Learning and Teaching Division
Disruptive Degrees
Thanks to a new approach to the goal and design of academic degrees, Bar-Ilan students will gain much more than knowledge of a given discipline. They’ll also acquire the skills and mindset to advance Israel’s prosperity.
Education that Works
With the introduction last year of Bar-Moach (“Brain”), an AI-powered assistive-learning tool for helping students reach their full potential, Bar-Ilan’s Learning and Teaching Division raised innovation in instruction to the level of personalization. Currently being expanded from its initial 15 to 500 courses across every faculty, Bar-Moach is helping advance the university’s goals of innovation leadership, academic excellence, and the preparation of graduates for an AI-dominated economy. Now, with funding from the Council for Higher Education (CHE)—and the expressed desires of workplace leaders, who increasingly seek “soft skills” in their employees—the division is bringing its signature approach to innovation in education to the design of undergraduate degrees.
Nicknamed “Academia 360°” to express its all-encompassing nature, the NIS 11 million initiative—co-funded by the CHE—will reimagine both the purpose and contents of an academic program, with an eye toward aligning today’s classroom with tomorrow’s known and as-yet-unknown needs. Beginning last spring, the division worked with departments from across the university to build, together with input from potential employers and department graduates, the ideal graduate profile: that combination of knowledge, specific abilities, and values essential to impact, both within one’s professional life and as a member of civil society. Then, the division helped the 16 chosen degree programs’ faculty reverse engineer their curricula, integrating all the means necessary to achieve their ideal profiles into the courses and other components of the degree. “Universities that want to stay relevant can no longer simply transmit knowledge,” says Vice Rector Prof. Arie Reich, who is responsible for the Learning and Teaching Division and is a co-architect of the initiative. “Instead, they need to ensure that their graduates can maximize that knowledge, by applying it in their professions, advancing academic research, and strengthening their communities.”
“Universities that want to stay relevant can no longer simply transmit knowledge. Instead, they need to ensure that their graduates can maximize that knowledge, by applying it in their professions, advancing academic research, and strengthening their communities.”
—Vice Rector Prof. Arie Reich
A truly innovative approach to reforming higher education, Academia 360° goes beyond the old, ad-hoc model in which discrete courses are added to augment the standard curriculum. Instead, explains Reich, the initiative is making the acquisition of certain skills and attitudes toward citizenship an organic part of education. And not just in the classroom: If developing these skills and attitudes requires fieldwork, workshops, or tours, that’s what the new programs of study will contain. “In the end, it’s about expanding our definition of pedagogy,” concludes Reich. “Happily, our faculty don’t want to suffice with delivering lectures. They want to deliver value for Israel’s future, and they’re eager to pioneer new ways of achieving that goal.”
Finding their North Star
To determine the qualities today’s scholars need to prepare graduates for lives of influence, the Faculty of Humanities developed its “ideal scholar profile” during the course of 2024. The result is a faculty “compass star,” modelled after the diagrams that display the cardinal directions on a map. And to which qualities does their star point? Along with expertise, skills in communication, and an openness to dialogue, there’s creativity, curiosity, breadth of knowledge, and the embrace of complexity and doubt.
