Minerva Blueprint
Minerva's curriculum is designed to balance breath of undertanding with depth of expertise. See this page
As a venture-based Silicon Valley startup, Minerva has developed slowly over the last seven years. As a new form of higher education, progress from concept to enrollment was lightning fast.
In the narrowest sense, Minerva is great new leadership development option for the world's smartest young people. More broadly, it is a reconceptualization of the ends and means of higher education.
The blueprint is detailed in a new book, Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Educationedited by Chief Academic Officer Stephen M. Kosslyn and CEO Ben Nelsonand with a foreword by Senator Bob Kerrey.
At Minerva, now the most selective university in the world, Kosslyn created a focus on active learning, "where every student is expected to be actively involved in every class." Minerva students build "practical knowledge" aiming at global contribution.
The book is part of an active campaign to challenge higher education to adopt this intentional design or devise something better.
"The literature is crystal clear in showing that students learn best when they have to use the material, not simply sit passively and hear it described," observed Kosslyn, the former Harvard dean of Social Sciences.
Kosslyn's graduate training at Stanford focused on the intersection of cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence. He is co-author of Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain
(one of 14 books he's written or co-authored) and is one of the most respected learning scientists in the world.
Problems to be Solved
Kosslyn and Nelson outline four problems that Minerva addresses:
Kerrey's forward suggests that three foundational problems are to blame. First, regional accreditation makes it "almost impossible for high-quality, lower-cost entrants to receive accreditation before their first class graduates."
- Higher education is not fulfilling its promise: students are leaving unprepared for work and life;
- Many college students are unengaged and half don't graduate;
- Global students don't have access to first-rate colleges; and
- College is too expensive.
Second, notes Kerrey, the concept of shared governance is well-intentioned but poorly applied, becoming "a means for academia to ignore the facts at hand." It leads to general education that satisfies the needs of faculty and departments more than students. Kerrey adds that lectures are an easy way to teach but a terrible way to learn.
Third, adds Kerrey, college boards are typically risk-averse and often relegated to fund raising. He suggests that strong boards that support performance improvement are key.
The innovative Minerva design and the book detailing its startup phase address all of these problems. Stated positively, Kosslyn suggests that higher education should equip young people to succeed in life after college, both professionally and personally. That leads to four goals:
- Understanding leadership and working with others: most of the world's problems are so complex they require people to work together, leveraging each other's strengths.
- Understanding innovation: learn when and how to innovate.
- Thinking broadly and adaptively: acquiring broadly useful intellectual tools.
- Attaining a global perspective: experiencing different cultures and being comfortable working with people from different backgrounds.
Four Core Competencies
The Minerva design process began by asking what graduates should be able to do. Kosslyn and the core academic team interviewed employers, read surveys of employer priorities and reviewed the empirical literatures on characteristics of successful leaders and innovators. They identified four core competencies that became the design pillars for the "intentional university."The first two competencies focus on personal abilities: Thinking critically:evaluating claims, analyzing inference, weighing decisions, and analyzing problems.
- Thinking creatively: facilitating discovery, solving problems, creating products, processes, and services.
The other core competencies are interpersonal abilities:Communicating effectively: using language effectively, using nonverbal communication effectively.
- Interacting effectively: negotiating, mediating and persuading, working effectively with others, resolving ethical dilemmas, and having social consciousness.
Those competencies may sound familiar; they are similar to other distillations like the 4C from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The big insight, according to Kosslyn, was each of these competencies is actually a heterogeneous collection of different abilities. For example, it is difficult to teach critical thinking directly because "it's actually a collection of disjunctive ideas."
The Minerva design team identified five types of Critical Thinking, each of which has very little or no overlap with the others. The same proved true for creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction.
Across the different subtypes of each of the four core competencies, Kosslyn's team identified about 100 underlying Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts. Habits of mind are "cognitive skills that with practice come to be triggered automatically." For example, the habit "Distinguish between categories and types of information to determine source quality" triggers a mindframe and set of actions that allow sound judgment about information sources. Foundatitatistics, effect size, confidence intervals, correlation, regression, Bayesian statistics, significance
-Analyzing inferences: deductions, logical fallacies, induction, prediction, attention bias, confirmation bias, memory bias, interpretive bias, context, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, music, multimedia, levels of analysis, constituent parts, systems dynamics, emergent properties, multiple causes, networks
- Complex Systems: interacting effectively
- Empirical Analyses: thinking creatively
- Formal Analyses: thinking critically
- Multidimensional Communications: communicating effectively
There are no lectures at Minerva. Students learn online and come to class ready to engage. A novel technology platform supports real-time, synchronous small seminars--which work equally well with a local or distant professor.
These first-year courses are highly structured and build on each other systematically. Faculty members share common lesson plans with explicit learning outcomes. In weekly meetings, they review what worked and didn't in the last week's seminars and preview the next week's.
Unlike most university classes where boredom reigns, Minerva classes are tension-filled and are often exhausting--there is no back row. Students exercise the intellectual muscles they'll need for global contribution.
For the last two years, incoming students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment
1.Think it Through:
- Evoke deep processing: the more cognitive operations engaged the better
- Use desirable difficulty: calibration is key
- Elicit the generation effect: digging information out of memory helps capture it
- Engage in deliberate practice: pay attention to, and correct, mistakes during repetition
- Use interleaving: mix different kinds of problems
- Induce dual coding: combining verbal andhed as such.
- Courses should be seminal: a limited number of courses should be explicitly designed to convey seminal knowledge and skills.
- Students need informed choice: All Minerva freshmen take the same foundational courses. Second-year students choose majors, third-year students choose con and complete their own capstone projects.
Majors include
//www.minerva.kgi.edu/academics/majors-courses/#SocialSciences">Social Sciences, Computational Sciences, Natural Sciences, xArts &aeet the rigorous admissions requirements, regardless of ability to pay. They charge no application fee and have no quotas for nationality, gender or socioeconomic status. The process yields an incredibly diverse global student body.
450 today, break into cohorts of 100 to 150 students who live together, rotating through seven cities around the world--they learn about the world by experiencing it. The first year is spent in San Francisco. During the second year, students experience Seoul and Hyderabad; in the third year, Berlin and Buenos Aires; in the fourth year, London and Taipei.
Miision courses) has a rubric for evaluation. Using these rubrics, faculty assess student assignments, location-based assignments
(applications to the city of residence), class participation (all classes are recorded and can be transcribed), and original works including signature assignments and capstone projects. Any faculty member can assess on any habit or concept previously introduced.Minerva students get a lot of feedback. A progress dashboard rolls up to the four core competencies and is updated weekly. Students and faculty can click through to specific evidence (e.g., a paper or video of a class discussion).
Students who successfully complete the first year receive a conditional pass to year two but they continue to receive feedback on all habits and concepts.
Teaching at Minerva
Teaching is veass and come ready to engage. Professors launch and guide discussions, check for understanding, and debrief. It requires depth of knowledge as well as facilitation expertise.All classes at Minerva take place on a learning platform, called the Active Learning Forum, which was designed to engage and enhanc as learning campuses--visiting local libraries, interviewing experts, partnering with agencies, working at local companies. Students consider important institutions in each city, how the city has evolved and its&nd to continually refine what they do in service of that goal.
If you care about learning--K-12, Higher Education, or corporate--you'll benefit from reading Building The Intentional University. You won't find a more systematic design based in learning science.
For more see
HigherEd Reinvented: Minerva Goes Global (podcast with Minerva CEO Ben Nelson)