This blog post was originally shared on http://educationcommissionblog.gatech.edu/. 

More ideas from the openIDEO Challenge: All are tied together by existing credentialing and business models, but they each address the challenges of learning communities not well-served by traditional residential degree programs. These speculative models were inspired by David Stanley’s EduCause Review article

• Polymath University: For T-Shaped learners in the 21st-century workplace, Polymath University requires students to major in three distinct areas.  By the same token, faculty members must be capable of teaching in three distinct programs.
• Nomad University: A kind of competency-based model, the Nomad University has no fixed location (and in some interpretations, no fixed courses). For learnings in the gig economy, this flexible approach to education has some advantages.
• Interface University: I was struck by this idea of constructing an entire university curriculum around the notion of computational thinking.  There are elements the interface university in Georgia Tech’s computational media degree which combines computing and the humanities in a degree focusing on technology-enabled content.
• Neo-Liberal Arts College: There is a great deal of discussion about how to bring the liberal arts to science and engineering curricula, but  little effort on the opposite side of that coin.  How would you design the arts and humanities around technology?
• Ludic University: This is the university of play.  Instead of lecture halls, seminar rooms, and laboratories, this is a university built around design studios. According to Kate Rushton, “this is the university of what-if.”

These are five novel ways to organize post-secondary education.  What problems would these universities solve?  How are they different from current experimental approaches to higher education, and which ones would actually change our system if they were successful?