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Journal of Contemporary Research in Education

Abstract

The quality of education is a necessary input in utilizing the “power of higher education to transform lives, communities and the world”, words spoken by Chancellor Dr. Jeffrey Vitter at his inauguration speech at the University of Mississippi. Despite the many advances in technology and teaching methodology, traditional lecture-delivery courses still dominate. Lives, communities and the world truly are transformed as a result of higher education, as indicated by world statistics linking a country’s education quality with international competitiveness. However, this transformation could be even greater if additional effort was put into ‘transforming’ the higher education system, relying on innovative teaching approaches rather than those first used during the birth of Universities themselves. Personalized (or differentiated) learning is the first of fourteen grand challenges for engineers in the 21st century, and as such is the key to truly transforming the education system in order to support continued transformation to lives, the community and beyond. This essay discusses in depth the characteristics and necessities of differentiated teaching and learning in contrast to the current state of higher education in STEM settings, and highlights the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to implement this framework on a large scale.

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