Course Description
Minerva Schools, which attracts worldwide attention as a next generation university, was founded in San Francisco (USA) in 2014. In the second year of its opening, the university received more than 11,000 applicants from 98 countries who wished to enroll, but the pass rate was only 2.0%. The University is a four-year university that provides education online and has a unique residential system that accommodates students in 7 cities around the world.
It selects ambitious and excellent students with an entrepreneurial spirit who are “unsatisfied with passive education and want to re-create university education” from all over the world. The university also enrolls many high school students with entrepreneurship experience while currently in school. In 2017, the applicants who wish to enroll in the university are exceeding 20,000 and the university is becoming even more of a “narrow gate.”
The University curriculum is composed mainly of small class seminars and project learning, using the latest ICT (Information Communication Technology). It focuses on two personal skills: “critical thinking” and “creative thinking” as well as two inter-personal skills: “presentation” and “inter-personal communication.” The curriculum is designed in a way to promote the acquisition of these four skills, through continuous hands-on learning, performance assessment and students’ data analysis based on prompt feedback and adequate advice.
This international symposium welcomes Mr. Ben Nelson, founder and CEO of Minerva University as the keynote speaker as well as others who are in charge of promoting the development of the same university in Asia and Japan and other industry officials. It will cultivate a better understanding of the possibilities and challenges in innovative university education such as the one presented by Minerva University, discuss the impacts of the emergence of next generation universities on traditional universities, and the future of university education.