Through Berkeley's course thread program, undergraduates explore themes that connect courses across departments and disciplines.
It could be supported by organisations that already exist to help connect courses and businesses and could create measurable benefits for everyone involved.
Nearly half of them welcome visitors, and there is a meandering Vermont Cheese Trail, inspired by the long-established success of wine trails and, lately, their marketing offspring, from the Malt Whisky Trail in Scotland to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail connecting courses in Alabama.
Rather than generate new programs, interdisciplinary majors, or requirements, the aim of this project is to establish a flexible model for cross-disciplinary education by bringing to light some of the hidden "threads" that connect courses across existing departments and disciplines.
The general practice codes consist of practices where there is no designated primary actor, such as connecting course content to scientific research, drawing attention to connections among course concepts, and real-time polling.
Teachers can take advantage of this phenomenon, known to psychologists as "elaborative encoding," by connecting course content to students' lives in any of a variety of ways.
Diverse student populations have been shown to connect course material to daily life in different ways (Packard, 2013), a factor that instructors might recognize when crafting statements.
Table 1 Codebook used for content analysis Definition Example item Instructional format codes Connect course content to scientific research Instructor relates concepts directly to scientific work.
One way to connect course material with things students naturally care about, says Shirley Malcom, head of education and human resources programs for AAAS, which publishes Science Careers, is to highlight the historic context in which discoveries were made.
Although they do not pretend to be able to replicate the full "campus experience", Futurelearn's CEO Simon Nelson says they intend to use the power of social media to connect course participants.
For instance, 'please consider how important each reason is for you in attending counselling', or 'the good connecting course'.
