Beyond co-creation: Courses designed by students

Previous posts in this vein have provided regular updates on courses which might be described as possibly slightly bonkers or, more generously, a bit niche.

For example these distinctive degrees in puppetry and bagpiping, and, more exotically, in Beyonce and Ghostbusting. Travelling through time we have also seen this exciting academic offer, a course on Dr Who. There’s an exciting but very serious Game of Thrones course at the University of British Columbia, which “seeks to examine the role of the medieval in the popular consciousness of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” Equally seriously, Brown is offering a course on Star Wars and Beyond: Physics in Film which puts the science in science fiction movies to the test. At the University of Southampton there is a course on the Real Downton Abbey which gives students the opportunity to learn about life above and below stairs.

Genuinely student-led courses

At the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), students have the option to create and lead courses on topics of their own choosing.

The university currently has more than 200 student-led courses, spanning 60 departments. Though they aren’t officially graded, they do count for one or two credits.

The courses at UC Berkeley fall under the school’s Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program, which started about 50 years ago as a result of the school’s free speech movement.

Topics are wide-ranging and have included:

Relationships as seen through the lens of “Modern Family”;
Political strategy in “Game of Thrones”;
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter;
Secrets of the Rubik’s Cube;
The art of lion dancing;
Mass incarceration;
Human trafficking;
Korean recitation;
Human genetics;
Christian thought;
Cognitive Karate;
Sufi meditation;
3-D bioprinting;
Stem cells;
Surgery;
Baking; and
Aliens.

Nearly 4,000 students enrol in the courses each semester.

Studying musical and sporting genius

Georgia State University offered a course on West in 2015, and one at the University of Missouri in 2014 focused on West and Jay-Z. Dr. Jeffrey McCune, an associate professor in the African and African-American Studies and the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments, helms this course on the rapper, producer and fashion designer.

McCune promises the course isn’t an excuse to fawn over West’s music, nor will it be a weekly exercise in West bashing. Highlights from the artist’s life last year include a lauded album, “The Life of Pablo,” and a public breakdown followed by a stint in rehab. McCune sees the course as a “good way to get students to connect issues of politics, race, gender, sexuality and culture.”

West of course is no stranger to higher education as he disclosed when accepting an Honorary Degree recently: “I am a pop artist so my medium is public opinion and the world is my campus”.

But perhaps the most interesting new course is the new UBC offering on footballing superstar Cristiano Ronaldo:

A Canadian university will give students the chance to study “arguably the best footballer in the world” – by offering a course on athlete Cristiano Ronaldo.

The University of British Columbia Okanagan is enrolling fourth-year sociology students on a course examining the three-time ballon d’Or winner impact on social and cultural trends.“I’m interested in how Ronaldo has been used to construct several discourses about who he is, what makes him distinct as a footballer, what is his relationship to Portugal, Madeira (his hometown) and his Portuguese identity,” associate professor of sociology Luis LM Aguiar claims.