NEP: some thoughts

Some excerpts as I was reading the NEP
“moving towards a higher educational system consisting of large, multidisciplinary universities and colleges”
“build vibrant communities of scholars and peers, break down harmful silos, enable students to become well-rounded across disciplines including artistic, creative, and analytic subjects as well as sports, develop active research communities across disciplines including cross-disciplinary research, and increase resource efficiency, both material and human, across higher education”
“10.2. Moving to large multidisciplinary universities and HEI clusters is thus the highest recommendation of this policy regarding the structure of higher education”

Thinking out loud about the experience at Columbia University with respect to multidisciplinary coursework and research:
IGERT experience
Some fields do better in interdisciplinary research probably because there are already some pathways for them – Bioengineering, biochemistry for example. The Architecture and Engineering IGERT however struggled.
Different ways of teaching and learning, different value systems (nursing and medicine), unavailability of venues to publish research (Engineering and Architecture) were some of the challenges.

Creating coursework
School of Nursing and School of Medicine when creating an online course could not agree on how to read test reports (therefore how to teach how to read reports) – the basic assumptions about relationship with patients or their positionality with respect to patients differed so drastically that it was almost impossible to decide the ‘right’ course of action as the students walked through the cases presented.