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Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Pulling Higher Ed Out of the Middle Ages

Higher education has fallen woefully behind in the race to keep up with technological change, according to a former dean for graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

In an effort to close that gap, Dr. Christine Ortiz is planning a new kind of residential research institution to keep up with advances while preparing students for life in the 21st century. The yet-to-be named institution would allow students to design their own learning paths and work with faculty to build an individual curriculum. Ortiz’s team has already developed software for computer-guided intelligent curriculum design that integrates science, technology, and humanistic fields.

By the end of 2016, she hopes to have started several pilot programs and to incorporate as a nonprofit in Massachusetts. The plan calls for her institution to be open to students by 2020.

“Technology is accelerating, and modernization and expansion of the higher-education system is desperately needed,” Ortiz said in an article for TechRepbulic. “Our higher-education system is still stuck in the Middle Ages.”