience could be designed to explore options, while advanced projects could be designed to provide real-world experience with the things a student is interested in developing further. This is essentially an apprenticeship model – a model that has produced some of the greatest creative minds in history. What if we embraced it – wholeheartedly – once again?