by Fiona Black, Director of Academic Planning

Required introductory courses have had a hard go of it as of late. Anecdotally, instructors don’t like teaching them, and students don’t like slogging through them.

The University of Maryland thinks they may have found a way to make these courses more intellectually engaging. Their new introductory courses, called the “I-Series”, are organized around provocative questions or propositions.

The courses bring the meat of the discipline, which is often reserved for third- and fourth-year students, into the hands of first-year students through debates, new approaches to problems and new ways of viewing the world. Read At U. of Maryland, an Effort to Make Introductory Courses Extraordinary and let us know what you think.