{"id":1143,"date":"2003-03-26T15:13:27","date_gmt":"2003-03-26T15:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/?p=1143"},"modified":"2025-05-12T19:54:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T19:54:50","slug":"learning-and-teaching-division","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/?p=1143","title":{"rendered":"Disruptive Degrees"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019ll also acquire the skills and mindset to advance Israel\u2019s prosperity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inclusivity","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"

Learning and Teaching Division<\/h5>\n

Disruptive Degrees<\/h1>\n

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\u2019ll also acquire the skills and mindset to advance Israel\u2019s prosperity.<\/h3>\n

Education that Works<\/h6>

With the introduction last year of Bar-Moach (\u201cBrain\u201d), an AI-powered assistive-learning tool for helping students reach their full potential, Bar-Ilan\u2019s 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\u2019s 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)\u2014and the expressed desires of workplace leaders, who increasingly seek \u201csoft skills\u201d in their employees\u2014the division is bringing its signature approach to innovation in education to the design of undergraduate degrees.<\/p>

Nicknamed \u201cAcademia 360\u00b0\u201d to express its all-encompassing nature, the NIS 11 million initiative\u2014co-funded by the CHE\u2014will reimagine both the purpose and contents of an academic program, with an eye toward aligning today\u2019s classroom with tomorrow\u2019s 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\u2019s professional life and as a member of civil society. Then, the division helped the 16 chosen degree programs\u2019 faculty reverse engineer their curricula, integrating all the means necessary to achieve their ideal profiles into the courses and other components of the degree. \u201cUniversities that want to stay relevant can no longer simply transmit knowledge,\u201d says Vice Rector Prof. Arie Reich, who is responsible for the Learning and Teaching Division and is a co-architect of the initiative. \u201cInstead, they need to ensure that their graduates can maximize that knowledge, by applying it in their professions, advancing academic research, and strengthening their communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUniversities 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.\u201d<\/p>

\u2014Vice Rector Prof. Arie Reich<\/h4>\n\"Prof.\n

A truly innovative approach to reforming higher education, Academia 360\u00b0 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\u2019s what the new programs of study will contain. \u201cIn the end, it\u2019s about expanding our definition of pedagogy,\u201d concludes Reich. \u201cHappily, our faculty don\u2019t want to suffice with delivering lectures. They want to deliver value for Israel\u2019s future, and they\u2019re eager to pioneer new ways of achieving that goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>

Finding their North Star<\/h6>

To determine the qualities today\u2019s scholars need to prepare graduates for lives of influence, the Faculty of Humanities developed its \u201cideal scholar profile\u201d during the course of 2024. The result is a faculty \u201ccompass star,\u201d 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\u2019s creativity, curiosity, breadth of knowledge, and the embrace of complexity and doubt.<\/p>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1143"}],"version-history":[{"count":58,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2452,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions\/2452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}