Curriculum

Upsetting some students, U. of Minnesota Medical School stops using live patients to teach pelvic exams.

Prominent voices look to in-the-classroom residencies and colleges of education to reshape how teachers are taught to teach.

Puerto Rico’s Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez attracted thousands of adult students to an accelerated degree program, AHORA, by stressing the kind of flexibility and practicality that one would expect from a program called “now.”

But when administrators and faculty started considering how to expand into the continental United States they realized it wouldn’t work to simply shift their program a few hundred miles north.

When colleges and universities revamp curricular requirements, disciplines can become winners or losers. Those fields that are required (or that have many courses that meet requirements) enjoy assured enrollments. So when a college votes down a foreign language requirement, as faculty members did last year in the arts and sciences college of George Washington University, that can be a blow to those who teach languages.