If your university Chancellor offered you the keys to the university, and the chance to re-think the university experience for students, what would you change? Would you change the content taught, the way classes are run, or make it more practical? Odds are, all the changes you could dream up have been embraced by the UK’s newest university, and member of Elevate’s investment portfolio, London Interdisciplinary School, who are completely re-thinking what university looks like.
Meet London Interdisciplinary School
Not only will LIS be the UK’s first new university in 40 years, it will also be the first university that is (a) completely interdisciplinary in nature, focusing not on individual content silos like maths, science or humanities, but rather will cut across all content areas, and is (b) completely focused on applying this interdisciplinary content to solve real-world problems like malaria, knife crime, or ocean plastic waste.
In the last 2 editions of Disrupting the Classroom, we have discussed Elevate’s investments in Project-Based Learning (PBL) pedagogy, whereby students are presented with real-world problems which they need to solve. As previously discussed, the benefit of this approach is threefold: firstly, it is a more motivating way to learn, since students are focused on solving a problem for a real-world audience, rather than just learning a topic area because they have to. Secondly, this approach is extremely hands-on, as students need to develop practical solutions that can be applied to the problem, making the learning experience more interactive and tactile. Finally, and most importantly, since students need to not only understand content, but more importantly, apply the content to create a working solution, students move well beyond the kind of basic and temporary understanding that results from rote-learning, to a deeper, long-lasting state of knowledge.
Elevate is such a believer in PBL pedagogy that we have now invested in 3 companies that use PBL as the cornerstone of their teaching experience. Luminaria, a chain of primary schools in Australia, based on PBL; eduSTEM, Elevate’s very own incubated PBL curriculum for high schools; and now LIS, who are using PBL at a university level.
So, what does this practically look like? The LIS degree is organized across 3 pillars:
Content knowledge: what you would normally learn in a degree;
Research methods, or how to understand things from primary data. This includes statistics, data science, maths, survey design, market research techniques, and design thinking;
Application skills: psychology, sociology, coding, media.
Students then pool all of the above together to solve a problem over a semester. These problems range from working with the London Met Police to address knife crime, tackling childhood obesity, eradicating malaria, and making palm oil supply chains more transparent.
The crowning piece of the LIS degree is that students have the chance to apply the skills that they learn and develop to solving problems in companies such as McKinsey, Deliveroo, KPMG, Virgin, Funding Circle, Innocent, and the Met Police. As opposed to most graduates who go to university to hopefully get a job at the end of it, at LIS, you intern in these companies as you go, giving you a significant advantage for grad recruitment. On top of this, you are actually PAID by the companies! That’s right – paid internship with the top companies in the UK, as part of the degree! That is a significant head start! Want to change universities? Let us know!
When does it open?
LIS takes on its first cohort in September 2020.
Want to know more?
Check out these newspaper articles and podcasts. One of the Co-Founders, Ed Fidoe, has spoken at our last 2 Client Conferences in the UK, and if you haven’t heard him speak I highly recommend it. Ed was at McKinsey until he left to start his own school, School 21 in Newham, which went on to have one of the highest levels of value-add in the UK. Having started his own school chain, he is now working his way up to universities. Ed is a fascinating thinker on education, and I highly recommend checking out any of these articles or podcasts: