The Block Plan

Office of the President

Dr. Richard MyersOn Friday, October 1, I met with members of the AU community to launch a proposal for the adoption of the "Block Plan." Let me share with you a brief overview of this proposal.

The Block Plan (BP) is an innovative format for course delivery first developed by Colorado College over 40 years ago. The basic idea is simple. At most universities, a full-time student takes five different courses simultaneously for a fifteen-week semester. Under BP, students do one course at a time. Learning is very intensive, with three to four hours of instruction per day. Each course is delivered in a short "block" of time – about three weeks. At the end of the three weeks, students write their exam and then move on to a new course in the next block.

Naturally, students love this format. The learning experience is richer, with higher levels of engagement. Moreover, that "end-of-term panic" that grips students in late November and late March is forever banished – for the simple reason that there is no more "end of term!" You finish a course and then you move on.

But the BP provides a host of other interesting opportunities for us. One is the fact that in a BP system, students and instructors have the freedom to move the classroom offsite. Under BP, a student takes only one course at a time and an instructor teaches only one course at a time. Consequently, there's nothing to prevent a biology professor from offering her ecology course in the boreal forest north of Lake Superior, or a political science professor from offering his Canadian government course in Ottawa. In fact, if I didn't have a day job, I could hold my United Nations class in New York City – or in Nairobi, for that matter.

In this way, the BP would allow AU to achieve one of the ideas I talked about in my inaugural address: to make AU Canada's most international university. Every university in the country is talking about the need for 21st century students to have international experience, but statistics show that less than 3% of Canadian students actually study abroad. With a BP system in place, there's no doubt that our faculty would develop a wealth of opportunities for foreign study, and I'm confident that we would quickly reach a point where every AU student had at least one study abroad experience. Imagine how distinctive that would make us – and how attractive we would be to potential students from across the country!

I also see in the BP a chance for us to do a better job of meeting one of our more fundamental mandates: promoting better understanding of Anishinaabe life and culture. In the same way that we could mount art courses in Florence or business courses in New York, we could easily develop a course on the history of Anishinaabe life and culture and offer it on a reserve. Imagine how much better relations would be between Anishinaabe and non-Anishinaabe people if large numbers of our students had the benefit of that kind of learning experience!

Adoption of the BP would also dramatically strengthen our capacity to recruit students from abroad. North American universities that operate on the conventional schedule force international students to conform to a calendar that is decidedly Western and often not very convenient for them. Chinese students, for instance, desperately want to be in China in late January for the "Spring Festival," but the Western calendar doesn't allow for that. Under the BP, however, they could actually go home and be with their families for the most important family festival of the year.

There are other advantages to the BP, and naturally, some disadvantages as well. In order to study the proposal from all possible angles, I've created a special Presidential Task Force to study the idea, to seek input from all members of the campus community, and to provide us with a report. As part of the consultation process, the Task Force will be organizing a mini-conference here at AU to which they'll invite students, faculty and administrators from universities that use the BP. This mini-conference will provide us with a great opportunity to explore the BP with seasoned practitioners and I'm confident that it will create a level of excitement and engagement on campus unlike anything we've ever seen.

The membership of the Presidential Task Force is:

Chair: Dr. Arthur Perlini
SASA: J.P. Chalykoff
AUSU: Barbara Chartrand
Alumni: Jessica Ferlaino
Staff: Michael Young
Board: Claudette Chevrier
Sessional Faculty: Sheila Redmond
Full-time Faculty: Cathy Denomme, Michael DiSanto, Dave Broadbeck, Julian Hermida
Administration: Dave Marasco, Ken Hernden

 

For more information about the BP, you may wish to visit the websites of some of the universities that currently use it:

 

Questions?

If you have questions for Dr. Myers about the Block Plan, please email QuestionsForThePresident@algomau.ca. Questions and answers that are of general concern to the Algoma University communtity will be published in this section of the website.