A new model for post-secondary education, the optimized university

This means acquiring the problem solving approaches and skills, habits of the mind, content knowledge, and beliefs about the nature and relevance of the subject that are like those of practicing experts. [...] While good arguments can be made for the value of such faculty driven university research and the creation of spin-off companies, the result is a faculty with new sets of demands and responsibilities that were largely nonexistent at the middle of the last century. [...] Another subtle but important difference of the optimized university are the roles of the student and the faculty member in the learning process. [...] In the optimized university the role of the faculty will be as “educational designers,” utilizing their knowledge of the discipline and how best to learn that discipline to design optimized educational environments,. [...] Valid assessments of the desired deeper understanding require a detailed examination of student thinking in the context of the specific subject material and the specific understanding and problem solving skills that are the goals of the course.