Questions instead of majors: implementing a self-authored concentration program
本文介绍了一种以自我设计为核心的本科集中学习项目，学生自主设计课程路径，培养探究能力，并讨论了实施、成功要素和权衡。
The major is a standard undergraduate degree structure in which learners follow largely predetermined course paths with the primary goal of developing content knowledge and skills. Developing the more sophisticated ability to author inquiry is typically deferred to graduate training but can, we believe, be successfully cultivated in undergraduates through a self-authored concentration. This approach flips the conventional order of higher education by establishing self-authorship as the primary goal, from which knowledge and skill acquisition follow, and by placing primary responsibility on students – guided by faculty mentors – to design their course of study. As an extreme form of interdisciplinary inquiry-based learning and of self-designed majors, the self-authored concentration poses a deliberately disorienting dilemma in service of a deliberately developmental degree, preparing graduates for the rapidly changing demands of the future. We describe the implementation, features of success, and trade-offs of one such program, the single degree offering at Quest University Canada.