In most universities, majors are determined largely by tradition. The main engine for change is new interdisciplinary fields that emerge in research, which subsequently may be converted to fields of study. At Minerva, we start from scratch, building a highly structured, flexible curriculum that enables students to obtain interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and transdisciplinary training that is on the cutting-edge of knowledge. However, we treat these fields as sources of practical knowledge and treat them primarily as good starting points, not ends in-and-of-themselves. We assume that these fields will continue to evolve and aim to give students the intellectual foundations to adapt to the future.

When we initially created and refined the first-year Cornerstone courses at Minerva, we evolved a set of shared processes, conventions, and templates to support the process of developing lesson plans for active learning. After devoting two full years of curriculum design effort exclusively to these four courses, we faced the challenge of scaling our course development process to simultaneously design a much larger number of upper-division courses. In order to consistently and efficiently create extraordinary active learning experiences, we started to develop a software-based lesson plan authoring tool that would encapsulate and codify our previously-validated templates and processes. This tool, Course Builder, grew to also support the management and iterative improvement of our full curriculum. By the end of its first semester in use, the combined functionality of Course Builder and the Active Learning Forum allowed us to move beyond the need for a Learning Management System entirely. In this chapter, we introduce the Course Builder curriculum design system. We take a close look at how this technology allows us to collaboratively design, systematically coordinate, and iteratively improve on courses and lesson plans built specifically for active learning.

A crucial aspect of the Minerva curriculum is the lesson plan, which is used to structure and guide every class session of the Cornerstone, Major Core and Concentration courses. This chapter describes how professors use these lesson plans and how they form the basis for dynamic, evolving class sessions while maintaining a high-level of structure and consistency over different sections of the same class. The lesson plans specify assigned readings and videos, exercises the students work through before class, quizzes at the beginning and end of class, carefully crafted sets of active learning activities, and more. The core of the lesson plans is the activities, which rely on problem solving, focused analyses in small breakout groups, polls together with discussions, role-playing scenarios, debates, Socratic relays where students take turns discussing a given topic, and many other interactive exercises. In all of this, the professor plays a central role, shaping the discussion, adapting to evolving circumstances, and providing expertise to ensure that students understand the class material. The professor keeps the class focused on the learning outcomes that are specified in the lesson plan and which inform every aspect of it. In every class, students must actively interact with the professor and with each other, which makes every session a dynamic and distinct teaching experience.