'Transforming Higher Education for the Sake of the World' says Ben Nelson

Employers lament the fact that new graduates lack basic skills that contribute meaningfully to their workplace. Indeed, many of us of an older generation would agree that most of what we learned at university, if we remember it at all,  has served us little in our professional lives. For higher education to bridge the skills gap and to ensure that university graduates add economic and societal value,  it should address three questions: what skills are students being taught, how and whether students are really learning them, and how effective are they in the workplace.

A traditional university’s curriculum often centers on discrete subject matter taught through siloed academic disciplines, although we all know that our complex world’s challenges do not fit neatly into these disciplines. For example, a policymaker or a business executive who had to make decisions during the recent pandemic should have been able to make sense of rapidly changing health, legal, macro-economic, and even psychological information as it related to the decisions that needed to be made—something no education would have prepared them for even if they were to take a smattering of introductory level classes across those disciplines. This same policymaker might be confronted with a different set of complex issues in the next few years that needs yet another set of cognitive and interdisciplinary skills. Universities should, therefore, be intentionally reinventing their curricula so that they make interdisciplinarity a fundamental pillar of everything they teach., in order to enable students to solve real world problems, regardless of the career path they pursue.

Universities’ teaching methodologies are rarely more effective than their curricular design. The near universal reliance on the lecture, which is a highly cost effective way of teaching, and a miserably ineffectual way of learning, is the source of this issue. Test and lecture methodologies have been widely proven to result in over 60% learning loss only a few short months after the end of a semester. It is well known that our ability to retain information decreases drastically over time, as demonstrated by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting curve. But decades of research have demonstrated how to teach students in such a way that they are deeply engaged learners and can increase retention rate by 7-14X over the test and lecture methodology. Those universities that will combine Fully Active Learning teaching methodologies as well as thoughtful interdisciplinary curricula can drastically increase how much students actively recall, and more importantly, apply and transfer what they have learned across contexts and disciplines.

All this makes it apparent as to why employers widely believe that university education is not relevant to day to day life. According to the Strada Gallup 2017 survey, only 11% of all employers believe that graduates have the skills necessary for the workplace. Though technical skills are important to an extent, they often times become outdated requiring a constant cycle of effective learning and relearning. What universities should be nurturing instead are enduring skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, effective collaboration and communication- skills that can be transferred across different contexts, even those that are new, unknown and unlearned.  To achieve that, these skills should be intentionally taught and be an explicit part of the curriculum, allowing students to practise them in professional contexts.

Founded in 2011, Minerva Project has reimagined higher education by focusing on students’ outcomes and creating an interdisciplinary, cross-contextual curriculum taught using the science of learning. Minerva’s Fully Active Learning pedagogy means that professors do not lecture but engage students to deepen their understanding of explicit concepts and are then able to apply them in real world contexts.

Minerva has partnered with Zayed University — one of the region’s leading academic institutions — to build a superior education for the development of the nation’s leaders. The UAE’s first fully interdisciplinary programme, Zayed University X Minerva has been launched to help students step into the world with applicable skills, navigate evolving business landscapes, and lead with purpose.

At Zayed University X Minerva, students will be able to choose from three interdisciplinary concentrations focused on one major global challenge: business, societal, or technological.  Classes, which will be taught on a state-of-the-art technological platform, will be complemented by experiential learning in the UAE and beyond. This will ensure students practise vital skills such as public speaking, debating, and decision-making.

Students will also be able to apply what they have learned in a real, professional environment where they will spend a considerable amount of their time working in groups on challenging projects for leading companies. For the duration of their study, students will be given access to exclusive internship and part-time employment opportunities, improving their long term employability.

This transformational approach to higher learning will equip students with the tools to fulfil their potential and attain lasting success. None of us can predict how the world will evolve or what kinds of jobs will be created, and that is precisely why we should equip students with enduring skills and the cognitive ability to transfer them into new and unknown contexts.  Unless we radically change how we educate students, we will be unable to achieve that.