UBC Arts offers diverse, customizable, and high-impact learning opportunities.
Arts students are empowered to chart their own course of study, and to immerse themselves in diverse learning experiences.
Our strategies
Goal: Facilitate innovative, student-focused teaching practices.
- Redesign degree requirements to align with faculty priorities, situating requirements as meaningful learning opportunities, not boxes to tick.
- Enhance and evaluate systems to assist students in navigating degree programs, and map interdisciplinary pathways through the curriculum.
- Build on our Program Learning Outcomes, map how students fulfill outcomes, and assess their effectiveness, providing students with agency and clarity regarding their learning during and beyond their degree.
- Collaborate with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies to improve graduate curriculum renewal and program outcomes at the departmental level.
- Create incentives and rewards for excellence in teaching within the faculty.
- Enhance staff support and resources for curriculum renewal and design.
Goal: Renew our academic offerings, find areas of niche strength and emerging societal need, and foster a culture of innovation and flexibility in teaching and educational design.
- Strengthen the Masters of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA) degree.
- Expand and enhance the Writing Studies program to develop academic writing and communications curricula in collaboration with other faculties.
- Inaugurate the new stream in the Master of Data Science in Computational Linguistics.
- Support the launch of the Language Sciences program.
- Collaborate with the Faculties of Science and Medicine to develop an undergraduate Neuroscience program.
- Launch a new interdisciplinary program in the Study of Religion.
- Explore new undergraduate minors, joint degrees with other faculties, international dual degrees, and certificates.
Goal: Provide transformative and high-impact education guided by learning outcomes.
- Enhance first-year cohort learning communities, writing-intensive small-class experiences, global learning and research, community-service learning and community-based research, and practical experiences including co-op, internships, work learn placements, and interdisciplinary research opportunities.
- Integrate career preparation into the fabric of our undergraduate and graduate programs.
- Support and develop intensive interdisciplinary field school courses.
- Develop best practices for experiential learning and community-based experiential learning (CBEL) from UBC faculty, staff, and the community.
- Recognize the diversity of community-based learning including the need for sustained development of relationships.
- Explore the integration of case studies involving external partners into the curriculum.
- Continue to support the adoption of Arts Co-op Program graduate student initiatives.
- Collaborate with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies to reimagine the PhD program and support the Public Scholars Initiative.
- Develop curricular and co-curricular opportunities for student career development.
- Improve our ability to track student employment data after graduation.
Goal: Create a personalized, responsive, structured, and supportive student experience.
- Move from a disciplinary approach to academic integrity issues to one that promotes the importance of ethical scholarship, for example, the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund project, Our Cheating Hearts.
- Work with the university and the Faculty of Science to pilot student retention activities.
- Enhance student support through the assessment and redesign of Arts Academic Advising Services, and enhance support for students at academic risk.
- Develop flexible and personalized learning plans for students.
- Support students in assembling portfolios including curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular achievements and experiences.
- Improve waitlist procedures through input into the upcoming Workday Student Information System.