We review the processes and tools we use to help achieve a consistent and high-quality learning environment for our students and a pleasant and productive working environment for our faculty. Our Cornerstone courses have multiple instructors, who meet weekly, along with the development faculty for the course; we are extending this model to upper-division (sophomore year and above) courses as we grow. Extensive use of a real-time chat tool ("Slack") facilitates tight synchronization, knowledge-sharing, and team-building among our geographically distributed team. Full faculty meetings and a faculty advisory committee provide additional channels for higher-level strategic direction. The substance of the exchanges provided in these communication channels spans content, pedagogy, classroom management, and grading support. Before they begin teaching, a one-month orientation course helps all new faculty develop working relationships, become comfortable with the unique Minerva pedagogy and the digital tools we use for development, assessment, and instruction.

Minerva’s Multimodal Communications cornerstone course brings together theory and findings in rhetoric, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, and design theory and applies them both to new forms of communication--made possible by the technological revolution of the last few decades--and traditional forms of expression, such as speech, gestures, music, and art. The aim of the course is to teach our students to become persuasive communicators who will have an impact in the world. The tools they hone in the course provide them with essential skills they can apply to careers in the sciences, humanities, business, the arts and in their everyday lives. This chapter summarizes the highly interactive and iterative approaches we use in the course to cultivate the core competency of effective communication, which students must master in order to meet their potential to become leaders and innovators.

A “dream ballet” uses ballet technique as its stylistic language, although it might incorporate other choreographic styles. Movement is its primary medium of expression, as opposed to dialogue or song. The dream ballet focuses on the subconscious feelings and motivations of a main character. Dance often serves the function of lifting the audience outside of the main film narrative into another realm. But the dream ballet does this while also facilitating the development of a character who plays an important part in the main story. An American in Paris (1951), Oklahoma! (1955), and La La Land (2016) all contain dance sequences that serve as useful case studies to examine the genre of the “dream ballet.” This lays the groundwork for in-depth analysis of the three dream ballets with a broader discussion of dance in early Hollywood musicals.

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